Bill Gurley’s presentation from the 2018 Sohn Conference.
Bill Gurley has spent nearly 20 years as a General Partner at Benchmark, joining in 1999. Before entering the venture capital business, Bill spent four years on Wall Street as a top-ranked research analyst, including three years at CS First Boston.
Q1 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc
Bill also maintains a blog on the evolution and economics of high technology businesses called Above the Crowd.
Over his venture career, he has worked with such companies as GrubHub (IPO: GRUB), Nextdoor, OpenTable (IPO: OPEN, Acquired by Priceline), Stitch Fix (IPO: SFIX), Uber, and Zillow.com (IPO: Z).
Education: BS in computer science from the University of Florida, and an MBA from the University of Texas. He is also a Chartered Financial Analyst. Bill is a board trustee at the Santa Fe Institute, a research and education center focused on the study and understanding of complex adaptive systems.
Bill Gurley 2018 Sohn Conference Comments
Already some good stuff from one of the most famous VCs of oour time. Bill Gurley says that Elon Musk makes it too risky to own shares of Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA), but he has some hope for the company's debt.
Bill says that due to SoftBank's agressive purchases it has now become the ‘most powerful investor in our world’, our condolenses to Draghi, Jordan and Kuroda on that one
But power does not equal respect, Bill believes that title belongs to Jeff Bezos, Gurley opines that ‘Amazon is the most respected company in Silicon Valley’
He is not a fan of Hertz which makes him on the opposite side of Carl Icahn on HTZ - why is he bearish on the car rental company? Because of Uber (of which he is a big investor/backer), Lyft and other ride-sharing apps.
Gurley says that we are nearing a peak car moment. Cars per household is going to start dropping for the first time ever
Gurley disagrees with Gundlach and does not believe Facebook faces an existential, and would be long FB along with AMZN.
