Bill Gurley

That has been whittled away and taken down.

And then I'd say more, if you're going to point the finger more directly, I would say the late-stage funds have come up with a pretty clever premise, which is if they can...

intercept those growth years that used to be in the public markets and keep it for themselves in an oligarchic kind of way there there's there's only a handful of these really really big funds then um then they get that growth they they get to steal that that economic upside maybe steals a strong word but but

And simultaneously with telling the founder you don't ever need to go public, they'll go around to the LP community, the endowments and foundations, and say, look, these companies are no longer going public.

If you want exposure to those growth years, guess who you need to give money to?

you know, me.

And so it becomes self-reinforcing and that's what's been happening.

I also, one other thing that I think, the venture industry used to go through these periods and cycles where it would get reset and people would learn that you're taking too much risk and you'd get wiped out.

From like 01 to 08, the number of venture capitalists got cut in half.

I think we were headed towards a correction like that coming off the ZERP years, the zero interest rate period.

And right when it was about to be a correction, this AI wave took off and the money just flowed back in.

So it's almost like I felt like we missed a bit of a correction and there's just risk seeking dollars everywhere.

The thing that would cause it to stop is if somehow the money ran out.

There was fear of a endowment tax causing a liquidity crisis at some of the foundations, Harvard and

Yale, I think, got into the secondary market last year.

And so there was a sign that, oh, wait, this could cause a liquidity crunch.

And I think there's a reasonable argument, by the way, that both the commercial real estate, the venture capital, and the PE marks are all too high at all of those endowments and foundations.

But that's a whole other story.

I mean, I always give credit to Carletta Perez, who wrote this book that says that bubbles follow waves that are real.

So I disagree with this idea that, oh, it's either a bubble or it's real.