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Above the Crowd

abovethecrowd.com

Above the Crowd - By Bill GurleyAbove the Crowd | By Bill Gurley

Tech news / industryEssays / personal

’00’05’10’15’20’25
Posts
123 from 21 Oct 1996 to 3 Nov 2025
Posting
now and then (1 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://abovethecrowd.com/feed/

2025 1

  1. I Wrote a Book!!!

2022 1

  1. Venture Capital Red Flag Checklist

2021 1

  1. Customers Love Free Stuff … But That’s Not Your Problem

2020 1

  1. Going Public Circa 2020; Door #3: The SPAC

2019 1

  1. Money Out of Nowhere: How Internet Marketplaces Unlock Economic Wealth

2018 2

  1. Benchmark’s Newest General Partner Chetan Puttagunta
  2. The Thing I Love Most About Uber

2017 4

  1. “Customer First” Healthcare
  2. The Ezra Klein Show: VC Bill Gurley on Transforming Health Care
  3. Thinking of Home: Dickinson, Texas
  4. Benchmark’s New General Partner Sarah Tavel

2016 1

  1. On the Road to Recap:

2015 4

  1. In Defense of the Deck
  2. …Be Like Dave
  3. Investors Beware: Today’s $100M+ Late-stage Private Rounds Are Very Different from an IPO
  4. Uber’s New BHAG: UberPool

2014 7

  1. Meet Benchmark’s New Partner: Eric Vishria
  2. How to Miss By a Mile: An Alternative Look at Uber’s Potential Market Size
  3. Welcoming Jason Kilar, Richard Tom and the Vessel team to the Benchmark family
  4. Disrupting Finance From Above: Wealthfront
  5. HackerOne: A Superior Solution for Solving Web Vulnerabilities
  6. A Deeper Look at Uber’s Dynamic Pricing Model
  7. On Bubbles …

2013 5

  1. Stitch Fix: Reinventing Retail Through Personalization
  2. Conversion: The Most Important Internet Metric of All (Revisited)
  3. Transitioning To a Mobile Centric World
  4. Grubhub and Seamless: Effecting The Elusive Private-Private Merger
  5. A Rake Too Far: Optimal Platform Pricing Strategy

2012 11

  1. Favorite Longreads of 2012
  2. All Markets Are Not Created Equal: 10 Factors To Consider When Evaluating Digital Marketplaces
  3. Our Most Recent Marketplace Investment, DogVacay from Los Angeles
  4. The Dangerous Seduction of the Lifetime Value (LTV) Formula
  5. Social-Mobile-LOCAL: “Local” Will Be The Biggest of the Three
  6. Intuit to Acquire Demandforce for $424MM
  7. My Life With Bing
  8. Why Youth Has an Advantage in Innovation & Why You Want To Be a Learn-It-All
  9. Why Dropbox Is A Major Disruption
  10. Why Facebook Clearly Belongs in the 10X Revenue Club
  11. Thinking About Diets and Other Complex Matters

2011 6

  1. You Don’t Have to Tweet to Twitter
  2. Steve’s Jobs Remarkable Value Creation
  3. Understanding Why Netflix Changed Pricing
  4. On IPOs: If You Are Going To File, Make Sure You Price
  5. All Revenue is Not Created Equal: The Keys to the 10X Revenue Club
  6. The Freight Train That Is Android

2010 6

  1. Silicon Valley’s IPO Anxiety
  2. On Google, Growth, Pricing Power, and Valuation Multiples
  3. Google’s Acquires ITA: Will Deeper Vertical Integration Lead to Higher Revenues?
  4. When It Comes to Television Content, Affiliate Fees Make the World Go ‘Round
  5. Virtual Goods, Accounting, and the Power of the “Rental” Model
  6. Android or iPhone? Wrong Question

