Bill Gurley
64 statements across 28 episodes · 17 bullish · 30 bearish · 2 people on the record · first statement Jan 25, 2024 by Bill Gurley · said 5 times in 4 episodes since 2024 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Bill Gurley's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Brad Gerstner (4), Apoorv Mehta (1)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
Everything said about Bill Gurley, oldest first
Jan 25, 2024
Feb 8, 2024 neutral
Gurley: Software product-market fit typically plateaus around $100M to $200M ARR
“A lot of times the product market fit of the first product will get you, especially a really good product market fit will get you to a hundred million or two hundred million or some really large level. But then start to Peter out and then you have to figure ou…”
Feb 8, 2024 bearish
Feb 8, 2024 neutral
Gurley: Multi-year AI memory is a huge unsolved economic bottleneck
“I do think this memory issue is a big, big deal, at least on the consumer side. So none of the major contenders today can remember who you are because it would require them. And I mean, remember over five years, 10 years to really become a personal assistant k…”
Mar 21, 2024 positive
Mar 21, 2024 negative
Gurley: RSUs misalign management by preserving equity value during stock drops
“Here's where we get into questions of alignment with shareholders, because you could theoretically have a management team that leads a company, you know, over a year to a 20% decline and pick up 80% of the value of their equity award. Whereas shareholders are …”
Mar 21, 2024 positive
Gurley: Netflix offers zero RSUs, letting employees choose options or cash
“Netflix today has a remarkably unique compensation structure. No one does anything like them. But today, if you're an employee, you get to choose either options or cash, and there's a slider, and you get to pick where you want to be on that slider. They don't …”
Apr 4, 2024 bearish
Gurley: Market Enthusiasm Makes Marginal Tech Investing Very Difficult
“Well, and it gets, I think it gets even tougher if enthusiasm builds, because that impacts the entry price on the marginal investment that one might make, and I think this particular moment in time is very, very Difficult for investors that are, you know, look…”
Apr 4, 2024 negative
Gurley: Sam Altman's Energy Compute Framing Is Jobsian-Level Promotion
“I want to, there's two things Sam did this in this recent Interview that I think put him in the promotion hall of fame. And one of them was he juxtapositioned AI versus the smartphone market and then on the smartphone market is being small. He said, well, that…”
Apr 4, 2024 bullish
Gurley: Bought Constellation Energy Betting Nuclear Power Perceptions Would Shift
“I, yeah, I bought this stock, and I, and by the way, I bought a lot of stocks that went down, so I think we got to be careful about cherry picking, but I bought this stock solely based on the bet that perceptions would shift on nuclear.”
Apr 4, 2024 bearish
Apr 18, 2024 positive
Gurley: Going public improves company performance and raises operational standards
“I have always believed, and I'm not the only one there, there's a assortment of other people in our industry, that being public is great for companies. It raises the bar in terms of their performance. It causes them to, I think, achieve more than they would ot…”
Apr 18, 2024 negative
Gurley: Regulatory Scrutiny Has Curtailed Big Tech M&A Exit Options
“We do have a situation where at least the big guys have been pushed away from M&A by regulatory, which is another reason why you need to be more serious about the public option, because there are fewer Relative to history, I guess, fewer options on the M&A sid…”
Apr 18, 2024 negative
Gurley: Anti-IPO Memes Echo Louder in Silicon Valley Than Outside
“I think there's also some Off the beaten path companies with pretty good numbers that are going to come as well. Ironically, not in Silicon Valley, because I think this, the, these memes and rules and this kind of negativity about how big you have to be, I thi…”
Apr 29, 2024 bearish
Gurley: Compelling enterprise AI use cases rely on traditional ML, not LLMs
