Who is on this subjectordered by the date of their first quote here
1 of 2 lane rests on fewer than 5 quotes and is marked thin. Offsets are days from the middle first-quote date, 11 Jun 2011 — a date, and nothing else. It is not a claim about who reached a view first.
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Bill Gurley
108
11 Jun 2011 – 11 May 2026
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David Friedberg
1
thin
23 Jun 2026 – 23 Jun 2026
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The chronologysourced and dated, oldest first
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Bill Gurley
Gurley argues organic versus bought traffic is a critical distinction for valuing Internet businesses.
“One that one that I think people really should focus on is where, especially for these Internet businesses, is whether traffic is organic or bought.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley distinguishes between companies that buy traffic through marketing versus those with organic customer acquisition.
“Any company that's spending heavily on marketing to drive people in, that's just a far different value proposition than someone who has a product that's so good that everyone comes to it.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley lists Google, Skype, OpenTable, and LinkedIn as examples of companies that never ran ads to grow.
“Google never ran marketing ads, you know, in its day to get to get big. Skype never ran ads. OpenTable never ran ads. Linkedin doesn't run ads.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley contrasts Google, Skype, OpenTable, and LinkedIn as examples of organic growth versus companies renting customers through marketing.
“Skype never ran ads. OpenTable never ran ads. Linkedin doesn't run ads. People that are having to spend heavily on marketing are basically renting or borrowing customers.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley argues daily deal business value is inversely tied to platform rake, like a casino.
“The thing that strikes me about the deal business is that the value to the customer is a direct function of the rake of the platform or the margin the platform maker takes.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley argues daily deal platforms with lower take rates will inevitably attract more customers than high-rake competitors.
“In other words if you had a casino on one side of the street that took a 50% rake and another one on the other that took a 10% rake, eventually all the customers are gonna go to where the rake's 10%. Right?”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley predicts Facebook or Google could offer better daily deals by taking lower rake.
“So if we see a Facebook or a Google offering a much lower rake to participate, I think it's inevitable that they have better offers.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley names Grubhub as a Benchmark investment illustrating the cloud opportunity for small business.
“Grubhub is a great example. Grubhub? You probably haven't heard of this company. It's one of our investments.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley describes cloud-connected workflows from business to consumer through apps as unexploited white space across verticals.
“Once it's in the cloud, they connect to Zillow, they connect to rent.com, they push the listings out, they communicate with the end user of the apartment, and so this workflow that starts to be connected from the cloud to the small business, to the consumer, to the smartphone app, that's all white space in a bunch of different verticals.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley lists five portfolio companies connecting small businesses online and reports seeing strong current interest from SMBs.
“we have a number of investments from Yelp to OpenTable to Zillow to Grubhub to UberCab, where all these companies build this technology to connect these small businesses, and we're seeing unbelievable interest from these small businesses in in being online and having an online presence.”
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“I think that creates, I think it should create a rather healthy M and A market, but I also think it helps create opportunities because you know, you look at the Yelp and OpenTable integration with Apple, you know, if there were only one monolith and there weren't five, that probably doesn't happen.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley describes GrubHub's track-your-grub feature as example of smartphone-enabled marketplace workflow innovation.
“You'd never done it before. And then a few weeks ago, we released a product called track your grub.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley observes marketplace companies invest equally in supplier workflow systems as in consumer-facing products.
“Lot of my marketplace companies that I'm working with are spending as much R and D money on systems, workflow systems for the supplier side as they are on the consumer side.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley explains Uber was impossible before smartphones due to cost of installing embedded systems in cars.
“You're not going to go install 700 embedded systems designs in every car and the wireless and build the contracts. You're not going to do all that.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley cites DP Review, a one-person digital camera review site acquired by Amazon for forty to seventy million dollars.
“One guy, one founder and Amazon reported, you know, no one knows the exact number but I've heard anywhere from 40 to $70,000,000 for a single guy.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley says embedded devices ten years ago cost $3 to $4 per pound to deploy to workers.
