Bill Gurley

no, like when price comes down, it grows the market.

That was Bill Gurley's big thesis about Uber is that if you know you can push a button and count on a car, then the overall market is bigger than cabs and bigger than black cars.

Turns out he's right.

That's why he's Bill Gurley.

Panthalos is a fascinating one, right? Because if you think about it, one, it's using ocean power.

to power these data centers effectively.

There are a handful of people who are very much focused on it.

Bill Gurley introduced that to me and

said, Jim, you're not looking at stock-based compensation.

And what they adjust for, gap operating margin, by the way, has got it to 12%.

No,

no, like when price comes down, it grows the market, right? I mean, that was Bill Gurley's big thesis about Uber is that if you know you can push a button and count on a car, then the overall market is bigger than cabs and bigger than black cars.

It turns out he's right.

That's why he's Bill Gurley.

Panthalos

is

And throughout the 2010s and 20-teens, the game in venture investing became as much about showing the paper gains of IRR to raise funds of ever-increasing sizes as it was to actually returning those funds in the long run.

Said legendary venture investor Bill Gurley in 2016, everyone was successful on paper, but in terms of real cash-on-cash returns, there was little to show.

And yet in some ways, all of this was just dress rehearsal for what happened around COVID.

First, the pandemic moved everyone's life online.

You might disagree with me on this.

So you know about this Trump account that Brad Gerstner is? So a very rich venture capitalist, on the Midas list every year, does a podcast with Bill Gurley.

I'll hardly recommend people not to listen to it.

He's on it a lot.

And

you have all your employees looking at a stock price every day, which Bill Gurley said, when he was an analyst, he wrote a paper to try to get the employees to stop, Amazon's employees specifically, to stop looking at the stock price and

focus on work.

Yeah, and I'm sure that worked just as well as you might think, but from our standpoint, I think being a public company makes sense when you've reached some point of stability, some plateau.

Pop quiz.

Which of the two aspects of grit do you think is most lacking in the most ambitious among us? Passion or persistence? What's your guess? Now, before reading Bill Gurley's new book, Running Down a Dream, check out those notes, I would have guessed persistence.

How about you? And I would have been wrong.

How about you? Here's how Bill puts it in his great book.