Bill Gurley

But once those stablecoin companies become big, will they turn around and use regulatory capture against the next one?

Probably.

I think regulatory capture in the U.S.

is a huge problem, unrelated to whether Silicon Valley is a part of it or not.

A skeptic would push back on you, Ed, and say OpenAI and Anthropic came out of nowhere and they're already huge.

Someone, I think, could even make the argument that they may have done to their host what Microsoft did to IBM.

It's not clear to me that owning a piece of the thing protects you against disruption.

right?

And there's a chance that they've already birthed these two companies into a place where they're going to turn around and be disruptive to the people that gave them the money.

I think that's possible.

If you separate those two things and just look at maybe the MAG-7 pre-AI and look at how big they got, I've talked to a few people in the public policy world that look at

that type of problem.

And I do kind of think that breaking stuff up is the better alternative to trying to regulate them.

Because when they regulate them, you know, the incumbents help write the regulations.

I think it just further ensconces them

There was a period where they broke up AT&T and disqualified their patent portfolio.

And that birthed all kind of innovation.

I think that had Microsoft not been under threat in the late 90s, you may not have seen Amazon or Google or a lot of companies you may not have seen.

if they had been allowed to push through the browser the way they had moved up the app stack.

They were certainly capable of it, but there was a ring fence put around the browser.