Bill Gurley

I want to walk through a handful of market realities as I see them.

So in the first part, I don't really want to think too much about analysis, but just highlight a bunch of things that if you're in the VC market, and by the way,

I think what we're going to talk about is important to VCs.

It's important to founders.

It's important to LPs, anyone that touches the ecosystem.

This is super high level stuff.

So let me walk through the realities and then you and I can chat back and forth about some of the interpretations.

So the first thing I would just bring up, which people have talked about, so I'm just putting it on the table as one of the key variables, not trying to overanalyze it, which is the continued rise of the mega VC fund.

When I first started, everything was bespoke.

Most of the well-branded funds were focused on early stage.

They didn't participate in late stage.

And the funds were modest compared to today.

Today, many of the branded firms, I think, have moved from maybe...

500 million commitment every three or four years to 5 billion.

So 10x.

And they're participating very actively in what we would call late stage.

Although I've always thought late stage was a euphemism for big check.

There are people willing to put 300 million in an AI company that's 12 months old.

So that's not late stage.

It's just big check.