“If you go back ten years and you want to do something that touches all the suppliers or all the workers in a given industry, you have to basically build, spec build embedded devices, right?”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley says majority of marketplace companies spend half their R&D on B2B supplier-side systems.
“I would say the majority of our companies that serve some type of local marketplace are spending half of their R and D dollars on the B2B side of equation, the stuff you wouldn't see on the consumer side.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley calls the LTV model a house of cards where numbers can be manipulated.
“Lifetime value model, where people say, as long as we're paying below our lifetime value, cost of capital. But the numbers can be run-in a whole bunch of different ways.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley states Uber has 300,000 drivers globally and is adding 50,000 per month, the fastest job creation he knows.
“There's about 300,000 Uber drivers right now and they're adding it right now at a pace of 50,000 a month. That's on a global basis.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley argues that for eighty years we grossly underestimated transportation demand by limiting it with taxi medallions.
“The most fascinating thing for me is that for basically eighty years, we grossly underestimated the demand for transportation services. And we limited it at a city government level with the taxi medallion.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley compares late-stage private valuations to a Bernie Madoff dynamic with unaudited markups creating feedback loops.
“And I think what we see right now is a almost Bernie Madoff like dynamic where capital comes in, it gets marked up without any public scrutiny, unaudited financials.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley says 140-150 companies have valuations that wouldn't sustain in public markets.
“So we have 140 companies, 150 companies that have valuations that I think wouldn't sustain in the public market.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley warns the gap between capital deployed and liquidity returned has reached record levels without returns available.
“And the gap that's been widening between the money that's been given versus the money that's been returned in liquidity is record levels.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley states capital burn on headcount is breaking all prior records from 1999-2000 bubble.
“And so the single biggest indicator for us is that the capital being burned in the market so this is usually on headcount, mostly people, not hard assets is breaking all the prior records of 'ninety nine, two thousand.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley predicts three of next ten years' $300-500B companies will be in Silicon Valley, rest in China.
“It's also highly likely that three of them are going be in the Silicon Valley. And then the rest are in China.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley explains why targeting sales instead of HR made Salesforce wildly more successful than their HR SaaS company.
“the sales executive has a green light on any purchase in a company. The HR executive does not. They had a product where you could put it on a credit card.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley explains his HR SaaS company struggled because sales executives can buy freely but HR requires CEO approval.
“Our product required Yeah, PO and approval of the CEO for a less strategic function in his company, right? And so, know, learning learning moment.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley cites Miami rule requiring two-hour window before car pickup as example of regulation protecting incumbents against Uber.
“So regulation protects the incumbent, it makes it very hard for an entrepreneur to break in, and some of the stuff like Uber saw in Miami, there was a rule that, in several governments they had written rules that you couldn't have a car show up within a two hour window of when it was ordered.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley argues successful AI requires huge datasets on both sides for matching.
“In order to be successful and powerful in these types of areas, you need huge datasets, and you need them on both sides so that you can do the matching.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley says healthcare investing is extremely dangerous because marketplace dynamics don't apply and consumers don't pay directly.
“looking at health care, and it's extremely dangerous. It's extremely dangerous because the the laws of most, marketplaces doesn't exist. You know, there's not a simple gravity.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley says healthcare investing is extremely dangerous because marketplace dynamics don't apply and consumers don't pay directly.
“looking at health care, and it's extremely dangerous. It's extremely dangerous because the the laws of most, marketplaces doesn't exist. You know, there's not a simple gravity.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley calls healthcare marketplaces extremely dangerous with forces in five directions and misaligned incentives.
“It's extremely dangerous because the the laws of most, marketplaces doesn't exist. You know, there's not a simple gravity. There's forces in five different directions.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley calls healthcare marketplaces extremely dangerous with forces in five directions and misaligned incentives.
