Ep11. Coatue Conference Recap, Tesla & ISS Controversy | BG2 with Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner

**Bill Gurley** (0:00)
He implied, you tell me if I got this wrong, he implied that in the modern era, you need to be $10 billion to go public.

**Brad Gerstner** (0:08)
Yeah.

**Bill Gurley** (0:08)
Market cap.

**Brad Gerstner** (0:09)
Yes.

**Bill Gurley** (0:10)
Which, if it's $10 billion or bust, that's a bitch, man. Yeah.

**Brad Gerstner** (0:28)
Hey, man.

**Bill Gurley** (0:29)
How are you doing, Brad?

**Brad Gerstner** (0:30)
It's good to be here. It's like a destination podcast here in Santa Barbara.

**Bill Gurley** (0:34)
This is our first destination podcast. We're coming to you live from Coatue's East Meets West 2024 conference.

**Brad Gerstner** (0:42)
Indeed, were you up or down last night?

**Bill Gurley** (0:44)
I did okay. And you?

**Brad Gerstner** (0:47)
It was a good night, it was a good night.

**Bill Gurley** (0:50)
Hopefully, they don't think we were the ringers at the time.

**Brad Gerstner** (0:54)
Well, tell the audience a little bit about what is East Meets West? It's a really gracious invitation. We've been doing this for years with Coatue down here. Why don't you tell us a little bit about it?

**Bill Gurley** (1:05)
Yeah, so Phillipe and Thomas Laffont, who run Coatue, started a conference, I'm gonna guess about eight or nine years ago, titled East Meets West. And at the time, it was really about bringing together entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley and the West with entrepreneurs from China. And some of my best relationships with some of the smartest, coolest, tippest Chinese entrepreneurs came here.
And the access was just unbelievable. It's literally once in a lifetime opportunity. And they've kept the conference up. It's on my list of must-attends.
You get a combination of incredible founders, some great CEOs, Sachin Nadella is here, Dara is here, Andrew from EA is here.
And it's one of those conferences, like when I entered the industry years ago at Agenda, the Agenda Conference, which Stuart Alsop ran, Larry Ellison and Bill Gates and Scott McNeely would stay through the conference. So they're around. Today, most conferences, the keynotes come in and go out. Here, everyone stays. And so it's more intimate. You learn more, you get to talk to more people. They do a lot of these one-on-ones where they set it up so that you can maximize individual connection. It's just incredible. Anyway, I'm super thankful to them for having us down and for letting us do this here.

**Brad Gerstner** (2:33)
It's a big investment. It's a big investment by them. And I think one of the things that's underappreciated outside of Silicon Valley is there's this view that this is all zero-sum, right? That I win, you lose. You know, we're all very competitive. We all like to win, whether we're playing poker, whether we're playing hoops, whether we're doing this. But really, I think, like, this is a demonstration of positive sum.
The fact of the matter is we're all analysts. We're trying to figure out the future. And what I deeply appreciate, you know, with you, with the guys at All In, when you come to an event like this, it's a lot of conversation about this future, about the consequence on the economy. We're gonna be talking to Larry Summers tonight about, you know, about that question, about the consequence on society from AI, which we're gonna be talking about a little bit today.
You know, but when you really telescope out over the last 20 years that you and I have been doing this, technology is going from 5% to 15% of global GDP, right?
And we're gonna talk about public markets and venture markets, but the reality is there's a very big pie, you know, and we can all participate in that together. And so, you know, to me, this is a reflection. I see a lot of old friends, you know, this place is full of GPs, it's full of venture capitalists. You know, a lot of people would think of Altimeters as a competitor to Coatue. But the fact of the matter is you and I collaborate with them on a ton of stuff. Some of it works, some of it doesn't work, but we trust each other. We have a shorthand with one another. So it's great to be back down here. And like I said, thanks to, you know, Phillipe and Thomas for encouraging us to do the pod down here. I think it's a perfect setting.
But, you know, I thought one of the things we could do is set up for people, like what goes on here and just kind of take them through it a little bit, right?

**Bill Gurley** (4:16)
Sounds great.

**Brad Gerstner** (4:17)
So as you said, there's a couple of hundred founders, CEOs and GPs.