Bill Gurley

I really hate to think about every one of the next generation of general partners having every company live through what...

was on the field in the Uber Lyft situation because you go into a board meeting and the other company raises another billion.

The thinking that you're forced to do at the table, well, should we go negative gross margin for two more years and take market share?

You're not going to find it in a Harvard case study.

I'll tell you that.

It is a unique set of cards to be playing.

And it's super high stakes poker with strategies that you're not going to read about them in good to great.

This isn't how people who traditionally ran companies and made them great.

All the stuff you read in every Buffett letter will not apply in that world of capital competition.

Well, this would probably be the last point that I'd love to drive home and then we can just talk broadly about the situation.

But you asked a provocative question at the very beginning of the podcast early on.

You said, could the LP liquidity issue be a catalyst of some kind that causes this world to change?

And there are a lot of things pressing at that.

Time is a problem, as we've already talked about, and they've been putting debt in place.

There's broad talk in Washington about endowment taxes, which drive more liquidity requirements for these endowments.

And it's something they've never had before.

You have the research cuts, not just the aggressive stuff at Harvard, but even the research cuts on the normal NIH and NSF grants.

What was that extra part where they cut it from 60 to 10, the overhead or whatever?

is going to cause the universities to tell their endowment, instead of 3%, we need 5% or we need 6% a year.

So those things are the kind of things that could push