Bill Gurley - The Gift and The Curse of Staying Private - [Invest Like the Best, EP.427]
Episode publishedPodcast: Invest Like the Best with Patr...Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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Something I speak about frequently on Invest Like the Best is the idea of life's work. A more fun way to think about it is that I'm looking for maniacs on a mission. This is the basis for our investment firm, Positive Sum, and it's the reason why I'm so enthusiastic about our presenting sponsor, Ramp. Not only are the founders, Kareem and Eric, life's work level founders, certainly maniacs on a mission, they have created a product that is effectively an unlock for founders and finance team to do more of their life's work by streamlining financial operations, saving everyone their most precious
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc. My
guest today is Bill Gurley. Bill was a general partner at Benchmark Capital. He joins me for his time on Invest Like the Best and his most comprehensive market analysis yet, examining the realities reshaping venture capital. Bill tackles the uncomfortable math underlying today's venture returns with companies staying private for longer. He also walks through why no one from GPs to LPs to founders as proper incentives to mark assets accurately, creating a system wide coordination problem. And we dig into the investment implications of AI as a platform shift ranging from evaluating AI revenue qu
Oh, I can't think of anyone I'd rather be neck and neck with on the entire planet.
This is also interesting that this is the one that you and I have done, just the two of us, since 02/2019, if you can believe that. So time flies. Since it's just us, I would love to go very broad and start the conversation by just talking about the state of things as you see them. I know this is something you used to do in your benchmark days, give a state of the union markets edition. I would love for you to do that for us as we enter summer of twenty twenty five with everything that you're seeing out there in the world.
I'm excited to do it. Yeah. I used to kick off our LP meeting with a state of VC. It's a process and a presentation I'm used to giving. I've been noticing a lot of things recently that are different in the world and maybe permanently different about the venture capital world. And a lot of the talks that I would give were based on what appeared to be inherent cyclicality in the venture business, and that has been upset or kicked over or a little chaotic recently, which we'll get into. I offer two qualifications as we dive into this. The would be, and Michael would appreciate this, I'm a huge fa
like an indicator all his own. Yeah.
Yeah. I agree. So there's a lot more money out there. The reality that people talk about that's staggering, I think the phrase that's used, Motsu, I don't love is zombie unicorn. So if you look at the number of companies that were I always like to think pre LLM and post LLM because it it really is a dividing moment as everyone's gotten excited about this new platform shift. There's somewhere around a thousand. So these are a thousand private companies that have raised money over a billion dollars. And Chat TBD told me it was twelve fifty. NVCA says 900. Let's just say it's near a thousand. Rou
justice, a thousand. Yeah. Yeah.
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