2009 23

  1. Google Redefines Disruption: The “Less Than Free” Business Model
  2. Want To Know More About the Future of Internet TV?: Let’s Look to Korea
  3. What Is Really Happening to the Venture Capital Industry?
  4. A Real Time Free Vs Fee Example: Rosetta Stone vs. LiveMocha
  5. More IPO News, Ancestry.com Files S-1
  6. Counter-Point to Calacanis on Yahoo-Microsoft Deal
  7. I Do Not Believe that Zappos Was “Forced” to Sell
  8. Bill Gurley on the “Free” Business Model
  9. Amazon’s AWS Strategy Becomes Clearer Every Day
  10. A Really Interesting Online Education Company in Korea: Megastudy
  11. Bill Gurley’s Comments on the IPO Market on CNBC
  12. Will Apple Make an Actual Television? Makes Sense to Me
  13. Bill Gurley’s Online Video Market Snapshot
  14. Second Life: Second Most Played PC Title, #1 in Minutes/User
  15. Swine Flu: Overreaction More Costly Than the Virus Itself?
  16. Note To Timothy Geithner: Do Startups & Venture Capitalists Really Need More Regulation?
  17. How To Monetize a Social Network: MySpace and Facebook Should Follow TenCent
  18. Looking For Work: Are You an Insurance Agent?
  19. Perfect Online Video Advertising Model: Choose Your Advertiser
  20. Just Say No to a VC Bailout – Part 2
  21. Just Say No to a VC Bailout: A Green Government Venture Fund Is a Flawed Idea
  22. Picture Proof of the Innovator’s Dilemma: SlideRocket
  23. Google Stock Option Re-pricing: Get Over It

2008 5

  1. Do VCs Help in Building a Technology Platform; Part 2
  2. Benchmark Capital: Open For Business
  3. BAILOUT what?
  4. Bleak VC Quarter? Why?
  5. Back to Blogging (maybe)…

2006 4

  1. Techdirt: The Fake Broadband Price War
  2. MMOs (MMORPGs) Continue to Rock
  3. As Wifi Grows, So Do the PR Attacks
  4. Why SOX Will Lead to the Demise of U.S. Markets

2005 8

  1. Wifi Nation…
  2. Do VCs Help in Building a Technology Platform?
  3. DVD Glut
  4. Pro-Broadband Muni Issue Goes National
  5. Texas Sets Key Precedent for Other States in Refusing to Ban Municipal Wireless
  6. Texas Two Step – Backwards
  7. The State of Texas Refuses to Block Municipal Broadband
  8. Believe It or Not: Your State Leaders May Be Acting to Slow the Proliferation of Broadband

2004 4

  1. The Revolutionary Business of Multiplayer Gaming
  2. Entrepreneurialism and Protectionism Don’t Mix
  3. All Things IP: the Future of Communications in America
  4. The Rise of Open-Standard Radio: Why 802.11 is Under-Hyped

2003 9

  1. Cleaning Up After the Ninth Circuit in an Attempt to Save the Internet
  2. Beware the Digital Hand
  3. Much Ado About Options
  4. The Comeback of the Mobile Internet
  5. In Search of the Perfect Business Model: Increasing Marginal Utility
  6. Dot-com Double Take
  7. Pay Attention to BPM
  8. Software in a Box: The Comeback of the Hardware Based Business Model
  9. 802.11 & Cellular: Competitor or Complement?

2002 1

  1. It’s Time to Put a Stop to Spam

2001 5

  1. When It Comes to Pricing Software, the Greener Grass Is Hard to Find
  2. Tapping the Internet
  3. Bye, Bye, Bluetooth
  4. The Smartest Price War Ever
  5. The Next Big Thing: 802.11b?

2000 6

  1. The End of CPM
  2. Like it or Not, Every Startup is Now Global
  3. A Return to Demand-driven Capital
  4. Can Napster Be Stopped? NO!
  5. The Most Powerful Internet Metric of All
  6. Music, Morality, and Moore’s Law

1999 2

  1. The Rising Importance of the Great Art of Storytelling
  2. The Rising Impact of Open Source

1998 4

  1. The Continued Evolution of Advertising or How To Succeed in Advertising Part II
  2. Internet Investors: Beware of the Proxy Valuation
  3. Standards: Open For Business
  4. How to Succeed in Advertising

1996 1

  1. Backhoes Don’t Obey Moore’s Law: A Story of Convergence