Tellme's sale to Microsoft, for a rumored $880m, should be a relief to Silicon Valley. Obviously, startups need corporations such as Google, Microsoft and eBay to provide the demand that the public markets still aren't showing. The deal should be a particular relief to Kevin Harvey of Benchmark Capital, the voice recognition company's longtime backer. Benchmark needs the reflected glory. Here's why.

The partners — self-confident alpha males who were second only to Kleiner Perkins in cachet in the late 1990s — haven't made a big killing in recent years. Some close observers have even blamed the clubbiness of Benchmark; Kevin Harvey, Bill Gurley and the other partners are all VCs who came into their prime ten years ago. They're friends, and, unlike viciously competitive partnerships such as Sequoia, the Benchmark buddies allowed eachother to kick back during the downturn.

Benchmark still doesn't, with the exception of Bill Gurley's Zillow and a few others, have a particularly rich bench of second-generation web startups. I suspect Second Life, another venture in Gurley's portfolio, will prove as embarrassing a failure as Webvan was for the firm during the last cycle — though less financially ruinous.

None the less, it's earlier investments, much lampooned, are finally ripe. Bill Gurley and his colleagues were the most passionate believer in the consumer internet, and held to that belief, even when its portfolio began to look desperately unfashionable, and the strategy naive. Tellme's sold for a very respectable price; wedding site The Knot went public; Opentable, the restaurant booking service, might be worth a billion dollars in an IPO; not to mention other investments in companies such as Betfair. Benchmark was early, sometimes too early, but, in the end, right.

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