Full Interview: Bill Gurley Thinks College Kills Creativity

And without further ado, we have Bill Gurley. He is the author of Running Down a Dream. Bill, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time on a busy launch day. Congratulations on the launch. You're doing great.

0:00

Busy launch day.

0:13

Yes. Yeah.

0:14

How many podcasts are you doing this week?

0:15

I can't imagine. It's just some number beyond my comprehension.

0:17

Well, we appreciate you taking the time to come chat with us. Why?

0:21

Well, before we jump into everything, I got to say somebody, I think it was a week or so ago, made a fake TVPN graphic that was pretty silly, and I just wanted you to know it. We didn't make that. That was somebody. I almost emailed you about it.

0:26

No, I tried to jump in on the parody myself.

0:43

Yeah, you did. But then I was like, wait, does he. I don't know.

0:46

Well, we did early on when we were a little smaller and a little more free to loose with the jokes. We posted a picture of Bill at a basketball game at as a spotted. And you replied and said like, no, the person next to me is like the owner of the team. And the whole joke is like, we know you. We don't know basketball, but we're doing the paparazzi thing. Never heard of him, but we're very excited to have you. Why the book now? What was the impetus for actually writing the book?

0:49

Yeah, look, I think especially for a show like your own, I'm known as someone who spent 25 years in venture capital, and the book's not really about that, you know, So I. I developed a side passion project that started about eight years ago on this topic. And it was at a time where I was reading a ton of biographies, and I noticed a through line between three different subjects of things they were doing that I kind of felt most people weren't doing, but could do. And I put it together. I gave it as a presentation at my alma mater, where I got my mba, and they put it online. Few people noticed. James Clear noticed. That was one of the things that kind of woke me up to the possibility. And as I began to hang up my boots, adventure, which takes a while, I turned my attention to this. And it was something that meant a lot to me. I could have written a book on vc. I don't know how many humans that could have possibly helped, but a small fraction compared to what I hope this can do.

1:20

I think the projections are by 2030, there'll be more venture capitalists than people if the trend continues. So. But it is an interesting point.

2:25

Maybe I made A mistake.

2:35

I do feel like this is a book that you can read if you're a venture capitalist, insider, startup founder, and be like, okay, I'm seeing the world from Bill's perspective. That's helpful. But I could also give this to someone who's never heard of you or venture capital or knows what a safe note is, and they could get value out of it. And I'm interested to hear your thoughts on the. The translation that's happening right now around AI narratives as they break into the public consciousness. We saw this with that viral X article, Something big is happening. I had that forwarded to me by family, friends. I overheard someone in a restaurant talking about it who clearly is not, you know, an investor in an AI lab. They're just some random person and they realize that there's something happening. And I'm wondering about these transitions of communication. That's what's happening in Silicon Valley is going to have an impact and how what you've seen in the past translates to average Americans.

2:36

I haven't seen. You know, if you think so. First of all, the venture capital community appropriately gets excited about these big tech waves because they lead to disruption and they lead to kind of accelerated new wealth creation around these companies that break out. And that's happened over and over and over in my career. And I don't remember one. I mean, if you take the mobile wave or the PC wave or the client server or sas, I don't remember any of those kind of being thrown at the public consciousness this fast. And so I do think, I do think it's different this time from that front alone. That said, you know, we've had pretty high market caps for tech companies for a long time now, starting with dessert period. And you're getting to a place where, you know, anytime the market switches from from half full to half empty and a skeptics mindset, you. We have had those moments like so. So maybe not driven by the wave, but we certainly have those moments. And it's all okay. It will always be okay. I think people freak out. Buffett says he's a net buyer of stocks. If people are intellectual and curious and hungry, they should be sharpening their pencils right now trying to figure out where they want to find entry prices on some of these companies.

3:31

Yeah, that makes sense. I mean, it feels like a lot of the book is about finding a career. And I feel like that will resonate specifically with people who are nervous with me.

4:51

Because when I was thinking about when, when John and I first met, we had Both built some companies, we both invested in some companies, but we were trying to find our life's work. And it was such a. It's such a pain. Like, that period where you're searching is if you. If you're a high agency person, you like doing a lot of things, it can be deeply painful because you're like, I want to be productive. I want to be. I want to be making the number go up, but I don't have a number right now. And. And if you had asked either of us when we first met, hey, would you ever think about broadcast media? Would you ever think about being in front of a camera? Both of us, you know, John had made some YouTube videos, but it was just for fun. And if. And if a big, you know, if a network like CNBC had said, hey, would you guys consider, you know, hosting a show? He would have been like, yeah, like, like honored. But no way. That never imagined. And then you sort of just. And so as somebody who, like, wants a lot of control over their life and their destiny and, like, feels like they have historically have had control, that period of just, like, searching is like, is. Is painful. And I feel like a lot of the book is helping people through that moment. So in some ways, when I got our copy, I was like, wow, I really wish I had this two years ago.

