Bill Gurley: Searching for Feynman

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

Silicon Valley royalty, legendary investor Bill Gurley. Track record is incredible. The legend who backed Uber and Zillow, who's lived through every major tech cycle for over 25 years. You're not just a commentator, right? You've been an operator.

Bill Gurley (0:15)

I'd love to unlock this latent human potential. There's been no time in the history of the world where you can learn faster. You can increase your surface area for luck. I'm not a big fan of these dystopian narratives. The only thing to do right now is to run as fast as you can.

SPEAKER_3 (0:32)

Please welcome Bill Gurley.

Bill Gurley (0:45)

It's good to be here again. Three years ago, I gave a talk on regulatory capture, and this group was quite kind in how they reacted and how that video was promoted. I'm very happy we got that word out into the public discourse. Obviously, today, you hear it quite a bit. I have a different topic I'm going to talk to you about today. It's not, I'm not going to talk about AI.

It's a serious topic, and so there might not be as many fun joke parts in it. But it's something that's been weighing on my mind for the past five or six years, and I'm thankful that the team here allowed me to come to talk to you about it, and I'm hopeful that we can have an impact by getting the word out on this as well.

I'm going to start by talking to you about some catastrophes that have happened in the world and how humans normally respond to them. This is the Chamberlain Towers in Surfside, Florida. You may remember in June of 2021 when the building suddenly collapsed. Ninety-eight people died. What happened? There were design areas from the very beginning. There was poor maintenance schedule, and then the Board of the Condominium did not listen to an inspection report that said they needed to take care of this. Three different things. That's the institutional failure. The technical failure was different and you can see it here. This is a New York Times article. Hopefully, they can push play so you can see.

It's a 3D article. If they can't make it play, you'll have to watch it on your own. Here we go. But the reason I want you to see this isn't to talk about details of exactly how this collapsed. It turned out the pool deck was exposed to saltwater air. It corroded. The pool deck collapsed into the basement, which took out the structural columns and the building came down. But what I want you to take away from this is the New York Times and its investigative team had excruciating detail about how this happened, which comes from doing primary investigative work.

There were four other parallel investigations that happened. The NIST is the National Institute of Standards and Technology. After 9-11, they were assigned as a federal agency to go investigate what happens in a building collapse. These two individuals, Metrini, Reisner and Bell, would spend five years on this. Alan Kilshimer is the wolf of building collapses. He's who you call when you want to figure out what happened. The town of Surfside hired him. Judge Randall would convene a grand jury in the state of Florida to investigate this. There were 17 victim lawsuits which got put under a single class. Tropen was the litigant and Hansman was the judge that did that. All of these different groups were doing investigations on their own, sometimes running into each other, sometimes helping each other out, but all trying to get at what caused the failure.

One particularly heroic group was the Miami Herald. They had just gone through bankruptcy. They had a new executive editor named Monica Richardson, but they went after this hard. The beat reporter, Alan Leibowitz, was on the scene within two hours. Sara Blaski would lead an investigative team. They would eventually find Dawn Lehman, who is a professor at the University of Washington, and she would join the team. They would staff up to 37 people on this. They have a 3D model that's equally impressive to the New York Times one. They would deservedly win a Pulitzer Prize for the work that they did. When they won it, Monica Richardson, the executive editor who also won an award for executive editor of the year from her peers, said we will continue to investigate the collapse to find answers to how this happened, to ensure a tragedy like this never happens again. Now, finding the failure cause doesn't help if you don't prevent. This is a list of some of the changes that went into all the condominium rules in Florida. And thankfully, multiple other states, especially coastal states, adopted them. So you have change that causes prevention. That's what you want to have happen when these things happen. 737 MAX crash. Unfortunately, there were two crashes, October 2018 and March 2019 For those of you who don't know what happened, let me give you the really short version. Airbus had come out with a plane that was incredibly fuel efficient and they were starting to take share from Boeing. Boeing wanted to respond. If they built a new plane, it required tons of hours of teaching and training, and that makes it harder to sell. So, they decided they would attach a fuel efficient engine to an old plane, the 737 That's how you get the name 737 MAX. The problem is the engine was too big and they had to move it forward on the wing. When you move it forward on the wing, the plane is imbalanced. And they had this problem during test flights when it would occasionally tip up. So they wrote a piece of software, secret software called MCAS, MCAS, and they put it in there without telling anybody. And if the sensor went off and told them the plane was tipping up, the autopilot would push it down. The poor pilot that was flying the Ethiopian airwaves flight, his sensor malfunctioned. The software thought that the plane was tilting up and it pushed it into the ground. That's what happened.