![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/Bill-Gurley-blue.jpg?w=2048\")
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When Bill Gurley enters a room, people notice. It\u2019s hard not to: He is a towering 6\u20198\u201d. And for those well-versed in tech, Gurley is one of the most famous venture capitalists of the last decade\u2014even becoming a main character in the 2022 Showtime television series on Uber, Super Pumped<\/em>, which highlighted Gurley\u2019s role as one of the first investors to back Travis Kalanick, then later a key player in pushing him out of the company.<\/p>\n But ever since Gurley and his wife, Amy, quietly sold their home in San Francisco and moved into a skyscraper in downtown Austin, Tex., he\u2019s enjoyed more anonymity than usual. And his move back to Texas, where he and his wife are originally from, has largely gone unnoticed until I heard his name thrown around a couple times last week during a trip to Austin and some journalistic sleuthing revealed he had purchased a place. That subtlety, he says, was by design.<\/p>\n \u201cMy wife and I have been talking about this for 25 years. It wasn\u2019t a statement. I wasn\u2019t making a huge California-Texas thing. Others were, and I didn\u2019t want to get caught up in that. I literally did not want to be a part of that narrative, because it wasn\u2019t the reason why,\u201d Gurley told me as we met for coffee, sitting across from one another in a red booth next to a picture on the wall with the words \u201cwe are all bums on strike.\u201d<\/p>\n Gurley rarely gives interviews these days, but he sat with me for over an hour and opened up about both leaving San Francisco a year and a half ago and stepping back at Benchmark, one of Silicon Valley\u2019s most prominent venture capital firms, where he spent more than two decades backing the likes of Uber, Grubhub, Zillow, Stitch Fix, Vudu, and a host of other companies. (Gurley excluded himself from Benchmark\u2019s tenth fund in 2020 though he still serves as a partner of previous funds, attends Benchmark meetings, and holds 10 board seats)<\/p>\n Gurley says his portfolio companies, which include HackerOne, Nextdoor, GoodEggs, and Solv, require a lot more of his attention these days in the current environment, and meetings are taking up a lot of his time. But he\u2019s dabbling in a few things in the background: Public stock investing. A book based on a speech he gave in 2019 about pursuing your dream job. He started learning guitar\u2014his \u201cCOVID hobby.\u201d And he\u2019s doing some work with the University of Texas at Austin, where he went to business school, helping them with commercializing their efforts with entrepreneurs, he says. You might also see him at ACL Live, the Continental Club, or C-Boys Heart & Soul\u2014where he frequents live shows.<\/p>\n It wasn\u2019t Austin\u2019s burgeoning tech scene that drew Gurley to Texas. In fact, he says he misses the intellectual spirit of San Francisco\u2014and the conversations that emerged when he ran into people at lunch or at dinner parties.\u00a0 \u201cEveryone talks about Austin like an entrepreneurial place, but it hasn\u2019t really delivered, I think, relative to the potential,\u201d he says. Rather, Gurley says that returning to Texas had always been an \u201cunofficial agreement\u201d between he and his wife, and he likes Austin for its restaurants, live music, and walkability. He says he now spends time with a much more diverse group of people\u2014musicians, people that own spirit brands, run hotels, or sell real estate. \u201cI find it interesting: It\u2019s just different, you know?\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n For someone as prominent as Gurley, he carries himself in a more understated manner than dozens of lesser-known investors I\u2019ve grabbed a cup of coffee with. He downplays his own success, and he pays in good, old-fashioned cash. He\u2019s curious about me, asking his own questions about where I live and about something I\u2019ve written. He never shied away from any question I asked, but he didn\u2019t volunteer anything about himself, either. I realized after our conversation that I had reached out to him on his birthday. He didn\u2019t mention it.<\/p>\n When word got out that Gurley wouldn\u2019t be part of Benchmark\u2019s tenth fund three years ago, it was notable, even though other Benchmark partners like Matt Cohler or Mitch Lasky have also stepped back in recent years. At 57 years old, with a slew of successful exits behind him, Gurley had the kind of track record that would have welcomed him riding out the next 20 years and taking a paycheck from new funds. But Gurley tells me he wasn\u2019t interested.<\/p>\n \u201cWithout naming names, I think there are VCs that have hung around too long, you know? I didn\u2019t want to be that person. Does that make sense?\u201d he says.<\/p>\n And particularly because of Benchmark\u2019s unusual structure relative to other firms\u2014an equal partnership where all partners have an identical cut of each fund\u2019s management fees and profits\u2014it didn\u2019t feel right for Gurley to keep earning his share if he wasn\u2019t going to be doing his share.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cThe venture business, if you want to be at the top, requires insane, remarkable hustle\u2026 You have to live in fear that the next Google is going to get funded by a firm that\u2019s not yours,\u201d he says. \u201cEither you\u2019re in there rowing as hard as you can, because we\u2019re all a team, or you\u2019re not.\u201d<\/p>\n That said, he still has strong instincts about the future of tech. \u201cIf I were still active as a venture capitalist, I\u2019d be looking at a lot of the vertical applications of A.I. I look at the coding stuff, and it\u2019s insane\u2026 If you\u2019re not using it, I think you\u2019re probably writing your own death certificate as a programmer, because people are going to be so much more efficient. And the question is: What are other applications that have that kind of productivity boost or lift, and I think people are trying to figure that out.\u201d<\/p>\n But in the end, it was a book by Steve Martin, Born Standing Up<\/em>, that helped convince Gurley it was time to step back. \u201cOne day, [Martin] is in Vegas and he comes out, and the top row is empty, the first time he\u2019s ever seen the top row empty. He quits the next day\u2014never does standup again. And then he goes off and he does his banjo and his theater and his acting.\u2026 Like I said, I don\u2019t think I ever played the stage, so I\u2019d rather not say I\u2019m the same. It influenced me. That notion influenced me.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n #Legendary #Bill #Gurley #opens #stepping #Benchmark #act<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When Bill Gurley enters a room, people notice. It\u2019s hard not to: He is a towering 6\u20198\u201d. And for those well-versed in tech, Gurley is one of the most famous… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2677,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[4665,2023,4660,1530,4661,4663,4662,3150,4664,568],"class_list":["post-2676","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-finance-news","tag-act","tag-austin","tag-benchmark","tag-bill","tag-bill-gurley","tag-gurley","tag-legendary","tag-opens","tag-stepping","tag-venture-capital"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2676"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2676\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2677"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2676"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2676"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fintechpulse8.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\nAn empty top row<\/strong><\/h2>\n