American - Businessman | May 10, 1966 -
I think one of the key differentiators I bring to the table as a venture capitalist is a solid understanding of the public markets and how they operate.
Bill Gurley
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If the goal is to build companies that maximize long-term equity value, then optimizing corporate performance in a way that Wall Street appreciates is obviously critical to that goal.
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I have never seen Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, or Reed Hastings complain about being public. Nor have they ever argued that being public prevented them from doing things with a long-term focus.
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Having an investor on your board of directors who is naive about public markets or finds them complex or scary is non-optimal.
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It's really hard to run a business against somebody who is not acting as if it were in business.
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Almost everybody who thinks about local thinks about daily deals, but companies like OpenTable and Zillow and Yelp are all getting their money from the local market.
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It's not for everybody to tweet, it's for everybody to follow. The more people figure that out, they see it's RSS-plus. It's literally the place you check for information.
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Facebook has stitched together your social graph. The idea of an interest graph is to bring together everyone that has shared interests. If I can isolate the people who are into mountain biking in Marin, in one place, the ability to put ads against that is really high.
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I think one thing that may have happened with both Facebook and Zynga is that they may have waited too long to go public. They got particularly cute on that front.
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Venture capital is unscalable. Production equals the time each partner has.
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The first time you went to eBay, you probably didn't do a transaction.
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Most firms are hierarchical in nature, with everyone getting different slices of the economic pie. The problem is those slices are negotiated every time a firm raises a new fund, so in between funds, which is most of the time, the partners are trying to outgun one another to make a stronger case for themselves.
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