5:02

I'd like to go back to the word, the phrase you used of high agency. I think that one of the problems that has kind of evolved is that our common college pathway has actually become more restrictive, and I think there's less agency. And kids are being encouraged. They have to sign up for a major before they ever go to the college. They get stuck on these pathways, and there's not a lot of exploration. There's not a lot of search for creativity or obsession or the kind of thing that really gets you going. And I think the journey you went on is perfectly fine. I think that's another thing which is letting it be okay for people to bounce around and see what they can find, because once they latch on, and we have examples in the book where that it doesn't happen till 40. Sometimes it's at 30, sometimes it's. I didn't become a venture capitalist until I was 30, and that was clearly my dream job. But the first two. Two stops were. Were fine and interesting and building blocks towards that. So. So I think it. I think. I think that is part of the message is to get comfortable with that and give people permission to do that type of exploration.

6:18

Yeah. Enzo. Enzo Ferrari Estee Lauder, I think the Red Bull founder too, all were, I think in their 40s when they started their companies. And so there's this intense pressure in our industry and everywhere to figure out a job and then attach your, you know, make your entire identity that job. And it's so, it's so constrictive.

7:27

Yeah. Yes. What are, and I circle back to, to the first question, just about this AI stuff that's out there. I think there's this massive paradox where if you are not engaged at work, if you don't love what you do, you know, you go home and you don't try and improve on your own time. AI feels very threatening for high agency people who are kind of on their own custom career path, which I hope this book encourages more and more people to be on. AI is like a superpower. There's like, you can learn constantly, like you can find people who you should be connecting with. You can, you can have it do things for you so that you're operating with the power of more than one person as you move forward. And I, I, I just think that's quite a, quite an ironic paradox that for certain people this is the best of times, the best. Like there's never ever in the history of the world been a better time to self learn like it is. It is all out there at your fingertips. It's like magic.

7:49

But yeah, I think the ability to, anyone can ask a dumb question at any point, all day long, and you don't have to be embarrassed about it. And I think that that is underrated today in terms of how many. If like generally there are no dumb questions and yet people still don't like asking dumb questions to their peers or mentors or whatever. And I feel like that's an underrated element of AI, no doubt.

8:55

What do you think about hyper financialization, young people, day trading, meme coins, all of that. It feels like a trap for young people where it can feel like you're learning about AI or learning about technology, but then instead of actually building a product, creating value, you're sort of just trying to shuffle chips around the poker table and ultimately just take risk.

9:26

Yeah, I mean, based on my understanding of day trading in a Wall street context prior to maybe the crypto world, I'm not aware of any signal that suggests that's a durable skill. And I think the data points the other way. But one of my messages is like, do what you love, do what you're passionate about. So if that's, if that's the thing that you're going to wake up every day. You know, I don't want to, I don't want to be discouraging. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

9:52

Just maybe you'll land or start a fund that takes it really seriously and creates some, some captured value or.

10:25

You know, I was probably overly skeptical of at least many of the crypto messages that were out there, but the, the stablecoin rail seem like a real, real innovation and, and something that has scale and I think maybe we're still yet to see some disruption coming down the path.

10:33

Yeah, I mean we just talked to the Collisons about that. Ken Griffin started as a day trader. He was in college, he was buying convertible debt and he was looking at where the convertible debt was mispriced and made a bunch of money and then grew it into a massive team with a fund and high frequency trading arm and all this stuff. What are you making?

10:51

I was just going to say the thing that will differentiate you more in your career than anything else is to be the most hyper curious person that's trying to do this thing and once again that's put on steroids with these AI tools. But if you are the most curious person that's constantly learning in your field, you will do extremely well. And I said it in the book, but I'll say it here, make you the most talented person in your, in your, you know, company or your group or your field. But you have no excuse not to be the most knowledgeable person because the information's all out there.

11:11

What kind of, what kind of things are you doing to learn about industries and companies, you know, in the beginning of your venture career that maybe you'd be using a deep research query to do today. But.

11:49

Well, the first thing, I mean the first thing is you develop and I think this is all the great VCs in the valley. You develop this hyper FOMO of anything and everything. And one of the way, one of the reasons I know that, that it's time for me to move on is I, I haven't, I haven't put together a clawbout yet, but I know my older self would have done it immediately. And, and it's just that kind of thing. You can't sleep on not knowing something, you know, or hearing that there's a company you don't know about. And you develop that as an instinct, like as a positive tool to just be hyper paranoid about new companies, new things, new information, new technologies.

