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 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 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.”