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198 points 101carl | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.208s | source
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goodriddance ◴[] No.14609529[source]
For all the future founders on HN, the lesson here is to never do business with Bill Gurley. He's one of the reasons AngelList exists. I hope his lesser known reputation finally catches up with him and forces him out of Benchmark and out of the VC industry entirely.

The Ravikant v. Tolia (and Bill Gurley) Lawsuit: http://blog.ericgoldman.org/personal/archives/2005/02/ravika...

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1. snarf ◴[] No.14610712[source]
Exactly this. For those who weren't around in the first dot com bubble, he has a certain reputation which he has managed to bury. Benchmark used to be a much bigger firm back then, and due to poor fund performance, they had to scale back and "reboot" the firm. Along the way, he managed to bury his lesser know reputation. This was critical to getting deal flow in the current investing environment which is much more founder friendly given the increased availability of capital and competition for deals. Tolia also managed to rehab his reputation after lying about completing his Stanford degree and working for McKinsey (and teaming up with Gurley to screw over his other Epinions cofounders). He's now running NextDoor with significant investment from Gurley.