back to indexE81: All-In Summit: Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner on markets, downturns & investment cycles
Chapters
0:0 Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner break down the state and historical significance of 2022's market downturn
12:27 How VCs will handle capital commitments from LPs, underwriting startups in the new reality
24:14 Bull run mistakes, why VCs don't underwrite lower valuations, handling distributions
33:52 Gurley's take on WeCrashed & Super Pumped TV series, how sophisticated investors got "gaslit" by the market, influx of capital creating consumer-surplus businesses
47:54 Brad predicts the market for next year, Bill gives post-Benchmark plans
00:00:05.000 |
Brad Gerstner and Bill Gurley give it up for our guest. 00:00:27.000 |
Bill, you predicted five of the last three recessions. 00:00:41.000 |
You've sounded the alarm bell and of course you're right. 00:00:44.000 |
You've seen this movie before for all of us younger capital allocators who are experiencing it for the second or third time, 00:00:53.000 |
but you've experienced it a couple more times. 00:00:58.000 |
How does this one measure up to Great Recession, dot-com bust, '87, and the many ones we've seen in between? 00:01:08.000 |
One thing that I think is super important to put this into context, I'll try and tell this quick. 00:01:14.000 |
I had a meeting once with Howard Marks who I'd wanted to meet for a long period of time. 00:01:18.000 |
He's a famous bond investor that does a lot of writing. 00:01:22.000 |
For 15 minutes, he asked me questions about the venture industry. 00:01:32.000 |
He said, "Man, that's a really shitty industry." 00:01:35.000 |
I said, "Well, why do you say that? What do you mean?" 00:01:37.000 |
He says, "Cyclical collapse is built into the structure." 00:01:43.000 |
We have funds that are committed to that have 10 to 15 year lives. 00:01:51.000 |
You have low barriers to entry, but you have very high barriers to exit. 00:01:55.000 |
He felt that it was just systematically set up to rise and crash, rise and crash. 00:02:01.000 |
One thing that I realized coming out of that is that it doesn't happen like a sine curve, which is what we all imagine when we think of a cyclical business. 00:02:18.000 |
It's reflexive, so it grows and grows and grows and grows. 00:02:26.000 |
This cycle, risk on was from '09 to five months ago. 00:02:36.000 |
The thing that's really tough about that is it requires mental adjustment very quickly because it didn't gradually change. 00:02:53.000 |
It's not systematic issues that are stuck because too much lick prep relative to the new reality. 00:03:03.000 |
You may have, on the way up as people took more risk, you tried crazier things. 00:03:10.000 |
You're willing to make investments in businesses you might not if the cost of capital is a lot lower. 00:03:17.000 |
You name a stadium for five years as a crypto company. 00:03:24.000 |
Now the commitment to naming the stadium is greater than the market cap. 00:03:35.000 |
Just as an example, it might be a disproportionate value of your market cap. 00:03:43.000 |
In this particular case, because that's what you asked, it turns out '09 wasn't that bad. 00:03:53.000 |
We didn't really start to see liquidity again until, with a few exceptions, Elon mentioned PayPal, but '05, '06. 00:04:04.000 |
A lot of great companies were started, but a lot of founders gave up at that time, right? 00:04:09.000 |
Look, I think if you're an early-stage investor or if you're an early-stage founder that's just getting going or even an early-stage company, 00:04:18.000 |
because if you haven't scaled out yet, this price is going to go up. 00:04:20.000 |
If you haven't scaled out yet, this probably hasn't affected you. 00:04:25.000 |
Your access to talent is going to be a lot easier. 00:04:28.000 |
People are going to be more pragmatic and rational, but it's usually a long window on the other side. 00:04:33.000 |
The other challenge you have here is in '20, we basically had a mini pullback in March of 2020, 00:04:41.000 |
but then the Fed hit so hard that things just blasted off again. 00:04:46.000 |
Now, you guys have talked about this, but that tool is not in the toolbox. 00:04:51.000 |
