Gurley mentions rumors of a thirty billion dollar investment from Nvidia into OpenAI and calls it a sport of kings.
“And so, there's rumors today of a $30,000,000,000 investment from Nvidia into OpenAi on top of everything they've already already raised and spent. So it it I I call it a sport of kings,”
Gurley notes seven AI coding or lawyer companies raised hundreds of millions, unlike venture capital he practiced.
“There's seven companies that have raised hundreds of millions of dollars. And that's not the venture capital I practiced.”
Gurley recalls Uber's mega-burn era had no precedent, leaving board with no mentors or case studies.
“You could take the board members from Walmart and Costco and GM and and General Electric or whatever you consider the top 10 best company, and they would have never been in this situation before.”
Gurley critiques circular deals where cloud providers fund AI companies to spend on their own services.
“Imagine you're a cloud service provider and you notice that this company, Anthropic, wants to develop this model. It's gonna cost maybe $5,000,000,000, but they don't have that money.”
Gurley says being conservative isn't realistic as seven companies each raised over $200 million in coding and legal AI.
“Because then we'll just throw out two examples, the coding space and the legal AI space. There's seven companies that have raised over $200,000,000”
“Because then we'll just throw out two examples, the coding space and the legal AI space. There's seven companies that have raised over $200,000,000 and they're all gonna mount customer acquisition strategies with those dollars.”
Gurley says most VCs are so focused on AI that non-AI companies can't raise money at any valuation.
“So you really have this massive black, white, have, have not situation where the AI companies are raising money at crazy valuations and the non AI companies can't raise money at any valuation.”
Gurley notes seven companies raised over $200M in coding and legal AI, making conservative approaches unviable.
“There's seven companies that have raised over $200,000,000 and they're all gonna mount customer acquisition strategies with those dollars.”