Monday, July 24, 2017

Researching pensive spending and public market accountability a la Bill Gurley

Well, venture capital is the focal point of today's story. Bill Gurley is an experienced venture capitalist at Benchmark Capital, a renowned private capital firm in San Francisco. Bill is a general partner at Benchmark, and he has his own weblog called 'Above The Crowd.' For Bill, he likes to be an well known supporter of pensive spending and public market accountability. This train of thought is quite different than one of the companies that he invested in. The company that G. Ripley described is Uber. Bill was on the board of directors of Uber, a highly valued start up. Recently, Uber has come under fire as Travis Kalanick resigned from the popular ride sharing company. Kalanick held the CEO position for quite some time, but Gurley was instrumental in calling for the resignation of Kalanick. Back to Gurley's current roles, He left the board of directors at Uber a few weeks ago. During his tenure on the Uber board, Bill led the company in a behind the scenes fashion. He steered the popular ride sharing firm, even though the company dealt with widespread fallout from accusations of misconduct and sexual harassment. Bill G. is not too enthusiastic of Uber's self driving car strategy. Uber had a market cap. of $69 billion at one point, but it will not follow through on an IPO in 2017. Outside of Uber, Gurley is on the board of directors at some of the following companies: Ubiquiti Networks; Zillow.com; OpenTable; and Grubhub. Also, one should go to www.abovethecrowd.com to read Gurley's blog. Before working at Benchmark, Gurley was a partner with Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. These days, you can find Bill on the various social networks a la Twitter; Facebook; Linkedin etc. Some of Bill's big investments were Snap, Instagram, and NextDoor. Snap went public in 2017, but the company's stock price is under the IPO price already. Instagram was acquired by Facebook. NextDoor is the neighborhood social network in LA; Phoenix; and other highly populated cities in America. Finally, Bill is extremely tall as he is 81 inches above the ground. That is 6 ft. 9 in. for all those math experts, unlike myself. Bill received an undergrad. degree from University of Florida, and an MBA from UT Austin. He owns homes in Atherton, and Truckee, CA. Benchmark Capital invested a small amount ($5 million) in Ebay, back in 1997. Today, Ebay counts as one of Gurley's investment hits. Investing in startups continues to give good rates of return, for Gurley. One of his latest investments was in Zipcar, which is a subsidiary of Avis Budget Group now. In closing, Bill Gurley has been writing or 'blogging' for more than two decades. This feat is remarkable for the author of this post, to digest as G. Ripley wonders 'How does Bill find the time to write, when he invests in many successful startups?' Gurley can be wrong about investments, like jet.com. He is an outspoken critic, that is recognized by the likes of Marc Andreessen and Roger McNamee. Andreessen is a current partner at Andreessen Horowitz, another popularly successful VC firm. McNamee is a founding partner of Elevation Partners. Roger is one of the oldest, venerable VCs in silicon valley. As my writing for this post comes to an end, may the reader have gathered a monolithic amount of useful information on venture capital and Bill Gurley. Enjoy the photo above of a pensive man talking about public markets, and useful technological products. The man is the talented Mr. Bill Gurley.

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