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I'm Bill Gurley I got the Silicon Valley in about 1997 and was fortunate enough to become
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a venture capitalist in 98. and the entire you know first year of my career
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I had zero interest in interacting with any form of government it didn't seem
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necessary for what I was trying to do I was working with Founders and software and Technology I didn't see what it
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would bring me until one day where I ran into an issue which I'll tell you about later that
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required me to understand what was going on in Washington so I checked in with a
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few advisors they introduced me to this lawyer in DC turns out D.C lawyers do a
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lot of things that aren't lawyering and and he listened to where they have yourself call you back he calls me back
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he says bill I got exactly what you need I found a congressman on the committee That Matters to what you're talking
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about and I can set up a meeting I go great I'll fly out he goes no no no don't fly out he's coming to you because
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he's coming to me that's pretty nice he goes do you have a conference room a cinema venture capitalist we have lots
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of conference rooms so he said I needed to get some people together and and here's the catch they need to bring five
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thousand dollars each hung up the phone started thinking all
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right I got six people we got board members CEO five thousand thirty thousand dollars call me back next week
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how's it going great I got six people five thousand dollars ready to go because most of these meetings have 10
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to 12 people says [Â __Â ] like now I'm inviting people that don't even have anything to do with this thing
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and like having to help them out I'm up to 60k I hang up he called me back a week later he goes Bill how's it going
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like ah [Â __Â ] I got 12 people you know everybody's got a check we're ready to go I'm losing interest at this point he
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goes do they have spouses I'm like what kind of question is this
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do they have spouses he goes yeah let's let's have their spouses write five thousand dollars each I go our
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conference room's not big enough for the spouse he goes they don't have to come this is a True Story by the way true
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story and it would go on to happen two more times in my life and then I stopped meeting with congressman
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foreign the reason that I needed to engage relates to this company my fourth VC
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investment was in a company called tropos networks we had industrial grade mesh Wi-Fi you could mount it on a
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telephone pole and bathe a city in in Wi-Fi Broadband it was awesome we are so
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excited about it we were changing the world it was disruptive Google got excited about it Earthling got excited
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about it but the customer I loved the most that got excited about were Mayors there are hundreds of Mayors all over
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the country that wanted to provide free Wi-Fi service across their downtown area
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it would help with Public Safety economic development of course digital divide so we we were so thrilled I was
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so pumped I was sure we had a winner here and then one day these two people got excited which turned out not to be a
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good thing this is Mayor Street of Philadelphia and his CIO Diana Neff they
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got just as excited as I did they were idealistic they were you know
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optimistic maybe they were quixotic maybe I was too because the next thing
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that happened is what caused me to get that meeting you can't read this but it says lobbyists try to kill Philly
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Wireless plan and in the article it says Philly's plan to offer an inexpensive wireless internet service the most
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ambitious yet collided with commercial interest collided with commercial
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interest there were no voters or citizens up in arms about this commercial interest
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how many of you I know this younger crowd how many of you are old enough to remember Schoolhouse Rock
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awesome so like you I learned about how Congress works by ABC Saturday morning
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television and they told us there's a phrase in this I looked up the script it said some
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folks back home wanted a law so they called their local Congressman implying that the people that have the need are
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the citizens and the people that write the law the congressman imagine how surprised there was when I read this
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Philadelphia was embarking on the research phase of the project when Verizon successfully pushed a bill
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through the state legislature Verizon's writing legislation how does that work
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now it turns out this wasn't even our biggest problem because another company's headquartered in Philadelphia
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named Comcast they had put a bill on Governor Randall's desk proposal drafted by
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lobbyists for the telecommunications companies this isn't what I learned on Schoolhouse Rock
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the governor whose bill that was on the desk of is Ed Rendell he's on the right before he was governor he was mayor of
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Philadelphia the gentleman in the middle is named Michael Nutter he would go on to replace Street and was a longtime
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council member but the guy on the left was the real Nemesis this is David Cohen
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Chief lobbyist for Comcast now David Cohen is the corporate lobbying what Bob
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Marley is to reggae he's like there's just there's no there's no
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second uh the New York Times did a profile of him called Comcast real
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repairman in which they say is the most important executive in the whole company and I fundamentally believe that
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um It also says he's probably one of the most Savvy corporate political operatives in the history of U.S
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business the article on the right from The Inquirer calls him Philadelphia's most powerful unelected official I don't
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even know how you can put those words together so here we are here we are in our little
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conference room with our spousal enhanced checkbooks and
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this is like a second grader challenging Michael Jordan to a game on one-on-one for money like we had we were pissing in
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the ocean we had no chance no chance
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now guess who offers Citywide Wi-Fi that one's easy um
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ATT would join this fight within two years they would outlaw Municipal Broadband in over 22 States they just
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write it into the books and and just took took the power of these local
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decision makers away from them all in the interest of the of the city of the
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commercial interests not the citizen I want to talk about another piece of Telecom legislation my my partnership
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back in those days invested in Telecom equipment and so we were very interested in Telecommunications Act of 1996. this
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was heralded as the most important telecommunications reform in 62 years
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now this one's simple I'm just going to use the headlines from Wikipedia the
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Telecommunications Act of 1996 had two goals to promote competition
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and to encourage the rapid development of new technologies let's see how things
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went in 1996
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the top four had 48 markets here four or five years later after this heralded
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legislation they're up to 85 percent that didn't work
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let's check in on the second one were they promoting Innovation this is a
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chart of VC dollars into Telecom equipment this used to be 15 of what VCS did
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um within 10 years it had gone below one percent and a year later the mvca stopped tracking it now if you want to
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talk to one of the expert VCS in telecommunications equipment it'll be
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easy to do because they're retired this Market's gone there is no more
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innovation in Telecom equipment so what happens here how can you possibly have a
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super important Bill signed by and implemented by one of the most heralded presidents that we've in our generation
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that doesn't just fail failing would be things stay the same and you don't
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accomplish the goal this did the did even worse it created the opposite thing
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of what it was supposed to go do let me introduce you to George Stigler he's the 1982 Nobel Prize winner in
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economics and the father of regulatory capture this is his most famous quote as a rule
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regulation is acquired by the industry and is designed and operated primarily for its benefit I like to say regulation
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is the friend of the incumbent quick audience interaction moment that's the one thing I want you to take away so on
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the count of three scream regulation is the friend of the incumbent one two three
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yes amen all right
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so this is this the only slide I have with bullets because this is going to be a two-minute regulate regulatory capture
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101 all from George stigler's notes the first thing he says in regulatory
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capture a special interest is prioritized over the general interest of the public sound familiar for my other
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stories leading to a net loss for society a net loss for society that's
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important the two mechanisms they usually use is the second bullet limited market entry
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and price protection or even price increases which I'll show you more of and then the mechanisms of influence are
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money made worse by citizens united exposure just time around people and
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then three revolving doors this is super important and I'll show you one great example of that that's people moving in
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and out when they interviewed Christy on the Pod the other day they were talking about this in the military
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all right this is a piece of Morgan Stanley research from 1999
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someone took the time to go study five pieces of major U.S legislation that had happened over the years and how the
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incumbent stocks did after the legislation and let's just steal a few
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sentences from this conclude that Landmark regulatory action is a tendency to improve returns for the
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largest players in the targeting industry long-term investors should consider capitalizing on any temporary
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weakness caused by market reaction deregulation many attempts to increase competition or improve customer
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experience have failed this is reinforcing what Stigler taught us here's a very simple quick one number of
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new banks in the U.S 2009 nothing Dodd-Frank
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like that's what happens all right two really good stories you might not even believe them because
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they're so outlandish does everyone know who epic is
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it's hard to know because they're not public it's a very large private company in Wisconsin that is the largest player
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in medical or EHR software medical records and this is their CEO Judith Faulkner now in
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get the year right 2009 Obama put her on his health I.T Council she was the only
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corporate representative should not surprise you that she's a
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major donor to Obama now Obama passed the American Recovery Act that was his
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big piece of stimulus kind of like Biden's inflation act that happened recently and tucked underneath that easy
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to hide in this big bill is an act that was the acronyms high tech it's this
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health information technology thing and then they created an agency called onc that oversaw it now
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this is the part you're not going to believe they came up with a brilliant idea I have to assume she helped encourage this
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um doctors would receive forty four thousand dollars each
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if they bought software 38 billion dollars this is true you can
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look it up I'm not making it up forty four thousand dollars to give it to a doctor Implement some software many of
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you run companies that'd be pretty cool right the government passed the law if they buy your software they get money make it a lot easier
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now you may be thinking are doctors needy but here's the catch you remember
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this happened because the mortgage meltdown doctors own multiple homes so they have multiple mortgages so like
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they probably needed the assistant now there's two more things about this act they're also unbelievable first there's
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a there's a flaw if if someone said younger pay people to buy software most people would be like well you're gonna
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have a problem they're gonna buy it and they're not going to use it right well they thought of that so guess what the second phase doctors
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got paid 17 000 more dollars to prove that they were using it this is
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called meaningful use it's plastered all over the website of all the HR vendors at the time
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it gets even better so the the onc decided the threshold of
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features you would need for your software to comply with this mandate
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and I'm assuming they kind of took epics feature set and plowed it into this
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spreadsheet but they got the Department of Justice to enforce people that didn't
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have the feature set that were getting the payments and you had three record
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fines 155 million 57 million 145 million against the Lesser competitors of epic
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unreal if you've studied the innovator's Dilemma the way startups disrupt is they
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come in with lower feature products but a feature that really matters to the customer in a simpler product and they
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move up they put a brick wall there so you couldn't come up
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um it's just amazing um Obama in an interview with Ezra Klein said this was the most disappointing
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part of Obamacare I mean I think if any of us were in the room when they scratched this thing out I could have
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told them that it would have failed I mean paying people to do stuff is just it's not going to work now you may ask
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am I am I unhappy with Judith I'm disgusted with it but
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but if I were a judge in the Olympic regulatory capture competition I'm
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giving her a 10.
