The world is weird, and sometimes people stumble onto insights that turn out to be ridiculously valuable. Gurley’s inability to articulate ‘liquidity quality’ was likely due to the tacit nature of his recognition: that is, the LQ metric was different for every marketplace startup that Gurley had seen; he could — to paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart — “know it when he saw it”. Both authors spend some time on the structural and technological changes that led to the rise of the sharing economy, but the bulk of the book is focused on the narrative arc of the main actors. I think the right answer is this: Gurley was one of the few people to have deeply internalised the implications of Arthur’s ‘increasing returns’ theory; he understood more about network effects and networked marketplaces than just about anyone in tech at the time. By Bill Gurley Going Public Circa 2020; Door #3: The SPAC. “They’re not democratizing investment.”, In an op-ed in USA Today on Sunday Robinhood Chief Executive Officer Vlad Tenev said, “We will stand right beside everyday people in our mission to break down barriers to open the financial system.”. "The problem is getting ginormously worse.". One of the dangers of reading business history is that everything seems pre-ordained — of course Uber would win; of course they would prevail against government regulation; of course Kalanick was a ridiculously effective combatant in the ride-hailing wars. He must have gone after Taxi Magic/Cabulous/Uber the same way he went after any startup that looked like it could take advantage of ‘increasing returns at scale’. (Bloomberg) --Bill Gurley, one of Silicon Valley’s most famous venture capitalists, has long been a critic of traditional initial public offerings, in part because the big gains in first-day stock price mean some categories of investor benefit at the expense of the company.Now, he says those price jumps could signal a breach of fiduciary duty. By Bill Gurley The Dangerous Seduction of the Lifetime Value (LTV) Formula. As with many business biographies, the lessons are often too specific to the story to matter; you read the narrative simply to add an extra business pattern to your head. And it probably explains why — now that he’s squeezed all the returns out of that one idea — Gurley announced, early last year, that he was finally going to stop. But for a taste of what it must’ve felt like circa 2011, recall how the fog of uncertainty felt in the early days of the pandemic last year, or even the confusion one feels about the multitude of crypto projects today. It’s easy to forget that in the early days of ride-hailing, it wasn’t at all clear that Uber would emerge as the winner. We combine Bloomberg’s global leadership in business and financial news and data, with Quintillion Media’s deep expertise in the Indian market and digital news delivery, to provide high quality business news, insights and trends for India’s sophisticated audiences. Regulatory risk would affect other less-entrenched companies more than Amazon, he said. (For an equally compelling story with the same shape, go read Gregory Zuckerman's The Man Who Solved the Market). If a stranger were to look at my list of books, it would look like a random grab bag of topics, authors, and ideas. "VC Bill Gurley Tells Startups to Beware of 'Dirty' Fundraising Terms". “DL >> SPAC >> IPO” he wrote later Friday in an email to Bloomberg, using the abbreviation for “greater than,” and signaling he prefers direct listings to special purpose acquisition companies, which are still better than IPOs. Pabbly Subscriptions provides your customers with the flexibility to choose the payment currency, payment gateway, and even the payment option and on your end. The conservative lesson that you might take away from Gurley's story is simply “huh, this is something that can happen”; you file it away in your head and then carry on. October 28, 2015 ^ markmilian, Mark Milian. Gurley has long advocated direct listings, yet another way private companies can enter public markets, over IPOs. That way, when you signed up for Nextdoor, you would be able to search for reviews of local businesses and services, because it would have already been filled in by users in the adjacent neighbourhoods. This is true regardless of whether it’s books that you’re reading, or podcasts, or even just research programs that you’re executing (I know friends who — on becoming a parent — go deep into child development research; the same thing probably happens for them once they cross a certain threshold of information consumption.). But that trite answer obscures another fact: when it comes to marketplace startups, Gurley has had a hell of a track record. Folk, bluegrass, and original tunes with sweet vocals and acoustic instrumentation. NEW YORK, NY - Photo by Brian Ach/Getty Images for TechCrunch Benchmark venture capitalist Bill Gurley recently resigned from GrubHub’s board of directors. "Those companies could theoretically be held accountable," Gurley, a general partner at Benchmark, said on Bloomberg Technology on Friday. Ann and Bill Saas, wed July 4, 1970 are proud parents of Elizabeth Ann, Amy and William J. Saas, Jr. Ann, former classroom teacher having attained full masters credentials in education, now "partners" regularly in Bill's CPA-related and media pursuits. I spent this past month reading Bill Gurley's fantastic posts on Above the Crowd. I sometimes read such business biographies and struggle to find useful, generalisable things that I can learn from them — you would think that in Uber’s case, the lessons might be “winning at any cost is often not worth it” or “VCs might stab you in the back if you represent too large a size of their portfolio, because this turns things into a finite game (vs an infinite one)” and “you really really really need to get lucky if you want to take advantage of a structural shift; nobody recognised the underlying reasons