Bill Gurley

Like the people that are best at it are students of it, like constantly studying it.

And by the way, if you have that mindset and you make a wrong investment or someone invests in a company that you said no to, it triggers in your brain, oh, shit, I've got something else to learn.

And that creates anxiety.

Oh, I got to go understand why that smart investor thought differently than I did.

So that it all goes back to that like infinite curiosity in your field.

Thanks for having me on.

So I spent 25 years as a venture capitalist and the four years before that as a sell-side analyst on Wall Street.

And through that process, I started writing as a way to differentiate myself.

And so I was an early blogger.

It was actually a fax, that's how old I am, when I started.

And I got in the habit of, when I had ideas, jotting them down and then either developing them.

A lot of them ended up just undeveloped, but if I developed them, they would become a blog post.

And there was a period in my career where I was reading a ton of biographies.

And I finished this third one and saw a through line with these other two from people that were in wildly different fields.

And I jotted those notes down.

And that thing kind of

simmered and breathed and took on a little bit of a life.

And I got asked by the dean of the business school here in Austin, University of Texas, to talk to the MBA class one day.

And I was like, can I do this?

And he said, sure.