YouSaid · the spoken record

Bill Gurley

lines on the record: 153
first: 2025-12-17
most recent: 2025-12-17
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Immense anxiety about sharing this with his father, his father, this is all in the book, but his father's a very tough individual. And so reason to be fearful when you're going to drop some news. I'm no longer going to be a lawyer. I'm going to go to film school. And he builds it up a lot in the book. I didn't know when I was going to talk to him. You can imagine being in that situation. You're delaying, delaying, delaying. But he finally tells his dad and his dad utters this very simple phrase, well, don't have acid. And he says, you know, of all the reactions he could have had, don't half acid were the last words I expected to hear and the best words he could have ever said to me. And he said in that single moment he gave him blessing, consent, approval, validation, privilege, honor, freedom, and responsibility, called it rocket fuel. And I'd like to believe there are a number of...”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As I was preparing, because I was kind of wrapping up the book, I started listening to green lights. And I was told you had to listen to it because, of course, he reads it, so you get all the great McConaughey affections as you read it. But there's a story in it that just popped in my brain and kind of summarized exactly what I'm trying to accomplish with this book running down a dream. And he had spent the vast majority of his young adult life. So this anecdotes from when he was like 20, 21, telling his family he was going to be a lawyer. And so he gotten into the University of Texas. He was pre-law, you know, every time he went home, he talked about, yeah, I'm going to be a lawyer. And he had met some people at Texas that had convinced him that he should switch to film school. And he had”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well You know, one of the things that's been impressive about China is, you know, since Deng Xiaoping kind of brought back capitalism 500 million people have come out of poverty. You look at countries that have a very strong work ethic and a high education and a low currently low per populate income and you would think more jobs would come their way. two that would pop for me are Vietnam and Turkey who kind of check all those boxes”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, ironically, Matt Ridley was in town a few weeks ago in Austin. Irrational optimist. Yes. I love his stuff, but he would say that I would be dead wrong on that. Things aren't going well there. And he lives there. So I'll just take that as I got that one wrong.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Its solid state, it uses solid state semiconductor technology instead of that big spinning radar. And so the LIDAR on a Waymos five grand. And it's $130 for MIMS LIDAR. They're putting on every car. You can go into ChatGPT and say, tell me about MIMS LIDAR innovation in China. But it's just a great example. Lei June's another one. But like anybody that thinks there's no innovation is just”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That'd be one thing. There's another thing that I think is important for people to understand on the China front. There are numerous people with a loud microphone that will say, oh, they know how to scale out like plants, but they don't know how to do any innovation. And that's just flat wrong. Whoever's saying that just hasn't been there. They don't know the facts on the ground. These entrepreneurs are every bit as good as the entrepreneurs. They are here. There are examples like in LIDAR, they built a MIMS LIDAR product that's like $130 a car.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think Bill infrastructure, like if you're going to build semiconductor plants, if you're going to build nuclear plants on time and on budget, that's very hard to do in the U.S. right now. And the glimmer of hope, I would say, is that a few states seem to have governors that want to get stuff out of the way. And I think it's red tape and bureaucracy and lawyers and litigation that make this stuff so expensive. And so Texas and Arizona seem to be getting their unfair share of data centers and semiconductor plants, I think because of that attitude. I've seen a similar attitude in Pennsylvania, you know, where they're like, they repaired I-95 in 12 days because, but they literally had to take a bunch of statutes that are on the books and say they don't apply right now. So that mindset, I think, needs a lot more momentum.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the way, to put a bit of bow on this part, I would say there's two other things. One, you hinted at one, the supply chains are so integrated in China down to the raw material level that even if you brought a factory back here, it'd be more of an assembly shop and you'd still be sourcing from there, which isn't necessarily cost competitive. And to replicate all of it would take a very, very, very long time.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm sure that's. And by the way, I think that reflective. Lens when you think about the country is helpful, like Alex Carp was just on stage a deal book last week. He was talking about surveillance and he says, well, of course our tools are used to surveill the enemy. And I'm like, okay, well, my God, the Chinese are surveilling us. But obviously we're surveilling them too. Let's be honest about these things.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There are companies that may not speak with you. Like when I was there, deep seeking unitry, the word was kind of out on the street that they're not meeting with Westerners. Know for reasons that are”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're overthinking it. I think the odds that Tim Ferris would disappear in China is really oh, I'm not worried about Tim Ferrara. That would be a terrible upside down.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First of all, I do get accused of being like an agent of the CCP or something, even by some of the people that responded to your Twitter thing. I'm not, I've only visited a few times. I don't know anybody in the government. But I worry greatly that we make bad policy decisions if we misunderstand what's really going on.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Doesn't mean you're right or wrong. It's just it is what it is. And I don't know that we have this ability to kind of tell them how they have to do it. Now, to the extent that... The Huawei stuff where their products are being shipped out and then those are used to gather intelligence out of their country and the rest of the world, of course that's a problem. But I think the way to deal with it, I'm not a politician, but I think the way to deal with it, I'm more of a believer of the engage, you know, like engage, talk about what you don't like and what you do like and trying to negotiate that problem away like we're trying to do with the fentanyl precursor.