Ep13. Silicon Valley’s Political 180, META AI, COVID Postmortem | BG2 w/ Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner

**Bill Gurley** (0:00)
And instead of a $250 marginal cost to implement a rural broadband, we're going to get f***ing bulldozers out and drop fiber lines to a ranch in the middle of nowhere. It's stupid.

**Brad Gerstner** (0:26)
Hey, man, good to see you.

**Bill Gurley** (0:27)
Good to see you.

**Brad Gerstner** (0:28)
I mean, so much for Selling May and Go Away. This summer's been nuts. You've got a near assassination of the president. The head of the Secret Service resigns.
Biden withdraws under pressure from Pelosi. Kamala has all the delegates. Now she's the presumptive nominee. She raises 80 million bucks the day Biden drops out of the race.
It really seems to overshadow everything else. I mean, I don't know that-

**Bill Gurley** (0:52)
Well, how's that inconsistent with Selling Go Away? Wouldn't that have been a good strategy or wasn't it a good strategy?

**Brad Gerstner** (0:57)
No, the markets are actually doing pretty fine given the background and the context here, but it's just trying to stay on top of the events. Our group chat has been exploding. I find myself 50 to 100 chats behind every time I open the app just because of all the political activity going on. Of course, we don't talk a lot about politics on this pod. We want to talk about business.
But we also look at this debate going on about Silicon Valley.
The Washington Post reported Silicon Valley realignment leading tech titans to back Trump. You've been here a long time. Silicon Valley's really been dominated by the Democratic Party. It's been perceived as pro-business and pro-tech enough. It's been perceived as fairly moderate on social policies. But just in the last few weeks, leading traditionally Democratic supporters, Ben Horowitz, Mark Andreessen, Elon, who've supported a lot of Democrats in the past, have come out in support of Trump.
What's changed? Why all of a sudden have people in Silicon Valley that have traditionally supported Democrats, why are they moving to Trump?

**Bill Gurley** (2:07)
And I might even say, like if I go back to when I joined, and I mentioned this a bit in the talk I gave at All In on regulatory capture, I think I might even describe Silicon Valley as apolitical back then. There just wasn't, sure some people would say, yeah, I vote Democrat, but there wasn't any discussion of it within the ecosystem, within the industry while you're at a meeting that relates to a startup. It just didn't come up. The title of my speech was 2,851 miles, which is the distance Washington is from here. Ironically, it's about as far away as you could possibly be in the United States, which I think was helpful, as I said.
All of a sudden now though, you've had those people you mentioned come out in a way that's very provocative.
I think it's provocative not only that they're coming out in favor of Trump, but it's provocative that they stepped out in this way. Now, Ben and Mark foreshadowed this quite a bit, at least by 30 days or so. Obviously, their firm's been getting bigger and bigger and bigger, multi-stage, multi-industry like specialized funds. As you move into things that they've been moving into, crypto, defense tech, you're getting into heavily regulated industries. You're going to bump up against this more and you're going to think about policy more. If you listen to what they do on their podcast and if you listen to what they write in their blog post, that trend has been going on for a while. It's not like just came out of nowhere. They've been talking about policy.
They went through in their podcast, which I think is a must listen.

**Brad Gerstner** (4:00)
It was great on this issue.

**Bill Gurley** (4:02)
On this Trump's... But they didn't just throw down and walk away. They threw down and talked about it for 90 minutes.

**Brad Gerstner** (4:07)
Exactly.

**Bill Gurley** (4:08)
And it's very clear, and this was in their foreshadow piece as well, that they're looking after the interests of their constituents and their business.
And I don't think there's anything wrong with that. They have people they represent that are counting on them, all their LP base, their employee base, the entrepreneurs they've backed, and all the piece of foreshadow that said, we're going to get more involved in politics and we're going to look after, they called it little tech, which you might describe as entrepreneurs who want to break through and be disruptive. They're looking after that constituency because that's endemic to everything that they do in work.

**Brad Gerstner** (4:49)
No, I think to be fair, they believe like both you and I believe, and I think most people in Silicon Valley believe that, in fact, they talk about this triangle, which is technology is the great source of American advantage. It drives our economy, which is the strongest in the world, which is a great source of advantage, which allows us to have a superior military because both technology that we invent is leveraged by our military and we have the financial resources to invest. That leads to American global leadership.