“It's extremely dangerous because the the laws of most, marketplaces doesn't exist. You know, there's not a simple gravity. There's forces in five different directions.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley describes Stitch Fix using machine learning and collaborative filtering to deliver items customers haven't seen yet via stylists.
“We try and learn as much as we can about the individual, and then we use machine learning and collaborative filtering, a whole bunch of algorithms that helps of our stylists, and we deliver something to you that you haven't even seen yet.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley describes Stitch Fix's approach as ultimate recommendation engine that doesn't show customers the choices.
“Our head of algorithm says it's the ultimate recommendation engine because we don't even let you look at the choices. And that level of curation is something that's highly unique,”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley claims Stitch Fix knows 10x more about customers and merchandise than competitors like Nordstrom's and Macy's.
“So you can put us up against anyone, Nordstrom's, Macy's, any of these players, and I am certain that we know 10 x more about our customers and even 10 x more about the merchandise.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley argues network effects decay as platforms scale, citing LinkedIn as an example of diminishing marginal value per user.
“Like what's the value of an incremental member joining LinkedIn? It's probably less than what the value of the 10,000 person that joined LinkedIn.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley argues network effects decay as platforms scale, with each incremental user adding less value than earlier ones.
“Like what's the value of an incremental member joining LinkedIn? It's probably less than what the value of the 10,000 person that joined LinkedIn. And so there are many, many, many nuances.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley shares his unpublished formula for evaluating network effects using value versus market penetration.
“If it's a two sided network, you could build one for the value to the supplier, one for the value to the consumer. On the x axis is your penetration into the market.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley says marketplace success requires doing unscalable things early, which frustrates most business school-trained entrepreneurs.
“And if you took 90% of the entrepreneurs that have been to business school and understand scaling, it drives them nuts.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley coined the term liquidity quality and prioritizes it over geographic breadth when evaluating marketplaces.
“And I've come up with this phrase I use internally that I made up. So I one day I'll have to write a definition of it, but I call it liquidity quality.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley introduces his concept of liquidity quality as more important than geographic breadth for marketplaces.
“So I one day I'll have to write a definition of it, but I call it liquidity quality. And I tell entrepreneurs I care way more about that than I do how broad you are.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley explains Mechanical Turk failed to show network effects because value didn't increase with supply penetration.
“Rather than say don't work, let's say didn't show signs of a network effect was Mechanical Turk that Amazon built, which was a labor marketplace for perfunctory work that could be pushed over the internet.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley explains labor marketplaces fail because 5% supply provides same customer value as 95%, preventing network effects.
“It turns out that if you get just 5% of the supply, the value you provide in customer is no different than if you get 95% of the supply.”
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“Yeah, the flow of cash and the competition and how that money is being used.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley illustrates direct listings allow any retail investor to participate at opening price, unlike IPOs.
“If you put in a bid at $380.01 from a Robinhood account and they open at 38, you're filled. That is absolutely not true in the IPO process.”
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Bill Gurley
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.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley recounts how Zappos extended payables to 90 days versus industry standard of 45 during crisis.
“And I don't remember the exact number, but he said something like 90. And having worked with Nordstrom at nordstrom.com, I knew the industry standard was like half that, like 45.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley describes direct listing as simply matching supply and demand unlike traditional IPOs.
“We have a wonderful new age alternative called the direct listing that just matches supply and demand.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley argues 5 million people choosing to drive during low unemployment disproves claims it's a bad job.
“One is, you know, 5,000,000 people committed to being drivers during the lowest unemployment in our lifetime.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley notes order matching systems existed for twenty years and corporate bonds already use supply-demand pricing.
“Let's let supply and demand matching, which, you know, unfortunately have been available order matching systems for for over twenty years.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley explains Robinhood doesn't route orders to exchanges but sells them to six companies who are their real customers.
“They sell that order to six different companies that they work with who are really their customers.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley states 64% of Robinhood revenue comes from options trading despite democratization claims.
“it's now known that 64% of their revenue comes from options trading. And so the company wants you to believe and and goes on public television and claims that their mission is to democratize investing.”