12:01

Is venture capital eating the world? Is venture capital scaling so much that it's eating into other Asset classes, we're seeing mega funds. I'm interested to think about what's durable about your approach to investing, what's additional, what's substitutive. How is venture changing?

12:45

I think from the minute I entered venture to today, venture has gotten nothing but more competitive. It's as an asset class, it's gotten more and more competitive and people get more and more aggressive. We're in a very interesting time where people have grown funds to the size of, of equivalent to the largest PE funds and they're moving money. Especially, you know, you just had the collison. You know, you look at the stripe or the databricks case, they're using those large funds to convince the companies to stay private with longer, maybe forever. That's just a very different world than the one that I grew up in. I think they turn around and the people that do those rounds turn around and tell the LPs, their investors, look, if you want exposure to these growth years in these companies, you need to come through us. And so if I were using cynical words, I'd say they hijacked the growth years of these early IPO companies. Amazon went public below a billion in market cap. It's hard to fathom that, you know, today with, with what we have going on here. Yeah, and that's.

13:03

What's the, what's the salute. What's the solution, though? Because, because there's different. There's different, you know, angel list has been, you know, available and scaling for a long time now. Robinhood has their new.

14:14

Yeah, I know, I know. The problem, the problem with getting the retail investor into this crazy world of venture capital is most venture capitalists are well aware that in a fund of 10 investments, seven are going broke and bankrupt. And I don't know that the retail investors got the right frame of mind for that type of activity. I also. There's a reason that public companies have public audits and file these, these financials in the way that they do. And I tell you, when a company gets ready to go public, everyone sharpens their pencils. The auditor, the lawyers, everyone really tightens up. And I think every venture capitalist knows that, that numbers that are in a PowerPoint may or may not be correct, but I don't know that retail investors know that. So I think it could, I think it could be a dangerous world to go down that path you're talking about. Yeah, but the, ideally the thing to do is just to make it a lot easier to be public, lower the cost of being public, really scrutinize the cost of DNO insurance and the lawsuits that come to the table because that makes people not want to be out there on the field. It would require the SEC to stare themselves in the face and say, look, the number of public companies in the US is half of what it used to be. And is that a problem? I think it is. But is that a problem and what are we going to do to fix it? But there's not an overnight fix it's going to take. It would take, it would take someone being very determined to make it happen.

14:28

Do you think that there's a world where the AI backlash is less if the big labs got out earlier? I'm just thinking about the average American can't get allocation in space x Anthropic OpenAI and they're seeing bills go up and they're worried about AI, but they don't have exposure. And if they could at least see that they're somewhat allocated to the market.

15:58

Yeah, in the same, the same way housing prices going up sucks until you buy a house.

16:27

And yeah, the way you describe it sounds more like how a politician would describe it than how I actually think it might play. I don't know that there are that many retail investors out there going, oh, my job's under threat from AI. I wish I could own Anthropic.

16:31

Well, isn't that part of, isn't that part of why. I mean, this sort of fear based fundraising approach that the lab, you know, some of the labs have taken where if somebody's telling you your job's going to go away, of course you want to give them as much money as you can as a hedge.

16:47

Yeah, I don't. Look, there's an interesting irony that if you wanted AI exposure, you're pretty good just owning the index. Nvidia is such a large part of the index. You have exposure to Microsoft and Google and Facebook. Like I don't know that you need to be in that place. And we are now already at a place, I would say, you know, every time there's a new technology wave, people get rich quick. When people get rich quick, speculators come in, Charlton's, you know, those kind of things. And eventually that leads to a bubble. People are confused when they think, you know, they say, oh, you, you say it's a bubble, you're anti aid. No, the fact that it's real causes the bubble. And that's why bulls rush. In the beginning of the gold rush, there was really gold there. They were finding at the end point, you know, it got Speculative. And so it will get speculative. I think it would be really ironic if we you know invite retail investors into a Goldman led SPV of open air anthropic right before the Reese which I think would be the most likely thing that would happen. Sure, sure.

17:04

How are you, what are you thinking about around China as of today, February 2026 we have distill gate this week A lot of people are talking about it but what's on your mind?

18:14

Can I ask you a question about that? This is remarkably naive on my part. So these model companies are saying that they're API was hit 16 million times, is that correct?

18:29

Yeah, something like that. I don't even know if there's anyone.

