Gurley notes that OpenTable's two venture-backed competitors went bankrupt during the 2001 downturn, enabling OpenTable's success.
“And as a result, you know, I think there were network effects, but nowhere in the history of OpenTable success story does anyone read two companies went out of business, but that's what happened.”
Gurley suggests incumbents may be aggressively investing in AI specifically to block OpenAI and Anthropic from raising needed billions.
“And now you've got people, you know, trying to project income statements and balance sheets of these companies and they're speculating about whether they might need to raise again or not.”
Gurley warns disciplined fundraising means irrelevance when competitors each have $500M to deploy.
“Well, if you're the disciplined one and there's six players with $500,000,000 each hiring salespeople, you're not going to matter.”
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”