for the sharing economy until after the fact”. So, again: what did Bill Gurley see? Published using Commonplace, powered by Ghost, VCs might stab you in the back if you represent too large a size of their portfolio, because this turns things into a finite game, recall how the fog of uncertainty felt in the early days of the pandemic last year, Invest Like The Best podcast — Bill Gurley - All Things Business and Investing, On Competing Technologies and Historical Small Events: The Dynamics of Choice under Increasing Returns, Invest Like The Best on the Acquired podcast, The Gap Between Reputation and Personal Brand →. He invested in GrubHub, Nextdoor, LiveOps, OpenTable, Stitch Fix, and Zillow, amongst others. Bill Gurley, the Benchmark venture capitalist who served for 10 years on the board of directors at Zillow Group, reunited with Spencer Rascoff for the latest episode of the CEO’s… (In the podcast with O’Shaughnessy, Gurley bemoans the overuse of the phrase ‘network effects’, saying “everyone’s heard it and repeats it so it’s been polluted […] having looked at so many different businesses over the years now, there are (actually) different levels of it.”). Missing BloombergQuint's WhatsApp service? ^ Bill Gurley Sees Silicon Valley on a Dangerous Path Wall Street Journal. Feb.05 — Benchmark Capital general partner Bill Gurley shares perspective on retail investors, Robinhood’s business model and the recent IPO pops of technology companies. If you spend enough time sniffing for tacit mental models, you would learn to recognise signs of expert pattern recognition. What did he focus on in the fog of uncertainty around early ride-hailing? The books are ostensibly about Uber’s rise to greatness (and in Super Pumped, Uber’s fall from greatness). Bill Gurley, general partner at Benchmark Capital, discusses 2020's initial public offerings and the future of Silicon Valley amid the Covid-19 pandemic on "Bloomberg Technology." (Source: Bloomberg) Legendary venture capitalist Bill Gurley told CNBC on Friday that the stock market reminds him of the late-1990s tech trading environment that led to the dot-com bubble. He said IPO pops had become more dramatic recently, indicating an underpricing of shares that could have let some investors gain unfairly. You get the feeling that he’s skimming from the surface of a very deep pond. On Friday, Gurley also criticized the recent market tumult and run-up in shares of GameStop Corp., driven by commenters on Reddit Inc. and day-traders on Robinhood Markets Inc. Gurley advocated banning “payment for order flow”—the process of selling trades to market makers for execution, and which is how Robinhood Markets Inc. makes money. I read Mike Isaac’s Super Pumped and Brad Stone’s The Upstarts fairly late in the year last year, shortly before the Airbnb IPO, and two years after the Uber one. I think the right answer is this: Gurley was one of the few people to have deeply internalised the implications of Arthur’s ‘increasing returns’ theory; he understood more about network effects and networked marketplaces than just about anyone in tech at the time. Salesforce.com trades at a staggering 7.5x 2012 estimated revenues. My point: Gurley appears to have thought really deeply about the nature of networked marketplaces, at a level above many of his peers. And indeed, whenever I listen to Gurley talk about marketplaces or network effects on a podcast or at an interview, his comments tend to be a lot more nuanced when compared to his contemporaries. It was thus a stroke of luck that the first — and last! I spent three books and a couple of podcast episodes looking into it last year — mostly because I was interested in the kind of thinking that allowed Gurley to bet big on Uber. The story isn’t that straightforward, however: before he found Kalanick, he offered $8 million to Taxi Magic at a $32 million valuation (he was turned down), and tried to get into an early Cabulous financing round (the founder, John Wolpert, told him the round was ‘full’). The link at the bottom of the page is (Bloomberg) -- Bill Gurley, one of Silicon Valley’s most famous venture capitalists, has long been a critic of traditional initial public offerings. 2 talking about this. Retrieved 2016-08-24. Bloomberg.com. "Regulation is a friend of the incumbent," he said. To hear Isaac and Stone tell it, Gurley met with every Uber-like startup in the 2010-2011 period, long before ride-hailing was on most peoples’s radars. But that last lesson — on the recognition of structural shifts — isn’t exactly true. — deal he made in the market turned out to be the winning one. He had been searching for taxi-related marketplace startups for many months, and found Uber only after every other competitor had turned him down. Of course, Gurley did get lucky — everyone who is wildly successful gets lucky at some point. It’s where VCs meet with their own investors, the “Limited Partners”. May 24, 2011: [Follow Me on Twitter] ... One obvious example of this is the predictable nature of SAAS subscription revenue. Bill Gurley, Benchmark Capital General Partner, discusses the impact Softbank has in an industry when it decides to target with its investment. — Bill Gurley (@bgurley) June 10, 2015. Here’s everything I consumed when I was trying to investigate this question: If there's a generalisable question from this investigation, it might be this: if Gurley really did build his career around a single, secret idea, how might you copy that? But it’s not too much of a stretch to say that Brian Arthur’s paper helped Gurley see the future; it does seem like his investing career has been defined by the nuances of a single, wonderful, idea. Many of you may not even know what an LP meeting is. “What Robinhood is really doing, I think, is glorifying speculation,” Gurley said on Bloomberg Technology. Find Bill Gurley's phone number, address, and email on Spokeo, the leading online directory for contact information. September 