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ability to penetrate the private sector. I think it's certainly well known that they do surveillance of their own people. And I know that would be particularly upsetting to people like Greg Lucianov that runs fire and is very interested in free speech. The flip side is there's very little street crime. You walk around, you don't worry about that when you're there.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not that many people that like the percentage of the country that's employed by those companies is small on an overall basis. I think they have a different perspective on whether big market caps matter. And I think that is somewhat intriguing.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, even within, like there's a notion you learn about in. Economics class is called pure competition, and in pure competition, no one has an intellectual property advantage. Marginal profits are whittled down just to the cost of capital and the consumer benefits because there's no excessive profit capture. If we have all these companies that are able to kind of have excessive profits, is that a form of market failure? And does the fact that they exist help American in any way? At first, of course, I'm a venture capitalist. I want to think, yes, of course. But then as I think about it, I don't know that our government or our society or our people are better off because these six companies have $3 trillion market caps.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, anyway, that's infrastructure. There's another thing that I think quite interesting, which is the government may not care about whether or not their companies have really big market caps. And when I first realized this, you saw what happened when they took down Alibaba when they went after Jack Mond and Ant Financial could have been this big thing and it got haircut. And you question, well, do they care? Maybe that's at odds with them being hyperprofitable and really big. And then you can turn around and ask the question, hearing that caused me to ask the question, does America really benefit by the fact that the MAG 7 have $3 trillion market caps? I know the employees of those companies do, but is that a sign of our competitive capitalistic? Society not being truly competitive.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our country is run by lawyers, and theirs is run by engineers. And so when you try and build something here, you know, the lawyers just get in the way and try and block it, which certainly when you hear Elon talks about why the gigafactories here in Austin and not in California, it all relates to those things.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And by the way, I'm not sure it brings jobs. The Xiaomi factory was a third based on some numbers I was able to acquire, a third the number of employees per car output. And I got to believe in 10 years it'll be a sixth. And so you could calculate the total number of jobs. You'd be bringing back if you brought back all this car production and it'd be hundreds of thousands. It's not millions and millions of jobs. So anyway, that infrastructure thing's for real. And I think Dan Wong does a good job of saying that America is run by lawyers. This is the all.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But when we sit here and say, Oh, we want to reshore manufacturing and they can build things at one-fourth the price we can. If you don't solve that, you're going to reshore something and we're going to not be price competitive globally because you won't input what they have and you're going to make our citizens buy from this new factory where we're making things way more expensive. It doesn't work.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me make one point and then let's come to that. So there's two other things I wanted to mention. Obviously, infrastructure. So they are building new nuclear fission plants. So fission being old school, not new school at one-fourth the price that we do it here in the US. So is South Korea, by the way?”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The other entrepreneur outside of Les June is the white dance CEO. And Byte Dance is probably got the leading position for the consumer AI like OpenAI, but over there right now, in addition to just incredible revenue growth, this is the company that owns TikTok and whatnot, but they're not going public and you don't see him at all, which may get to this dollar tree thing.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, the first one that I think been well publicized is when an entrepreneur has risen to a level of success and then uses that as a platform, the government seems uninterested in that. Jack Ma. Yeah, exactly. And there's a saying.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't think we went through the whole factory, but no, it wasn't that it wasn't. I mean, there are public companies. I think they're interested in being well understood. Which I think hints at why they enabled this. I think they had to send a car to this guy, the YouTuber. And by the way, the president of Ford went over there about six months before I did, went on the same tour, so they let him go there. And he had an SU seven ship to Michigan and he drove it for several weeks and he's talked about how incredible it is.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it's crazy. He says he put a note on any car in his parking lot that he had never drove. And he would ask each employee to give him three positives, three negatives, and loan him the car. Said he drove two hundred of his employees' cars. Like, when you hear that kind of stuff, you're like, wow, I wonder if anyone at Apple did that. I mean, it's just such a kind of bottomed up, like just ground truth way to start the process. Even still, even if you did that, like a bunch of people could do that. How do you have the wherewithal to build a factory? They never built a factory before. I've been in other car factories here in the US. It was phenomenal. Anyway, back to your question. I knew Le June from way back.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But that talk is unbelievable and it's translated on YouTube and I would encourage people to watch from about minute 30 to about a minute 15 or an hour 15, which is where he talks about his process for designing the car. I don't know if you saw that part.