“When I meet a company and see them using AI in a way that feels like ultra compelling from us improvement of their own strategic business position, it's almost always a more traditional AI model that's running a very particular optimization problem. It's not a…”
Apr 29, 2024 neutral
Apr 29, 2024 bearish
Gurley: Consumer AI Tools Lack Differentiation Needed to Reach Escape Velocity
“Right now, it's hard to believe that any of them, including the Google one, like, are going to have escape velocity because the differentiation, I'm not seeing, maybe you guys are, I'm not seeing an element of differentiation on the consumer facing tool that's…”
Apr 29, 2024 negative
Gurley: Massive secondary sales eliminate the primary employee pressure driving IPOs
“When you support massive secondaries, you're taking the number one pressure out of the system that used to lead founders to want to go public because their employees are like, I need liquidity. So you do a release valve, and you take that away”
May 16, 2024 bullish
Gurley: AI Models Succeed as Tutors Due to Infinite Patience
“One thing that seems blaringly obvious is this teacher element, and Saul Kahn, who's present in some of the demos this week has been leaning into this heavily. He's someone we should definitely pay attention to but they look real, and we talked about the model…”
May 16, 2024 negative
Jun 10, 2024 bearish
Gurley: OpenAI and AI leaders are spouting vague, unsubstantiated hyperbole
“I think in this case, because some of the leaders and I'd say OpenA is probably the strongest Are willing to spout hyperbole. And what I mean by hyperbole is they're willing to just state really vague, broad, big ideas without much meat on them.”
Jun 22, 2024 neutral
Gurley: AI tools act as competitive weapons without creating net income
“The problem I have with the first one is simply that, you know, my entire time in, in technology, like, these tools are competitive weapons. But if I get armed with them and my competitor gets armed with them, it doesn't necessarily increase. It doesn't create…”
Jun 22, 2024 neutral
Jun 22, 2024 positive
Jun 22, 2024 positive
Jun 22, 2024 positive
Gurley: Companies consistently blowing out estimates signal real secular shifts
“He pointed out that if you go to the past and start to notice one to three companies just materially blowing out numbers above everyone's estimates over several quarters. There may be something happening that you should pay attention to.”
Jul 11, 2024 negative
Gurley: Big Tech Licensing Acquihires Like Adept Are Not VC Wins
“The adept thing is which was positioned by the press is similar to the inflection outcome. There's no way that's a win for venture capitalists. Like, I'm sure venture capitalists try and spin it, and we heard some spin around inflection, but it, you know, I, i…”
Jul 11, 2024 bearish
Jul 25, 2024 negative
Aug 9, 2024 neutral
Aug 9, 2024 bearish
Gurley: SaaS at 6x revenue is not automatically cheap as industries mature
“I hear people say oh my God, SAS is super cheap at six times revenue. And I'm like, you know, I've worked, I've seen industries mature where, where six ain't a stopping point, you know? And of course, you got to move on to net income and earnings and cashflow …”
Aug 9, 2024 negative
Sep 9, 2024 positive
Gurley: Building next-gen nuclear requires ground-up deregulation and litigation immunity
“And if you want to go build this next generation level three plant, I think you've got to rewrite the regulation from zero ground up, like make it, Thinner and tighter. And two, I think we've gotten to the point where we got to say this is so important you can…”
Sep 9, 2024 positive
Gurley: Open-sourcing SMR designs eliminates single-source risk for utilities
“The reason to make it IP free, Is to get everyone working on the same platform, to remove single source dependency risk, and to get the utilities confidence that this thing's gonna be successful, and gonna go forward, and to get everyone behind it. So do the L…”
Sep 25, 2024 neutral
Sep 25, 2024 bearish
Gurley: Large endowments are holding zombiecorn startups at unrealistically high valuations
“And by the way, you talk, if 80% of the zombie corns are never going to get out or are going to get out at reduced prices, I'm telling you flat out, those are being held on the large endowments, you know, as LPs at unrealistically high prices across the board.”
