Bill Gurley

In a widely-circulated September 2023 All-In Summit presentation titled '2,851 Miles,' Benchmark general partner Bill Gurley laid out a case that the 2009 HITECH Act - a $38 billion federal program paying doctors up to $44,000 plus a further $17,000 'meaningful use' bonus to adopt electronic health record (EHR) software - was structured to disproportionately benefit Epic Systems. He noted Epic CEO Judith Faulkner was the sole corporate representative on Obama's Health IT Policy Committee and a major Obama donor, and alleged that federal compliance thresholds were set to match Epic's existing feature set while the Department of Justice levied large fines ($155M, $57M, and $145M) against Epic's smaller competitors. Gurley presented this as a case study in how incumbents can capture health-tech regulation to entrench market position.

On CNBC's Halftime Report in September 2019, Benchmark general partner Bill Gurley criticized SoftBank's $100 billion Vision Fund strategy of pouring outsized capital into competing startups (including Uber, WeWork, and Slack), calling it 'one of the biggest challenges corporate boards have ever had to face.' Gurley argued that SoftBank's willingness to deploy capital as a competitive weapon, rather than as disciplined investment, undermined normal governance and capital-efficiency incentives across the startups it touched - a critique that presaged WeWork's governance collapse weeks later.

In August 2017, Benchmark Capital - the venture firm where Bill Gurley was the partner holding Uber's board seat - filed suit against Travis Kalanick in Delaware's Court of Chancery, alleging Kalanick had fraudulently induced Benchmark to expand the board and fill additional seats with his allies after he had already resigned as CEO but retained his own board seat. The suit sought to force Kalanick off the board entirely, alleging the maneuver amounted to a cover-up intended to preserve his control. Benchmark held a roughly 13% stake in Uber at the time. Shortly after Kalanick's earlier ouster, Gurley had also publicly tweeted that 'very few entrepreneurs have had such a lasting impact on the world,' a conciliatory public note that obscured Benchmark's private view that Kalanick's conduct amounted to deception.

As the Benchmark partner holding Uber's board seat, Bill Gurley led a multi-week, behind-the-scenes campaign in June 2017 to remove Travis Kalanick as Uber's CEO following a string of corporate governance and workplace-culture scandals at the company. Fellow Benchmark partners Matt Cohler and Peter Fenton hand-delivered a resignation letter to Kalanick while he was traveling in Chicago. The letter was signed by investors representing roughly 40% of shareholder voting power. Kalanick resigned as CEO as a result, though he retained his board seat.