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“And I said, well, what does Airbnb have to accomplish to earn out this valuation that it has?”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley argues Google and Facebook's power led investors to wrongly believe consumer businesses are over.
“I think over the past three or four years, mainly because of the power of Google and Facebook that a lot of people have come to tell themselves that consumers over.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley reveals Benchmark is a lead investor in Upwork under Hayden Brown.
“We are actually a lead investor in Upwork. Hayden Brown's done an amazing job there the past couple of years.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley confirms Benchmark is a lead investor in Upwork and sees large opportunity in gig talent marketplaces.
“We are actually a lead investor in Upwork. Hayden Brown's done an amazing job there the past couple of years. And we see this as a big, big opportunity.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley predicts more vertical-specific talent marketplaces will emerge, fragmenting LinkedIn's horizontal model.
“People have talked about kind of, you know, the opening up of LinkedIn where people go into more specific verticals and are able to drive better outcomes, real work opportunities right away.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley contrasts InstaWORK's immediate job placement and training with traditional job listing sites like LinkedIn.
“The the the app tells you exactly where to go. The app teaches you how to do the job better before you actually show up.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley explains Instawork's app teaches workers how to do jobs before arrival, improving quality.
“The the the app tells you exactly where to go. The app teaches you how to do the job better before you actually show up. Quality goes up.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley reveals Benchmark has eight investments across different talent marketplace verticals.
“We have about eight investments in different verticals with these type of talent marketplaces. And so I I think a rising tide's gonna lift all the boats here.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley reveals Benchmark has eight investments across different talent marketplace verticals.
“We have about eight investments in different verticals with these type of talent marketplaces. And so I I think a rising tide's gonna lift all the boats here.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley explains Didi's competitive strength internationally could separately impact Uber's valuation.
“Uber also competes with DD internationally. And so whether or not this affects DD's ability to be competitive is a different force that could impact Uber's valuation.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley cites Amazon paying $3,000 and McDonald's $500 bonuses to argue drivers prefer flexible work over shifts.
“if if if these writer drivers wanted shift work, there's unbelievable opportunity out there right now. Amazon's paying $3,000 for you to become a shift worker.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley argues shift work is incompatible with parenting, school, or supplemental income needs that flexible work serves
“You can't be a stay at home parent with shift work. You can't try and be an artist and meet supplemental income. You can't pay that.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley predicts freelance work explosion as internet enables passion monetization like remote work for white collar.
“Freelance work is gonna explode because the Internet's allowing people with any passion, any special interest to to be able to monetize that on their own time, on their own will.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley claims remote work increases matching efficiency between skills and needs by two orders of magnitude
“The the ability to match as I was talking about earlier like the ability to match skill type with need goes up, you know, two orders of magnitude when you just open it up to everyone on the planet which is is a really good thing actually.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley says Second Life grew from zero to $70 million revenue in under eighteen months.
“I think the company went from 0 to 70,000,000 in revenue in less than eighteen months. And so you had this vision and excitement about what was possible.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley explains Minecraft and Roblox succeeded with simpler primitives and child demographics versus Second Life's complexity and adult focus.
“One, primitives are simpler. And so the creator tools at Second Life, you could do amazing rich things, but they were a little harder to use.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley says decentralization wasn't a limiting factor; Second Life creators were cashing out $100 million annually.
“If I made a list of 25 things that I think inhibited us from getting to a higher place, I don't think I'd put decentralization on that list.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley notes Second Life creators were cashing out $100 million annually from the platform.
“The creators were cashing out a 100,000,000 a year last time I had access to the number. So Philip gave the GMV, but they were taking out a 100,000,000.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley says tokenization's intersection with marketplace and UGC companies is remarkably nuanced and tricky.
“There's a ton of people that are thinking about tokenization and how that intersects with a marketplace company or a UGC company and a game company.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley argues tokenization with appreciating currency can provide massive advantage for marketplace bootstrapping through incentive structures.
