Bill Gurley

they started from a place of corporate governance where they were looking out for fraud. And so so risk mitigation rather than shareholder interest. And so when you come at it from that perspective, you're like, there should be rules and people should adhere to the rules and when people get outside of the rules, that's bad.

I would agree to that type of package for every company I've ever worked with, and most CEOs wouldn't take it. Uh, it basically says you don't make money unless the stock goes way up. And if you stock goes way up, you make an obscene amount of money. And I would do that deal over and over and over and over again.

the whole industry is is kind of stuck in this world where they make a lot of money because it is this way. But there's zero reason why it should cost 2 or 3%. Just zero.

I think it is insanely unfair to the companies the way they're forced to go through this process where the bankers pick the price and pick the shareholders. There's just no need to do that. If you took a freshman computer science student and a freshman finance student and said, you know, imagine how a company should go public. They would match supply and demand anonymously like you would in any auction.

Look, first of all, if a company's successful, someone will knock on your door and try and give you more money. So, like almost every round is preemptive for successful companies. And when you take that much money, $300 million, the only way to spend it is to take your burn rate up. And I always thought of burn rate as a measure of risk.

the investor community writ large has slowly become aware of and believes it strongly in increasing returns and power laws. And so over time, if they all believe that, they're going to be more willing to invest on the come and take risk.

the regulation gets extremely difficult and mundane and expensive that could actually lead to more igopoly and I think some of the players know that and are begging for regulation.

the competitive dynamic in China is more intense because it's more intense. Everyone's chosen to go open source and that creates a system that in my mind is capable of innovating far faster than the competitive system we have here. All the models learn from one another.

a more common trait that's related in the entrepreneurial world is obsessive learning like constant learning because the disruptions that allow for the technology waves that allow for companies to be disruptive and take market share from an incumbent are all tied to something dynamic that's happening on the edge.

I'm suggesting you should understand the really old stuff, the history, because it's differentiating and shows a passion and it gives you a great frame of mind, but you also want to really understand the new edge. If you do both of those things, like you're I think you're a power player in your field, you know.

We do live in a world where information is really cut up, but we also live in a world where you can have access to more information than you ever could. And that's even more true now with LLMs.

you got to be really conscious of the consequence and not get too deterministic about a single metric or a single variable and know what's important and what's on top.

I would describe complex systems as multivariable nonlinear systems. And multivariable nonlinear systems are very hard to predict. They can behave one way for a long time and then one variable can switch and they can behave another way.