18:40

How did that happen? Are you not tracking who connects to.

18:44

Yeah, you set up a whole bunch of different like front companies or you're reselling access. So if you go to the itunes app store right now there will be

18:48

an applause to set up 16 million

18:57

accounts or if you just, you can go to the app store right now and look for like chat AI and it will hit the other APIs but you're going through an American company, maybe they don't have security. So there's a lot of different ways to, to exfiltrate data and then also a lot of data just hits the open web because you go to ChatGPT, you run a deep research report and then you just publish it on your blog or on the Internet.

18:59

But now they've been able to those things down and I think I, you know I share the skepticism Elon does and this goes way back to my speech it all in on regulatory capture. I said then and I still believe now the biggest threat to the US let's call it AI hegemony is is the Chinese open source models and the developers even in the US that are working on their own are using those. And you can see that on all the, on all the, the, the tables that are out there. And so it is a highly competitive like just globally competitive reality that in an ecosystem where there's 6 to 10 open source models that can all learn off of each other, that's going to be high. Like that's going to be a really incredible primordial soup if you will for innovation to evolve. And I fear mainly because I'm well aware that like OpenAI's, I mean anthropic is the biggest spender on lobbying whatsoever. I always fear when these things come out that they're just trying to encourage more of that regulation and if that happens I think it could be like, if they try and make it illegal to use a model that has any Chinese, like ancestry, I think that could end up in a really weird place. And the place to really pay attention to and look out for is who's going to serve the rest of the world. In the Internet era, there was a fence around China and the US Companies served the rest of the world. If we get super heavy on US Regulation, you may find there's a fence around the US And China serves rest of the world. That's what I'd be worried about.

19:22

How are you thinking about great power competition more broadly? I'm an American bald eagle. I'm as American as they come. At the same time, I feel like I've been worried about a confrontation over Taiwan for years. Things. There's been trade wars. Yes. And things are tense, but nothing's really happened. Is China somehow, like, underrated in your mind? Is the geopolitical risk overstated in some way? Like, what are you seeing? That's not consensus.

21:12

If you've seen some of the stuff I posted, and I think this stuff I'm posting is highly consistent with Elon's point of view. Sure. It comes from a place of if you're going to declare that there's this, this relationship that we need to optimize, I think, and if your goal is to lower the risk of any, any major glow up, blow up between the two, I think it's imperative to have as much knowledge as possible. And so one of the things that I don't like is when you see people out there spreading rhetoric that's just not consistent with the reality. And so I'm just like, look, let's get eyes wide open first. I also think that there are things we could learn from China about how to run infrastructure in the US they're clearly better at it than we are. And if you just, you know, close your ears and say, oh my God, they're the evil competitor and they cheat all the time, you don't ever get yourself in a position where you're going to learn, you know, from them maybe what they're doing well and what we're not. And so I'm, I'm, you know, Elon, where I guess he was on Cheeky Pint with the

21:41

John Collison.

22:54

Yeah. He, he talks about how competitive they are. Like, and I'm just like, let's be realistic, let's not. I also worry a little bit that the venture community's gotten into all these military companies because venture capitalists start to look like warmongers. It's ironic, way back when, when the all in pod just got started, they were giving, oh, what's her name was on the Boeing board, Nick, Nikki Haley. And they were like, oh, she's a warmonger. She's, you know, looking after this defense company now. Every VC's in Andrew, they're doing the same thing. Let's be consistent.

22:55

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Are there any other industries that you do think are interesting that sort of. But outside of the. The typical mandate of venture capital, you know, like AI fits very neatly into the software continuum. Internet, cloud, mobile. I thought crypto was a little bit outside of the wheelhouse, but a lot of VCs made it work. Industrial energy, defense. These are sort of things that are a little bit outside of the typical software.

23:33

I'm gonna have to run. But I would tell you one thing. Every time venture cap, every time venture capital gets easy, people take or take risk with companies that are less of a great fit for the venture capital model. And when I say a great fit, like they're either heavy capex or they have, they have low gross margins, they require tons of capital to keep surviving. And history is pretty good at bringing people back around to how hard those are to do with venture capital. So it's interesting for me to see those experiments being run. You know, there was near death with Tesla many times. And it's a lot easier to get in those difficult situations when you're using debt and leverage, which we're seeing all over these data centers. And so I just a word of warning, be careful. It ain't easy.

24:07

Okay, Jordy, last question.

25:02

No, we got to let our guests jump, but congratulations.

25:04

Hopefully everybody can get out and buy.

25:10

Running down a dream. It's available everywhere, books are sold. Go check it out. And thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

25:12