The Visionary
The future, and what is barely possible, reads round the next corner.
Bill Gurley reads as The Visionary through a specific mechanism, not vague foresight. At Benchmark Capital he imported investing history into a venture culture convinced every cycle was unprecedented, and that asymmetric frame let him see Uber as a twenty-times-larger market before consensus formed.
“There's a lot of people, and I think this comes from a very good place. I think they're very well intentioned, who look at the world and say rising inequality, like why can't everyone have access to the same things? And then companies are staying private longer.”
“Just to see the scale and scope of the whole thing, there's a lot of rhetoric in the US about what is or isn't happening in China. And I just wanted to have a better feel for it. And we're making policy decisions that are going to impact the global footprint. And God forbid, you know, end up in a World War III kind of situation.”
“And they take a rake on it, and there's people promoting SPVs in situations where they don't even actually have the underlying stock, or maybe they hope to get it. the wild wild west. And most of the people on that edge I would put in the category of interloper carpet bagger. These are people that have come to this thing.”
“That night I made the decision that I got to go do something else. In Daniel Pink's book he talks a lot about boldness regrets, and this is where I say, do you want to do this the rest of your life?”
Masters in Business: “BONUS: Bill Gurley on Investing Early in Tech Disruptors & 'Runnin' Down a Dream'”
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