By Bill Gurley
CLICK HERE TO PRE-ORDER Almost a decade ago I had an inspiration. Leveraging a habit of reading biographies, I noticed a pattern of success amongst three unrelated individuals a restauranteur, a basketball coach, and a folk singer. I then reread each book, and the patterns became even more clear. I knew quite quickly this was a story I wanted to share. Over the past six years, I have done…
In his recent bankruptcy proceeding filing, John Ray III, the new CEO and Chief Restructuring Officer at FTX, minced no words: I have over 40 years of legal and restructuring experience. I have been the Chief Restructuring Officer or Chief Executive Officer in several of the largest corporate failures in history. I have supervised situations involving allegations of criminal activity and…
Thanks to the pioneering work of Barry McCarty and others, paying the "IPO Pop Tax" is now 100% optional. The post Customers Love Free Stuff But That’s Not Your Problem appeared first on Above the Crowd .
If you are looking past or through Covid — and why not, all of Wall Street is — the topic du jour in Silicon Valley is Special Purpose Acquisition Companies, or SPACs. SPACs are all the rage, and everybody and their brother have either raised one or are talking about raising one. What are they, and do they matter right now? Historically they have been a kind of back-door way for a company to go…
(*) Benchmark is/was an investor in companies labeled with the asterisk. In 1776, Adam Smith released his magnum opus, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations , in which he outlined his fundamental economic theories. Front and center in the book — in fact in Book 1, Chapter 1 — is his realization of the productivity improvements made possible through the “Division of…
The partners at Benchmark are pleased to announce Chetan Puttagunta has joined the firm as our newest General Partner. As early-stage investors, we are acutely aware of the work of other venture capitalists on the boards of the companies we serve. Nearly 15 years ago one of Benchmark s founding partners, Kevin Harvey, saw the skills of a young Peter Fenton on a board they shared. Peter s work so…
In spite of all the ink that journalists, analysts, and pundits have spilled on Uber over the years, no mainstream article has focused on what I consider to be the most elegant feature of this now ubiquitous, high growth global service — no driver-partner is ever told where or when to work. This is quite remarkable — an entire global network miraculously “level loads” on its own. Driver-partners…
The subject of the “consumerization of healthcare” has been around for many years. Most frequently people use this phrase in association with personal technology devices (heart-monitors, exercise accessories, sleep monitors, etc) that allow consumers to take direct control of their health information. There is however, a more important trend that relates alternatively to the consumerization of the…
In November of 2015, I posted a tweet that declared Benchmark was interested in discovering Internet healthcare investments. Our firm has had the good fortune to invest in many two-sided networks that used information aggregation, supplier aggregation, and user generated content to attract and inform consumers and resultantly disrupt and change different industries. Examples of such companies…
For those of you who have moved away from the town where you grew up, the few times that you see your hometown in the national news creates an enormous sense of pride. Over the past few weeks, the town I grew up in, Dickinson, Texas, has been front and center in the national news, but for all the wrong reasons. Dickinson, a small town southeast of Houston on Galveston Bay, has been one of the…