4, 2012: Many consumer Internet business executives are loyalists of the Lifetime Value model, often referred to as the LTV model or formula. Separately, Gurley, a former stock analyst in the 1990s whose companies included Amazon Inc., addressed Jeff Bezos's announcement he would be relinquishing his position as Amazon’s CEO. “There is certainly what I would call a highly speculative nature to the markets today, a willingness to take on risks, a willingness to get excited about projects that may be five or 10 years in the future, that we haven't seen since the ‘99-time frame,” Gurley told CNBC. Bill has been blogging since 1996 and it was fascinating to look back through time and see his thinking and thought process over these past 25 years, specifically as it applies to technology and consumer internet companies. One — trite — answer is that Gurley got lucky. VC investor Bill Gurley wants the brokerage practice of payment for order flows banned. Bill Gurley is interviewed by award-winning journalist and author Malcolm Gladwell on the SXSW stage. One reason for this might be that he started much earlier compared to everyone else: To replicate what Gurley experienced, I went and read Complexity, followed by Brian Arthur’s original paper. In May 2019, Bill Gurley watched as Uber, the ride-hailing app in which he led a Series A in 2011, went public. I thought I’d start 2021 with one of the questions that leapt out at me over the course of 2020, along with the books (and external sources!) Bloomberg | Quint is a multiplatform, Indian business and financial news company. — Bill Gurley (@bgurley) June 10, 2015. And because he had sat with the problem long enough, and because he had more experience with more networked companies than others, he could recognise when an operating team had figured out ‘liquidity quality’, and then go all in on them. So when the ride-hailing opportunity turned up, Gurley was well prepared for it. In other words: what did Bill Gurley see? And how did he pick the right horse? Something really interesting happens when you consume a boatload of information: your brain begins to pick out patterns from the mass of stories in your head. Commonplace is about business and career decision making in a world of constant change. Take, for instance, this interview with Patrick O’Shaughnessy: Gurley’s conception of ‘liquidity quality’ made me sit up. What Gurley Saw. A prominent venture capitalist, Benchmark Capital partner Bill Gurley, is now applauding the launch, pushing the direct listing approach, and even … A short, actionable newsletter on careers, delivered every Tuesday. At our recent LP meeting, an LP told me industry wide distribution $ relative to paper value is at an all time low. And I quickly realised that Arthur’s articulation of ‘increasing returns’ was likely the very first explanation of network effects in business; Gurley read both the book and the paper a few years before he became lead analyst on the Amazon IPO. I read 53 books last year, most of it as an alternative to therapy for pandemic-related burnout. So, again: what did Bill Gurley see? Arthur’s idea helped Gurley see the future, but now the future he saw had finally arrived. Benchmark's Bill Gurley has provided wise counsel to some of Silicon Valley's most successful entrepreneurs. Unfortunately, I don't have any prescriptions. This SaaS Billing & Recurring Payment Management Software fits in every business scale and is fused with all the tech innovations for your payments and subscriptions management. Bill Gurley is Senior Vice President & General Manager, Systems & Technology Business Unit at SAIC, Inc. View Bill Gurley’s professional profile on Relationship Science, the database of decision makers. But Bill Gurley, a famed venture capitalist, thinks the method those companies used — a direct listing — will eventually become the standard way firms of all sizes and types go public. Past Chairman of the Connecticut Society of CPA's Committee on Federal Taxation, he has served also on the society's committees on publications, public relations, and personal financial planning. A CPA since 1969, Bill Saas is a highly acclaimed and accomplished TV and radio commentator on taxation, money management and personal finance. Now, he says those price jumps could signal a breach of fiduciary duty. By Bill Gurley All Revenue is Not Created Equal: The Keys to the 10X Revenue Club. August 23, 2020: If you are looking past or through Covid — and why not, all of Wall Street is — the topic du jour in Silicon Valley is Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, or SPACs. But when I look at my list, I see books falling into clusters, each cluster representing a set of questions I want answered, and in some cases have been investigating for a number of years now. Updates weekly. Later on in the podcast, for instance, Gurley explains: Think about the implication of that insight: Gurley and company restricted the growth of Nextdoor in order to optimise for ‘liquidity quality’ — that ineffable mix of user value and density; they only allowed it to spread to neighbourhoods that were adjacent to existing ones with high LQ. Join our. (Page 2) that I consumed in order to investigate it. (Bloomberg) -- Bill Gurley, one of Silicon Valley’s most famous venture capitalists, has long been a critic of traditional initial public offerings, in part because the big gains in first-day stock price mean some categories of investor benefit at the expense of the company. He eventually backed Travis Kalanick and Uber. The IPO process has "devolved" and it's time for a new approach, venture capitalist Bill Gurley said in an interview on CNBC's "Squawk Alley," Wednesday.Gurley, a … How did Gurley win? While nobody could say that they understood the full opportunity in ride-hailing, I think there’s a plausible case that Uber board member and venture capitalist Bill Gurley saw more than most. 422 records for Bill Gurley.