#651: Legendary Investor Bill Gurley on Investing Rules, Finding Outliers, Insights from Jeff Bezos and Howard Marks, Must-Read Books, Creating True Competitive Advantages, Open-Source Strategies, Adapting Mental Models to New Realities, and More

Tim Ferriss (0:00)

This episode is brought to you by Protekt's Rest Supplement, a new take on getting deeper and more restorative sleep. I was introduced to this by former Navy SEAL Nick Norris, who has been on this podcast. And as a mutual friend of ours put it to me, it's very annoying that Nick has no physical weaknesses. This is somebody who can climb like a spider. He has incredible abilities as a rock climber. He is incredibly strong and can also run ultra marathons. It's quite something to behold. And this is one of the tools that he uses. So Protekt's Rest Supplement helps provide consistent restful sleep without any habit forming ingredients or groggy side effects. Simply add it to your last glass of water before bed and it goes to work. So I tried this after I mentioned to Nick that I was avoiding melatonin due to next day sluggishness and its possible effects on testicular function. So I was trying to wean myself off of things like that.

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This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Shopify is one of my favorite companies out there. One of my favorite platforms ever.

And let's get into it. Shopify is a platform, as I mentioned, designed for anyone to sell anything anywhere, giving entrepreneurs the resources once reserved for big business. So what does that mean? That means in no time flat, you can have a great looking online store that brings your ideas, products, and so on to life. And you can have the tools to manage your day to day business and drive sales. This is all possible without any coding or design experience whatsoever. Shopify instantly lets you accept all major payment methods. Shopify has thousands of integrations and third party apps, from on demand printing to accounting to advanced chat bots, anything you can imagine.

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Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris show, where it is my job to deconstruct world class performers across many, many disciplines. My guest today, I'm so happy to have him, is Bill Gurley. You can find him on Twitter at be Gurley. That's G-U-R-L-E-Y. Bill has spent more than 20 years as a general partner at Benchmark. Before entering the venture capital business, Bill spent four years on Wall Street as a top ranked research analyst, including three years at Credit Suisse First Boston. Bill also maintains a blog on the evolution and economics of high technology businesses called Above the Crowd, which you can find at abovethecloud.com. Over his venture career, he has worked with such companies as Grubhub, Nextdoor, OpenTable, Stitch Fix, Uber and Zillow, among many others. Bill has a 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.