Sep 25, 2024 bearish
Gurley: Funding founder secondaries eliminates the primary incentive for tech IPOs
“And if you're going to be founder friendly and write big checks, guess what? You're going to be supportive of founder secondary. And you're going to be in for, you're going to be supportive of broad based employee secondary. When you do those things, you are t…”
Oct 13, 2024 neutral
Gurley: Hypergrowth delays microeconomics and temporarily masks margin durability
“Hypergrowth tends to delay what you learned in microeconomics class. You know, I remember when I was a PC analyst and there were five public PC companies all growing a hundred percent. And so in, in moments of hypergrowth, you will have margins that may or may…”
Oct 13, 2024 bearish
Gurley: AI productivity gains will be competed away across most industries
“The real answer is the companies that don't deploy these things are going to go out of business. And so I think margins get competed away in many, many cases. I think it's ridiculous to imagine, oh, every company goes to 60%.”
Oct 13, 2024 bullish
Oct 31, 2024 neutral
Gurley: High valuations raise future expectations rather than proving company success
“Valuations represent discounted future expectations. And so, you've, you may feel like you've won a prize, but you've really increased everyone's expectation for what this company can achieve. And in order to raise that up around from here, it's way harder tha…”
Oct 31, 2024 bearish
Jan 11, 2025 neutral
Jan 23, 2025 negative
Feb 5, 2025 positive
Feb 5, 2025 neutral
Apr 4, 2025 neutral
Apr 24, 2025 neutral
Gurley: Supply chain resilience can include allies and requires trade consistency
“There's also, if you're using the word resilient, you know, that can include other countries that are allies. It doesn't have to be on the shores of the U.S., and I know people who in the first Trump administration were told to diversify away from China, and t…”
Apr 24, 2025 bearish
Apr 24, 2025 positive
Gurley: Claiming the US Would Be Better Off Without Free Trade Is Fanciful
“Neil makes a great point about the argument that, oh, we shouldn't have done this. We regret global trade. That argument takes, you're allowing yourself to imagine, you're taking where we are today and competing with an imaginary version of how things evolved …”
May 22, 2025
May 22, 2025 bearish
Jun 6, 2025 bullish
Jun 20, 2025 bullish
Gurley: Government support and stablecoins require reevaluating crypto priors
“Two things that are new about crypto that Should lead anyone to reevaluate. The government's gone from being kind of antagonistic towards supportive. That's a big shift because regulatory risk was a big question for all this stuff. And then the stable coin, yo…”
Jun 20, 2025 bearish
Gurley: Low-growth $50M–$100M companies must increase risk rather than protect multiples
“One of the big thing, problems I think they have is having, you survive to this point, and having succeeded, let's say they have revenue of 50 to a hundred million dollars, they feel like they need to protect something, and it puts them on the back foot, not t…”
Jul 10, 2025 positive
Jul 10, 2025 positive
Jul 31, 2025 negative
Gurley: AI foundation models are pricing below cost, subsidized by venture capital
“Because of the amount of venture capital out there companies are not pricing the cost. Like, no one, none of the model companies, I don't think anyone, even in the verticals, like, no one's pricing the cost, because they're pricing to take market share.”
Aug 28, 2025 negative
Aug 28, 2025 neutral
Oct 14, 2025 bearish
Gurley: Circular AI financing hides leverage and delays demand slowdown detection
“I think what this does, this overall situation is First of all, I think it's driven by competition at this point. And like the first step into the gray zone was way back at the beginning. And so now I think we're fairly pregnant with it. So I think it's a comp…”
Oct 14, 2025 bearish
Gurley: Microsoft's OpenAI deal uses cloud credits to create cashless revenue
“It started with the original, from my perspective, with the original Microsoft open AI deal where credits go in as A in kind investment. And then those credits are used back against, you know, Azure and Microsoft cloud services. And in the, in that case, you k…”
Oct 14, 2025 neutral
Gurley steps back from co-hosting BG2 podcast to focus on policy
“I apologize that I'm not going to be doing it anymore. I came across this quote that was really inspiring to me. It said, life begins where your comfort zone ends. And there were a number of people that helped push me to write the book. It's taken up quite a b…”