So one of the things I was talking to somebody last night, and this audience is amazing. 00:04:55.000 |
I was talking to somebody last night, and they said, "So how does it work? 00:05:00.000 |
And I said, "What I love about this group is there are hundreds of hours of data and research that we're constantly challenged with. 00:05:11.000 |
And I think grounding ourselves in just a few facts to try to figure out what the next step is, 00:05:18.000 |
what the next six months are going to be, because we have founders here trying to run their businesses. 00:05:24.000 |
Are we bouncing straight back from where we were? 00:05:26.000 |
So very quickly, this chart just tells us, you know, the iron law of investing is interest rates. 00:05:33.000 |
A 1% change in rates leads to a 15% or 20% change in a multiple. 00:05:40.000 |
And so the reason multiples have collapsed here for all these businesses is because expectations as to inflation 00:05:53.000 |
So if it's all about rates, let's just look at those two things. 00:06:05.000 |
The Fed is now saying our neutral rate is 2% to 3%, and people are hyperventilating. 00:06:12.000 |
Look at what the cost of capital was in 2000. 00:06:20.000 |
We went from just above 5 up to 6 and a half, right? 00:06:24.000 |
So we're talking about going from 2 and a half back to 2 and a half or 3. 00:06:28.000 |
But the big question is, are we going back to 2 and a half or 3, or are they behind the curve, lost in the weeds, 00:06:34.000 |
and we're going to have to go to 4 to 5 to kill inflation? 00:06:37.000 |
Well, everybody was saying inflation, you know, inflation is here to stay forever. 00:06:52.000 |
Consumer price -- this is the basket of goods and services that we all go out and spend money on. 00:06:56.000 |
So the Fed is focused on the demand side of the equation. 00:06:59.000 |
They know they hopped us up on a bunch of Red Bull and cocaine to survive the pandemic. 00:07:04.000 |
I thought you were talking about last night for sacks, but keep going. 00:46:53.760 |
This is on Bloomberg, so I think you can find this clip. 00:46:56.760 |
But I was talking to Emily Chang, and she said something to the effect of, "Did you 00:47:10.860 |
I bought one mango, had it delivered for free. 00:47:14.880 |
I sent an email to Doug Leone, "Thanks for the second mango." 00:47:22.760 |
I mean, you can get four grapes whenever you want. 00:47:27.580 |
It's hard to judge a company from the outside because you can't look at the financials. 00:47:31.380 |
But the product experience has evolved over a very long period of time. 00:47:36.940 |
I suspect there's an asset value there, and whether that can match up with what someone 00:47:54.520 |
Brad, where's the market going to be at this time next year? 00:48:01.720 |
We will be higher for growth stocks this time next year, but we may very well get there 00:48:08.340 |
by way of lower and potentially meaningfully lower because the counterfactual to the hyperinflation 00:48:19.280 |
We can't deliver the counterfactual for at least four to five months. 00:48:23.740 |
The facts don't exist until we actually see the facts play out. 00:48:28.240 |
But my suspicion is we return to trend, things become more predictable and investable again, 00:48:33.760 |
and we bounce back up to the five-year average. 00:48:41.280 |
You can answer it if you like, but I got a more important one. 00:48:45.280 |
I know you're not going to answer it, so I got a better one for you. 00:48:53.280 |
Essentially, that means retirement of the Spurs. 00:49:02.240 |
Are you going to get back into early stage investing? 00:49:11.460 |
I think I might get intrigued with doing angel stuff the way Bezos did. 00:49:19.040 |
I don't want to practice the art taking board seats. 00:49:21.760 |
I'm still on 10 that I'm serving dutifully, and I've played that game. 00:49:27.540 |
Maybe similar to what David said about operating a business. 00:49:37.800 |
I'm very excited about public stocks here, actually. 00:49:43.800 |
The valuations are getting super interesting. 00:49:58.800 |
I've been investing for the better part of three or four decades, closer to four, and 00:50:06.620 |
Every time I shove it all in with kings, your mouth sucks out on me with a 910 suited, and 00:50:30.560 |
We open sourced it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy with it.