“And so if you build the right incentive structure around your tokenization, that could be a massive advantage to an on ramp, especially if you're able to get your currency to appreciate over time.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley argues governance tokens without economic rights would be worth a small fraction of tokens with rake ability.
“I think it's a fundamental question if that term weren't in the DAO or if instead it said the community will never rake a transaction, what would that do to the value of Uniswap?”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley found Dell's return on invested capital was 20 times higher than competitors, initially unbelievable.
“Like, night and day, like, 20 to one. Wasn't even close. And in fact, it was so ridiculous.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley recalls OpenTable's CFO wanted to quit because his model capped market share at 17 percent.
“And one day I showed up early for a board meeting and and the CFO comes to me and he says, Bill, I'm I'm gonna quit.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley argues transaction models produce 10x less revenue per visit than ad models due to CAC-to-LTV dynamics.
“You're not going to get to the same revenue per visit with a transaction model that you do with the ad model, because you already mentioned CAC TV.”
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“If you build it to average, you're not gonna be able to serve your customers during the peak at all. Like, they're only gonna be disappointed.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley argues Waymo faces unsolvable dilemma: building fleet to average demand disappoints peak users, building to peak wastes expensive CapEx.
“And if you build it to peak, you're gonna have a bunch of very, very, very expensive CapEx sitting around doing nothing mostly.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley asks entrepreneurs whether value proposition to one marketplace side increases as supplier base penetrates.
“When I push entrepreneurs to think about this and it gets to your increasing marginal utility, but I just say, as you penetrate a supplier base, one side of a marketplace, whatever, is the value proposition to the other side going up?”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley tests marketplace strength by asking if value to one side grows exponentially as the other side scales.
“When I push entrepreneurs to think about this and it gets to your increasing marginal utility, but I just say, as you penetrate a supplier base, one side of a marketplace, whatever, is the value proposition to the other side going up? And ideally, it would be going up exponentially, which is super hard.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley argues increasing returns vary in strength, with some linear and some exponential, forming a scale of network effects.
“It's arguable there are levels of increasing returns. Like, you could come up with some kind of scale or index because some of them are more linear and some of them can go exponential.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley notes Zillow had exited iBuying before he returned to the company
“They had the the the kind of detour into home buying or iBuying, which is refreshing. They had exited by the time I came back. So, yeah. So there's a lot going on.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley says healthcare startups trying to monetize end up reinforcing bad system dynamics instead of changing them
“And then and then some of them end up in a place where they're actually reinforcing the bad stuff, you know, and making it worse.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley describes Matt Cohler's concept of remote control for your life with Uber as one-click ride example
“And my my partner, Matt Cola, used to call this the remote control for your life. And we would talk about Uber as a one click ride.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley says Benchmark specifically sought black car marketplace after rejecting regulated taxi market due to pricing constraints.
“And I said, look, we just need to be on the lookout for someone doing this on top of black cars.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley predicted black car marketplace would work better than taxi due to less friction before finding Uber
“Because there's going to be less friction and we're going to be able to use the tools that entrepreneurs know how to use to be successful.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley argues Google's search monetization is so superior that no Bing deal could match Apple's current economics.
“So there's no like Apple's not mad about this deal. They're very positively impacted by it.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley notes early internet startups shifted from 100% Oracle and Sun to Linux and MySQL in five years.
“Every single fucking one of them were running on Oracle and Sun. And five years later, they were all running on Linux and MySQL, like in five years.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley says Visa and Mastercard have over 60% operating margins, the highest in North American markets.
“And there's another fact that you should know in North America, which is Visa and Mastercard have the two highest operating margin percentages in our markets total. Like, they're over 60%, and something's not right.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley argues IPO pricing is fundamentally broken because bankers pick price and allocation instead of markets.
“The way that an IPO's price is so god awful stupid. They pick who gets the stock and they pick the price.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley says modern venture capitalists refuse to take meetings on anything that is not AI-related.
“There's a reality where a modern venture capitalist does not wanna take a meeting in anything on AI.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley describes how technology waves attract speculators who rush in after seeing quick wealth creation.
“One of the things that happens any time there's a technology wave is people get rich quick and then a whole bunch of people see people getting rich quick and they rush in.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley suggests we may be in an AI bubble where people are doing speculative things that don't usually work.
“When you're in a bubbly time, and we may be right now with AI, people do silly things, things that don't usually work. They get very speculative.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley argues running Google ads is the least creative, most ignorant way to acquire customers.
“I've always felt that if you're starting a business, the easiest way you could possibly get a customer, the first way the most ignorant person would assume to go get a customer would be to run a Google ad.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley describes how most venture rounds now happen proactively with investors forcing money on companies.
“Someone thinks you're doing well and knocked on the door and is force feeding you money. And that is currently the way things happen.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley notes Collison brothers suggest Stripe may never go public as VC funds tell LPs companies stay private.
“And those funds that do that turn around and tell the LPs these are the foundations and the endowments that invest in these type of things. You know, these companies aren't going public anymore.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley knew Uber was already 20 times bigger than taxi market in San Francisco contradicting professor's TAM analysis.
“I already knew in San Francisco that Uber was 20 x bigger than the taxi market.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley explains OpenTable unlocked parametric search for restaurants that was previously impossible without calling each restaurant individually.
“Before OpenTable, you could not do that. You'd have to call each one of them, and so it unlocked a consumer value proposition that didn't exist.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley argues dynamic pricing is essential for digital marketplaces and giving it up would be fatal.
“And I knew that if you wanted to create a digital marketplace, you wanna use price to to cause liquidity, to get encourage drivers to come out at the right time, like you'd hate to give up price in a digital marketplace or auction, like you never would.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley explains dynamic pricing is essential for digital marketplace liquidity and driver supply management.
“I knew that if you wanted to create a digital marketplace, you wanna use price to to cause liquidity, to get encourage drivers to come out at the right time, like you'd hate to give up price in a digital marketplace or auction, like you never would.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley told partners to pursue any company layering technology on top of black cars before seeing Uber.
“I said to my partners, if we ever see a company that's putting a layer on top of the black cars, we should run at it.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley argues network effects are easier to build when supply is fragmented rather than consolidated like Ticketmaster venues.
“Part of what I loved about both OpenTable and Uber, it's easier to build a network effect if supply is limited, I can't You know how many people have tilted against Ticketmaster and whatnot?”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley says OpenTable had the most intellectual appeal because Benchmark invested at three restaurants with a network effect thesis.
“The one that had kind of the most intellectual appeal was probably OpenTable because we invested when there were three restaurants on the network and had a theory that a network effect could take place where it could tip towards winter, take most.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley backed OpenTable with only three restaurants on the network based on network effect thesis.
“we invested when there were three restaurants on the network and had a theory that a network effect could take place where it could tip towards winter, take most.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley says Mechanical Turk network effects level out because aggregating more commodity workers does not improve quality.
“If you had 100,000, it doesn't really change the quality of the work that much.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley cites Uber shifting from burning $2B yearly to generating $10B free cash flow under Dara.
“Dara was able, I mean, Uber was burning 2,000,000,000 a year and Dara had 10,000,000,000 in free cash flow last year.”
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Bill Gurley
Gurley cites Uber shifting from burning $2B yearly to generating $10B in free cash flow through unit economics understanding.
“I mean, Uber was burning 2,000,000,000 a year and Dara had 10,000,000,000 in free cash flow last year. Being able to make that shift, it's gonna require an innate understanding of your true unit economics.”
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David Friedberg
Friedberg observes Amazon sellers are frustrated with margins Amazon takes, suggesting the company may be over-earning.
“I've been involved in a number of businesses I've been on the board of and I see the margin that Amazon takes for seller from sellers and everyone's frustrated about it.”
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