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is brilliant. And that's the SG7. That's the factory I went to. As I mentioned, I'd been there before. So I met Leigh June. Who's the founder of Jaumi in two thousand five when he was chairman of Jo Yo, which was a e commerce company that Amazon bought. So he's been around a while. He has evolved into the best thing I could say is like he's the Steve Jobs of China right now. When he quit doing JoYo and he had this other company as well, he declared 10 years ago he was going to build a smartphone just out of the blue. I'm going to build a smartphone. He didn't have any smartphone experience, but Jiao Mi is now the third largest manufacturer of handsets in the globe. And about four or five years ago, at about the exact same time Apple hinted, they were interested in building a car. He said, I'm going to build a car.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cities, yes. But you end up with hyper competition. So I think the thing that a lot of people in Silicon Valley love about capitalism is this notion of the invisible and competition that leads to innovation and best practice and the winners rise up and they're better for it. That is happening there. And if you read about the solar industry or the EV industry or now the robotics industry, they have hundreds of different companies competing in these fields and it's brutal competition. And as a result of that, they're ending up with very innovative companies, which once again I think people wouldn't prescribe to being possible in a communist world. And remarkable execution from an industrial standpoint. So the price points of the product. That will be sold around the globe are well below anything that could be done”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Provincial competition has also led to overbuild of buildings. It's not always positive. You know, bridges that aren't used.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm guessing probably we could go talk to AI and get a better answer than I have right now. But yeah, I would think that's part of it. Prosperity, employment, those kind of things. By the way, this.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The country puts out this five-year plan, but then the provinces, which are, they're a lot bigger than a U.S. state, but they're the equivalent, like how the country segment, and they compete with each other. And the effective mayor of the province, if he does well, has a chance to move up in the system, which is not a reality in the U.S. system. But what that leads to is just a massive amount of competition.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The biggest one is that people who have a rudimentary understanding of What is happening there is this word communist. And one of the things that's inferred by communism is top-down state-run system. I think they think of Russia and they assume, well, that'll always lead to bad capital allocation, no innovation because they have this picture in their mind of, I don't know, like brick buildings with snow all around them and not much happening. The reality there is just far, far different from that. I think Dan Wonk did a great job of explaining how”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. So anyway, I just wanted a better understanding. I was aided by the fact that Dan Wong shared his book Breakneck with me right before I left and I read it while I was there, which was interesting. And then it came out, and of course it ended up on the bestseller list. But I think it's misperceived. I think China's misperceived in a lot of ways.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd been about six times before, so this is like my seventh trip. It was one thing that was different. My daughter is an Asian studies major, as you were. And she spent the summer in Hong Kong. So we picked her up and then we toured six cities in 10 days. And my objective with this trip, in the past trips, it was mostly just to meet with entrepreneurs and founders and mutual sharing of information, that kind of thing. This time I was more interested in just kind of being eyes wide open and learning. And so we took two of the high-speed trains just as an experience that I got a tour of the Xiaomi factory with their new car, the SU-7, and was trying to get a feel for what's kind of most recent there. And we, you know, went to Shenzhen, the overnight city, which has gone from... Less than 100,000 people in 1982, 20 million people.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing that popped in my head. I'm on the board of Zillow. Zillow's been investing for the past five years in tools that help the realtor do their day-to-day job. They have a tool called Showing Time that helps you book in-person tours at houses as an example. putting the mortgage together, getting the sign offs on. There's just all these tasks that have to be happened that can be automated. And so tasks that can be automated that can be integrated with AI, the more of that stuff you can build into a system, the better off you're going to be protecting yourself from a model that just answers questions, which is why I brought it up.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even if the model's capable of understanding that subject matter, there are workflows, there are data sets that are local to your customer. And that stuff has to be stitched together. So I think having an understanding of. Particular industry and one that's not going to be on the next thing to do list at OpenAI would probably be your best bet.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The key is just to stay pretty far away from the edge of whatever you can go online and see interviews with people in Anthropic or OpenAI and what they're working on. Like if it's the next thing they're going to do, I don't think you're going to be protected. But as I think about founders and angel investors, you're talking about a pretty broad array of things. At this point, as I mentioned earlier, you're not going to back the next big model company. Besides, if you were, you need a billion dollar angel investment to go make that happen. The games change. There's so much money involved. I think you're going to want to be off the beaten path anyway. When I think about these deeper verticals, I don't think it will make sense for OpenAI to go crush every little vertical.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is no interest. I can't state clearly enough how there's zero interest. And I could simultaneously make fun of that reality, but I could also justify that reality, but it is the reality right now. And by the way, while I mention that, I feel obligated for your audience. I don't care what field you're in. You should be playing with this stuff. It has the potential to impact your role in your career. And the best way to protect against any risk of your career being obfuscated or eliminated from AI is to be the most AI-enabled version of yourself you can possibly be.