Bill Gurley

If you're lucky enough to be in one of these hot companies and you're in the middle of this whole world that we talked about, I would offer a couple of things.

One, unit economics will matter one day.

And that doesn't mean you have to sharpen the pencil right now.

Like I said, the two generation old models cost one one hundredth the token.

You can plan that we're going to move to that.

It's fine.

I think that's fine to have a burn rate, but the unit economics will eventually matter.

You'll eventually have to scale the company up and operate in an efficient, productive way.

And I think when you have these all-out battles, you can get lost.

And I found a lot of founders think about certain elements of operating prowess as red tape.

They think, oh, that's what big companies do.

That's bureaucratic.

That's not why we're here.

But as you grow and get over 100 million and get to a billion in revenue, you just can't operate.

And this is advice in any cycle, really.

But it gets accentuated here because the amount of capital.

One of my favorite pieces that Reid Hoffman ever wrote, he wrote about Uber, this pirate Navy metaphor where he said, all startups are born as pirates, but they eventually have to become a Navy.

And that's true.

I think it's an uncomfortable transition for some, but you have to figure out a way to do it.

Another thing that comes to my mind related to that, there was also a great blog post that I think Ben Horowitz wrote about.