Bill Gurley
Bill Gurley has spent over 10 years as a General Partner at Benchmark Capital. Prior to Benchmark, Bill was a partner with Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.
Before entering the venture capital business, Bill spent four years on Wall Street as a top-ranked research analyst, including three years at CS First Boston focusing on personal computer hardware and software. His research coverage included such companies as Dell, Compaq, and Microsoft, and he was the lead analyst on the Amazon IPO. In both 1995 and 1996, Bill was a member of the Institutional Investor All-American Research Team.
Prior to his investment career, Bill was a design engineer at Compaq Computer, where he worked on products such as the 486/50 and Compaq’s first multi-processor server. For the past fifteen years, Bill has authored the Above the Crowd blog which focuses on the evolution and economics of high technology businesses.
Current Investments and Board Seats: Demandforce, GrubHub, Linden Lab/SecondLife, LiveOps, NextDoor, OpenTable (IPO: OPEN), Scale Computing, Tropos Networks, Uber, Ubiquiti Networks (UBNT), and Zillow.com (IPO: Z).
Previous Investments: Avamar Technologies (acquired by EMC), Business.com (acquired by R.H. Donnelley), Clicker (acquired by CBS), Employease (acquired by ADP), JAMDAT (IPO: JMDT; acquired by Electronic Arts), Nordstrom.com (acquired by Nordstrom), Shopping.com (IPO: SHOP; acquired by eBay), The Knot (IPO: KNOT), and Vudu (acquired by WalMart).
Other Affiliations: Advisory board of the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas. Board member at KIPP Bay Area Schools.
Education: MBA from the University of Texas, 1993; and a BS in computer science from the University of Florida, 1989. Chartered Financial Analyst.