Guide Note

Bill Gurley is a venture capitalist currently working for the firm Benchmark Capital. Before becoming an investment banker, Gurley spent four years as a research analyst on Wall Street, which included three years at investment bank CS First Boston. He has also authored Above the Crowd, a newsletter that reports on the technology sector.

Fast Facts

1. B.S. in Computer Science, University of Florida, 1989
2. MBA, University of Texas, 1993
3. Covered Dell, Compaq and Microsoft as an analyst
4. Writes the Above the Crowd newsletter
5. Invested in Jamdat, Business.com, Nordstrom.com and Shopping.com
6. Investor in the virtual world Second Life¹
7. 1995-1996: Part of the Institutional Investor All-American Research Team
8. Chartered financial analyst
9. Advisory Board, McCombs School of Business, University of Texas
10. June 19, 2008: First public blog post in over two years²

Business Week interviewed Gurley in 1997, shortly after he left Deutsche Morgan Grenfell Technology Group (DMG) as a financial analyst to become a venture capitalist for Hummer Winblad. In the article, Business Week details Gurley's past as a Division I basketball player for the University of Florida (he stands 6' 9") and his interest in technology that earned him a B.S. in engineering from the college in the late 1980s.

Gurley was at DMG when Amazon.com went public and made accurate predictions about the downturn in Netscape stock.

• Linden Labs/Second Life
• LiveOps
• Move Networks
• Nanosolar
• OpenTable
• Red 5 Studios
• Tropos Networks
• VUDU
• Zillow.com

• Avamar Technologies
• Business.com
• Crossgain
• Employease
• JAMDAT
• Nordstrom.com
• Shopping.com
• The Knot