#840: Bill Gurley — Investing in The AI Era, 10 Days in China, and Important Life Lessons from Bob Dylan, Jerry Seinfeld, MrBeast, and More

**Tim Ferriss** (0:00)
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show, where is my job to deconstruct world-class performers. I interview them to tease out the habits, routines, frameworks, et cetera, that you can apply to your own lives. My guest today is Bill Gurley. He is a general partner at Benchmark, a leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. But his venture career, his career overall spans a lot. He is invested in and served on the boards of such companies as Nextdoor, OpenTable, Stitch Fix, Uber, and Zillow. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Florida and then his MBA from the University of Texas at Austin. He's had lots of other careers, but we discussed that in our first episode. We're going to cover a lot more in this one. For more than two decades, Bill has written about technology and other subjects on his popular blog Above the Crowd and on his social media accounts. His new book is Running Down a Dream, How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love. And we detail exactly what he means by that, including some incredible stories and takeaways that you can apply. You can find him on X at x.com/bgurley, G-U-R-L-E-Y.
And without further ado, please enjoy a very wide-ranging conversation with none other than Bill Gurley. Optimal, minimal.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:20)
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

**Bill Gurley** (1:25)
Can I ask you a personal question?

**Tim Ferriss** (1:43)
Bill, great to see you, man.

**Bill Gurley** (1:44)
Good to see you.

**Tim Ferriss** (1:45)
And I thought we would start with a prop that you brought. So, there was a very thick book, the Tattered Cover, and I think that is as good a lead in as anything. And what are you holding?

**Bill Gurley** (1:57)
I'm holding a book called The Last Laugh by Phil Berger. The reason it's tattered is I think it may be out of print, like I bought it used, you know, because I wanted to see it and have it.

**Tim Ferriss** (2:07)
What's the subtitle?

**Bill Gurley** (2:08)
The Last Laugh, the world of stand-up comics.

**Tim Ferriss** (2:11)
Why do you have this book? Are you thinking of making a career switch?

**Bill Gurley** (2:13)
No, no, no, no.
So, as part of researching my new book, Runnin Down a Dream, my co-writer and I were, we spent six years like just diving through stories, because I had done this speech at the University of Texas, and we wanted to enhance it, and you know, when we went to the printed form. And one of the stories we came across was Jerry Seinfeld, and his decision to pursue a career as a comedian. And he was in New York, he wasn't sure what he wanted to do with his life. He had an inkling, an inkling, that he might want to be a stand-up comic, but he didn't know what that meant. He didn't know if it was a real career. He didn't know that you could make money. And he read this book, and it profiles, looks like 15 different, you know, it's got Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, George Carlin, Lillie Townley, Robert Klein. It profiled them in a way that was very disinhibiting to him. It gave him permission to go do this career that's not a typical career, right? Like, when you go to college, they don't list stand-up comedian as something that you can go do.

**Tim Ferriss** (3:23)
Guidance counselors generally putting that on the multiple choice.

**Bill Gurley** (3:26)
Exactly, but this book served as something that granted him permission to go do that.

**Tim Ferriss** (3:33)
And we're gonna come back to that. I will say that I bookmarked this for future conversations, and of course we're chatting outside of these recordings, but because two years ago, almost exactly when we did our first episode, you mentioned that you're working on a book idea based on the belief that it's easier than ever to rise up because access to mentors and information is unprecedented. So we'll come back to that, of course, and discuss it and the frameworks and the approaches and the stories at some length. But I wanted to start with some topical subject matter. AI bubble or not?
If so, what does that mean?

**Bill Gurley** (4:10)
Yeah. So I think this is super interesting. My partner, Peter, reminded me of a book that we had seen a while ago by Carlotta Perez. It has this very benign title, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital. It was written in 2002