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People who were paid both a salary and a piece of the return to be active investors of other people's money using other people's money. But the reason that kind of matters is if you angel fund a deal and have any hope of it raising money in the future, if it's not AI related right now.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's a weird reality out there right now, and this could end if ever a bubble has popped or whatever, but the institutional investors have zero interest in non ideals. Zero. It's more black and white than I could be successful.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was explaining this to a, I won't say who it is, but a Silicon Valley CEO, very successful. And he said, what are you going to do now? I said, I was thinking of doing Angel Investing. He goes, why would you do that? He said, I got 50 of these things. Like, people don't return my calls. He goes, I wish I had never done it. So there is an unglamorous side to it as much as there is a glamorous side. And you've participated in this. What would I say? I think if I were doing Angel Investments, I'd try and find him in intersection of people that are super curious and are playing with all these AI tools, but bring a perspective from a particular industry that gives them an advantage in that area where they could simultaneously be maybe the smartest user of AI in their genre.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tell you a funny story when I decided to hang up my gloves, if you will, and stop making institutional venture capital investments. I had a whole bunch of ideas about what I wanted to do next. And one of them was, oh, I'll do a bunch of angel investing. You know, Bezos did it on the side. This would be fantastic.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, right, exactly. And the second problem is the Information transparency in the private company game is just low. And I think the institutional investors have come to understand that and kind of know what they're getting into and know how to evaluate things. But if you come at it with a public market mindset thinking, oh, every set of financials I've been handed is audited and is correct and that's just not the case. It's super loosey-goosey.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. So they say, we need to institutionalize the generic public's ability to invest in private companies. I think there's two problems. One, you just hinted at, which is most private company VC-backed even, go to zero, like the majority, which is not something people, they sense that they want the lottery ticket, they want the Uber, they want the one that goes to the moon, but they don't understand that that comes along with it.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. And I just think you got to be quite careful. The investments. That were made that have already had 100 x plus returns were made a while ago, you know, before this thing started. That's not to say there won't be an incremental AI investment that makes money. I think there will. But your odds right now of that being the case are really, really low.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sophisticated companies might get speculative using a word from the previous discussion. And, you know, I hear things like, well, loss aversion tends to go down when you're winning. Like if you're on a hot streak in a casino, you take more risk. Things like that. But it is surprising to me. So when it comes to retail investors, I would be particularly concerned for them at this stage in the AI game because there is a plethora of SBV vehicles. You've heard that phrase I'm sure SBV. This is where someone has an N on an investment and they do a one-off VC fund, if you will. Yeah, it's a single entity just for that one. You have”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of talk out there, but it all started when Microsoft invested in OpenAI, OpenAI agreed to buy services from Microsoft. Is called a circular deal because you're giving them money they wouldn't have otherwise. And when Dario was on stage at Dealbook last week, he said, oh, I can explain this. It's not that hard. Amazon wanted us to spend money we didn't have so they gave us even more money. And I'm like, well, that's precisely why this is a questionable behavior. But it's gotten bigger, you know, NVIDIA's handing out money. And then NVIDIA gave CoreWeave money, but then also agreed to buy any services they have left over. This stuff's not ideal like if you were, say, what's crisp clean accounting, you know, you wouldn't do these kind of things. And some of them say, well, it's not material in which I would say, well, then why are you doing it? And I've asked other people to try and...”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just a quick comment on that industrial bubble thing. You know, one thing that is surprising to me is that even though I fundamentally believe this is an important real technology wave, the big players, even the Mac 7, have all decided to do things from a deal perspective. You've read about these circular deals and whatnot”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I think this is absolutely correct. If the wave is real, then you're going to have bubble-like behavior. They come together as a pair, precisely because anytime there's very quick wealth creation, you're going to get a lot of people that want to come try and take advantage of that are participate in it. So you get a flood of those types of people coming at it. It's odd. There's a real technology wave that's fundamentally changing the world. And there's also massive speculation simultaneous.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I think this is a super interesting one. My partner, Peter, reminded me of a book that we had seen a while ago by Carlotta Perez. It has this very benign title, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. It was written in like 2002. And what Perez kind of simplifies and notices, which I just find perfect for trying to understand whether there's a bubble or not, is that every time there's been a technology wave that leads to wealth creation, especially fast wealth creation, that will inherently invite speculators, carpet baggers, interlopers that want to come take advantage of it. Think of the gold rush, you know. And so people want to make it a debate. Do you believe in AI or is it a bubble? And if you say you think it's a bubble, they say, oh, you don't believe in AI. Like this gotcha kind of thing. And if you start.”
2025-12-17 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT