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General Partner, Benchmark Capital
By day, Bill Gurley is a venture capitalist at Benchmark Capital.
Quicklinks
Recent Posts
- My Life With Bing
- Why Facebook Clearly Belongs in the 10X Revenue Club
- On Google, Growth, Pricing Power, and Valuation Multiples
- Virtual Goods, Accounting, and the Power of the "Rental" Model
- Android or iPhone? Wrong Question
- Google Redefines Disruption: The "Less Than Free" Business Model
- Want To Know More About the Future of Internet TV?: Let’s Look to Korea
- What Is Really Happening to the Venture Capital Industry?
- A Real Time Free Vs Fee Example: Rosetta Stone vs. LiveMocha
- More IPO News, Ancestry.com Files S-1
- Counter-Point to Calacanis on Yahoo-Microsoft Deal
- I Do Not Believe that Zappos Was "Forced" to Sell
- Bill Gurley on the "Free" Business Model
- Government Debt for Startups? Not Such a Great Idea
- A Really Interesting Online Education Company in Korea: Megastudy
- Will Apple Make an Actual Television? Makes Sense to Me
- Bill Gurley's Online Video Market Snapshot
- Second Life: Second Most Played PC Title, #1 in Minutes/User
- Swine Flu: Overreaction More Costly Than the Virus Itself?
- Note To Timothy Geithner: Do Startups & Venture Capitalists Really Need...
Archives
- April 2012 (1)
- February 2012 (1)
- 2010 (3)
- 2009 (28)
- 2008 (2)
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- External (35)
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Posted: Thursday 19 April 2012
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For the past two months, I changed the default search engine on my browser (ironically Chrome) from Google to Bing. I have used Bing almost exclusively for this period, and have two quick conclusions. 1) With regards to core search, the Bing results were perfectly fine. I never struggled to find anything. I never forced [...]
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Posted: Thursday 2 February 2012
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Attached are my quick thoughts on the Facebook S-1 along with some quick stabs at valuation. As a quick disclosure, Benchmark Capital has a minority position in Facebook as a result of the acquisition of FriendFeed, a company that was incubated in our offices. I thought it would be useful to look at Facebook using [...]
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Posted: Friday 16 July 2010
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Last night, Google reported financial results for the second quarter of 2010. While revenue growth was up 24% year over year, revenue was fairly flat compared with Q1 of 2010. Moreover, earnings fell short of average street estimates sending Google down $20 per share (4%) in the aftermarket. Based on current estimates (which might change [...]
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Posted: Tuesday 9 February 2010
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American journalists and corporate executives have been slow to appreciate the beauty, brilliance, and consumer allure of the virtual goods business model.It’s not that they did not have data points - China is chock full of multi-US$billion market capitalization companies that are based on this business model. That said, many luddites predicted it was an [...]
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Posted: Tuesday 5 January 2010
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[Follow Me on Twitter]
In a recent New York Times article, Kathryn Huberty, a Morgan Stanley analyst was quoted suggesting that Apple’s iPhone is the key catalyst for an important new technology trend. "Applications make the smartphone trend a revolutionary trend - one we haven’t seen in consumer technology for many years." This argument rings true [...]
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Posted: Friday 30 October 2009
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[Follow Me on Twitter]
I like to think of myself as an aficionado of business disruption. After all, as a venture capitalist it is imperative to understand ways in which a smaller private company can gain the upper hand on a large incumbent. One of the most successful ways to do this is to change the [...]
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Posted: Tuesday 29 September 2009
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We are clearly at a very important point in time when it comes to Internet video, especially video that is served to your television, but over the Internet (also known as "over-the-top" Internet video). Christmas of 2009 and Christmas of 2010 will mark the point in time that Internet menus began to [...]
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Posted: Monday 24 August 2009
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[Follow Me on Twitter]
Many are speculating that the year two thousand and nine represents a fundamental turning point for the venture capital industry. Some are arguing that the industry is in dire straits after years of poor performance. Others have argued that the math simply does not work for the industry’s current size. Another theory suggests that permanent challenges with the IPO market [...]
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Posted: Thursday 20 August 2009
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As I was driving to work this morning listening to NPR, it became clear to me that this "free vs fee" discussion has some legs (to listen to the NPR piece click here).
Last week, Rosetta Stone was back in the news with regards to an earnings miss as well as pulled secondary offering. Over a year [...]
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Posted: Tuesday 4 August 2009
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For those of you that get the subscription VentureWire emails, you may have noticed the subtitle today "Recent buyout-backed IPO activity is a positive sign, but don't expect any VC-funded IPOs anytime soon." It also included the equally...
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Posted: Wednesday 29 July 2009
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Jason Calacanis penned an elegant and well reasoned blog post today implying that Yahoo has committed suicide by entering into a 10-year search deal with Microsoft. I would like to make a few points explaining why I respectfully disagree with...
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Posted: Monday 27 July 2009
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There are quite a few stories circulating in the blogosphere and Twittersphere discussing the recent acquisition of Zappos by Amazon. Some of these articles have a quite sinister and devious tone, imagining some remarkable behind-the-scenes drama...
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Posted: Wednesday 15 July 2009
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I have been intrigued by the back and forth between Chris Anderson, Malcolm Gladwell, and Mark Cuban on the topic of "Free" as a strategy and business model. For those that haven't read the articles and posts, I highly reccomend them all. Here they...
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Posted: Wednesday 8 July 2009
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I have made it clear in the past that I think it is a horrible idea for the government to enter the venture business on the funding side. As I pointed out in my previous post, providing excess funding has never led to success in a new market, just...
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Posted: Wednesday 3 June 2009
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Today's New York Times has half page article on a billion dollar (US$) public Korean company named Megastudy. My partner Peter Fenton and I had the luxury of meeting with this company a few years back, and I always had hoped to find the U.S...
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Posted: Friday 29 May 2009
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There is a lot of buzz in Silicon Valley circles that Apple may be working on a actual physical television (as opposed to the set-top box product known as AppleTV). There have also been assertions by business analysts that such a product is coming...
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Posted: Monday 11 May 2009
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I recently spoke at AlwaysOn's OnHollywood conference on the subject of today's extremely dynamic online/Internet video world. Things are moving so amazingly fast that its extremely hard to predict specific outcomes. That said, I believe there are a number of critical issues to understand as we watch this market unfold over the next few years.
Here [...]
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Posted: Friday 8 May 2009
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On May 5th, Nielsen released its March numbers for the top 10 PC game titles. The number 1 spot is no surprise, with World of Warcraft from Blizzard holding a huge lead over all others. But the number two position may be a surprise to some of you, particularly with the wrath of negativism SecondLife has received in the press over the past 18 months...
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Posted: Saturday 2 May 2009
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It is reassuring to see the press take a more modulated view of the swine-flu risks, especially as it becomes clear that both deaths and incidents have been overstated in the past week. Our “instant on” media has an insatiable appetite for the scintillating story. These days, you can actually sense the disappointment in the news anchor...
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Posted: Thursday 26 March 2009
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Mr. Geithner:
In the late 1990’s, in response to the obvious financial shenanigans of large companies like Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom, Washington handed us the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. I have no idea how effective Sarbanes has been at reducing fraud (it obviously did not prevent our current economic malaise), but I do know one thing. Sarbox created a [...]
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