Bill Gurley: Searching for Feynman

Silicon Valley royalty, legendary investor, Bill Gurley. Track record's incredible. The legend who backed Uber and Zillow, who's lived through every major tech cycle for over twenty five years. You're not just a commentator. Right? You've been an operator. I'd love to unlock this latent human potential. There's been no time in the history of the world where you can learn faster. You can increase your surface area for luck. I'm not a big fan of these dystopian narratives. The thing to do right now is to run as fast as you can. Please welcome Bill Gurley. It's good to be here again. Three years ago, I gave a talk on regulatory capture and this group was quite kind in how they reacted and how that video was promoted and I'm very happy we got that word out into the public discourse. Obviously, today you hear it quite a bit. I have a different topic I'm gonna talk to you about today. It's not I'm not gonna talk about AI. It's a serious topic and so there might not be as many fun joke parts in it, but it's something that's been weighing on my mind for the past five or six years, and I'm thankful that the team here allowed me to come to talk to you about it, and I'm hopeful that we can have an impact by getting the word out on this as well. I'm going to start by talking to you about some catastrophes that have happened in the world and how humans normally respond to them. This is the Chamberlain Towers in Surfside, Florida. You may remember in June 2021 when the building suddenly collapsed, ninety eight people died. What happened? There were design areas from the very beginning, there's poor maintenance schedule, and then the the board of the condominium did not listen to an inspection report that said they needed to take care of this. Three different things. That's kind of the institutional failure. The technical failure was different and you can see it here. This is a New York Times article, hopefully they can push play so you can see. It's a it's a three d article. If if if they can't make it play, you'll have to watch it on your own. Here we go. But the reason I want you to see this isn't to talk about the details of exactly how this collapsed. It turned out the pool deck was exposed to saltwater air, it corroded, the pool deck collapsed into the basement which took out the structural columns, and the building came down. But what I want you to take away from this is the New York Times and its investigative team had excruciating detail about how this happened, which comes from doing primary investigative work. There were four other parallel investigations that happened. The NIST is the National Institute of Standards and Technology. After nine eleven, they were assigned as a federal agency to go investigate …