Ep19. State of Venture, AI Scaling, Elections | BG2 w/ Bill Gurley, Brad Gerstner, & Jamin Ball

**Brad Gerstner** (0:00)
If you're on a run rate where you're raising 5 billion bucks every two years, so give or take, that's $50 billion over a 10 year period of time. A 2% on 50 billion, it's a billion.

**Bill Gurley** (0:13)
A billion a year. Let's just be clear.

**Brad Gerstner** (0:18)
So underscore that for everybody, Bill. Great to have you here. Great to see you in Austin this weekend. Congrats on 25 years of marriage.

**Bill Gurley** (0:37)
Thank you very much.

**Brad Gerstner** (0:37)
That was a really fun time. I went by J. Cal's, saw his new place, saw so many friends when I was there. Austin's really, really bumping right now.

**Bill Gurley** (0:48)
I agree.

**Brad Gerstner** (0:49)
Seriously, just an amazing number of people now calling at home. And I know that you recently took your dad, who worked at NASA, down to see the launch of Starship Five.

**Bill Gurley** (1:01)
Yeah, and I'm so grateful that SpaceX was able to make this happen for my dad's 88 And we'd been talking about getting him down there to see a launch. And they put us in this VIP section, which made it easy for him to move around. And he was just in awe. You know, I'd maybe start this discussion by telling you, on the way home from the launch, I did a search for my dad's name and NASA. And I found this document. It says, a sketch prepared by John Gurley demonstrates the spacecraft skip when entering the Earth's atmosphere. So this was hand drawn by my dad.

**Brad Gerstner** (1:37)
Come on.

**Bill Gurley** (1:38)
And if you look here, memorandum John R. Gurley to Chief Flight Operations. That's Chris Kraft. So my dad wrote this to Chris Kraft, a study of skip terrain sensitivities and allowable errors in exit conditions applicable to Apollo missions.

**Brad Gerstner** (1:56)
How cool is that?

**Bill Gurley** (1:57)
June 12th, 1963

**Brad Gerstner** (1:59)
And you just took him down to Boca Chica?

**Bill Gurley** (2:01)
He was 26 years old when he wrote that.

**Brad Gerstner** (2:04)
What's the average age of the guy who's down in Boca Chica?

**Bill Gurley** (2:07)
26 Oh, 29
Yeah. Yeah.

**Brad Gerstner** (2:11)
What was it like being down there with your pops?

**Bill Gurley** (2:13)
It was awesome. It was awesome. So I grew up in a town called Dickinson, which was near Clear Lake, and my father worked for NASA. And he worked there from very early. When they commissioned NASA, they took 50 people from NACA, I think it was called, which was on the Langley Air Force Base, and that's where he had started his career, and they moved them to Houston. So I'm a Texan probably because of LBJ's pork barrel politics.
But we grew up on a space street. Half the fathers on the street were NASA and the Apollo launches. It's just like you see in the Apollo 13 movie. You go over to someone's house if you didn't drive 16 hours to the launch. And yeah, it was just part of our lives. We had a wall in the house with all the Apollo launch things. And it was really like until he took early retirement in the late 80s, it was just part of our lives. And so to have him down there and he's...

**Brad Gerstner** (3:14)
So you went for Starship 5, the launch.

**Bill Gurley** (3:16)
Yeah. And I'd been trying to do it for a while because he's 88
And all of his former colleagues that are still alive are kind of in awe of what Elon's doing and super appreciative because for them, the space mission was something that meant a lot to them. And they kind of felt like the government quit trying. And so to see it rebirth just gets them like super excited. And of course, we were there to witness, it was very lucky that this was the one I took him to because we witnessed the booster coming back, which was...

**Brad Gerstner** (3:54)
Was it emotional for your dad?

**Bill Gurley** (3:55)
Yeah, oh, definitely.

**Brad Gerstner** (3:58)
And you look at it today, the average age at SpaceX, probably about the same age as your dad was when he wrote that.

**Bill Gurley** (4:04)
He talked about that. We went to an after party and all the SpaceX, not all of them, some of them were SpaceX employees were there. And it was a very young crowd.

**Brad Gerstner** (4:13)
Yeah, but that to me is part of the magic. Right, that believing, you can see how mission-driven they are. And we have lots of friends who work there, work there. And it's great to see America cheering for it again.