He’s backed the unicorn likes of Grubhub, Liveops, Nextdoor, OpenTable, and even Uber.
And, as McKinsey explains, highly-respected venture capitalist Bill Gurley “has often been a voice of reason amid Silicon Valley overexuberance and has tweeted regularly in 2022 about the need for start-ups to be realistic about the current economic environment.”
Many headlines (here, here, and here) have emerged about the great 2022 slowdown of venture capital, despite the fact that many firms still have plenty of money to invest. According to Gurley, realism doesn’t always add up to pessimism, and as he explains to McKinsey, it might actually be a great time to launch a start-up.
The VC recently sat down with McKinsey Quarterly for an interview as part of their series, The Quarterly Interview: Provocations to Ponder, to discuss the current anxieties of Silicon Valley, hybrid work, and what has changed in the West Coast tech scene.
Here are some highlights from the interview.
On tech’s current vibe
I have two things in the back of my mind that relate to start-ups and the start-up ecosystem.
First, Stephen Covey used to talk about your circle of influence, and Buffett talks about your circle of competence. Macro things are not things that start-ups can impact or control. So there’s not much reason for them to affect your thoughts about whether you would start a company or not. They might add anxiety, but I don’t know that they have any real impact… The truth is that if you’re going to build something from scratch, this might be as good a time as you’ve had in a decade.”
On hybrid work
The number-one thing people at start-ups worry about is missing out on serendipity—just some random conversation between two people who were out visiting a customer and then said, “Oh, wait, what if we did this?” and it becomes critical to the company’s success. That’s far more likely in a start-up than in a big company. But, ultimately, hybrid is really a founder-centric decision.
On lessons learned from past downturns
The collective venture community needs to get its head around the new reality as fast as possible. The more people see what’s really going on, the quicker that will happen. In ’09, the response to the downturn was pretty swift. But you had the benefit that ’01 was only seven or eight years in the rearview mirror. While there’s still some institutional memory around the Valley, it’s been a very long time since 2009.
On the most promising tech trends
For me, personally—I’m not speaking for my firm—I’m most motivated by all this stuff we’ve been talking about around hybrid and the fact that I can hire someone from around the globe instead of 20 miles from my office. Think about the productivity and innovation unlock that that might create.
