Gurley: Funding founder secondaries eliminates the primary incentive for tech IPOs
Bill Gurley · Ep16. Nuclear Update, AI Fast & Furious, State of VC | BG2 w/ Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner · Bg2 Pod · Sep 25, 2024 · at 39:51
Bill Gurley is a general partner at Benchmark discussing why late-stage venture-backed companies are staying private longer and delaying IPOs.
0:00 / 0:37exact quote · 37.6s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 taking away probably the strongest motivating factor that pushed people to go public, that pushed founders and their teams to want to be public, which was liquidity. And so with that off the table, for me, there's no surprise that IPOs are happening or not happening or not happening because there's no incentive. For them to go out.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Bill Gurley
Gurley: Defense tech startups and Palantir profit from escalating China tensions
“You have the new kind of VC-backed defense companies who all, and maybe I kind of put Palantir in that group, but they all I think have an incentive To kind of have tension with China, if you will. It actually increases revenue. I call them the new neocons.”
Gurley: US policy to block China from AI is futile and backfired
“I think the policy of American, of the American government to try and keep China out of the AI game is futile. I've always felt that way. I don't think it'll work. In this case, I actually think it backfired.”
Gurley: OpenAI Consumer Subscription Cohorts Suffer ~65% Annual Churn
“At least for the cohorts that are old enough, the churn's about 65% annually, so they're only 35% retaining, which Sachs had hinted at on All In, and maybe the reason that I think Sam at one point said he didn't really see the twenty-dollar thing as his future…”
Gurley: Cross-country excess death data shows COVID lockdowns achieved nothing
“They've gone back through, and looked at excess deaths at a number of different countries, and lockdowns achieved nothing.”
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…”