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this is fantastic fantastic [Applause] all right one more revolving doors
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there's one more so many of you know what this is this is a a coven rapid
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antigen test now this is based on a very simple piece of technology hopefully David will will
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confirm this when he comes back up um called a lateral flow assay now this
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technology was developed 80 years ago in 1943 and it's a complete commodity the
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the packaging Almost Doesn't Matter you could probably use the strip without it now before I tell you what happened in
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the U.S let me tell you what happened in Europe Germany leaned heavily into rapid tests they got their scientists together
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and they evaluated 122 different vendors and validated 96
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of them here they are on the right 96 different vendors the day okayed and as
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a result in the German Market you could buy five tests for 375 or 75 Euro cents
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a test UK leaned in as well they they got him in such numbers and so cheap they they
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distribute them to people's homes so what was going on in the U.S around that time the New York the New York
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Times did a um article like here's what's going on with antigen tests first of all they fought him forever and I I
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think that may be character as well because the hospitals were making a ton of money on PCR tests I think they they
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made as much money as they did on vaccines but that's another story here it says all the manufacturings are
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ramping up production but right now they're hard to find and then it lists which tests are available and they only
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list three vendors Abbott Elementary vendors now
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you can play along on your phone if you want to go on LinkedIn this guy's name is Timothy stenzel
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now he works for the FDA and he runs the group that oversees which antigen test
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gets approved I know this because he would write scathing letters to the ones he rejected that you can also look up
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online now guess what you're not going to be surprised
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five years that could help
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four years at Abbott
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it gets worse president Biden decided finally to lean into
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antigen tests and authorize two billion dollars to go purchase tests he should have gone to Germany and bought him out
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of the stores but instead
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but but instead he bought him from these guys now I don't know if you've ever used this test all that packaging is
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complete and utter [Â __Â ] and unnecessary that popsicle stick thing like everyone else uses the lateral flu
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essay plastic thing that you can buy super cheap this was over engineered um
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and then and then I got really pissed because the Wall Street Journal wrote an article that was a Victory lap for
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Abbotts antigen test execution and how well they did in the market and I've
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never met Brianna or Peter but I I hope they get to watch this because the first thing they should have done in the
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article was put a big picture of Timothy stenzel because that's why this thing
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worked and they they write the eye-catching card on a lollipop stick as
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if oh it was so cute everyone bought it like foreign
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if you tried to sell that thing in Germany how many would sell zero Lay It
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twelve dollars a test yesterday Just for kicks kind of I went online this is Walgreens and CVS antigen tests there's
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seven tests they're all exactly 23.99 what is that that's not a Marketplace
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that's not open competition um I also went on boots the the famous UK there the tests are about a dollar
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fifty dollar sixty per today so you have a 6X differential in these tests today
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and by the way I'm not even talking about the fact that our citizenry may have been you know much enhanced by
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having rapid tests at a much lower price if they were treated as the commodity they were
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of course they weren't now Washington's got its eyes on Silicon Valley and it's
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from both sides we got Lindsey Graham we got Elizabeth Warren there's an article here that says major green agrees with
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AOC breaking up big Tech and you say why why did why are they so interested in
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Tech this is a poll of Voters voters don't care voters are more worried about the industries where there's a lot of
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regulatory capture but they want to come after Tech I think I know why I think they want them in the system like the
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military like Finance like Telecom they want them in the system because there's money now if Elizabeth Warren attacks
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big Tech you think they might go fund the competitor then you probably can't read this but this is open Secrets spend
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time on open Secrets four of the top 10 contributors to Elizabeth Warner alphabet Apple Microsoft Amazon
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you attack them they have to come to you some of the some of our peers in Silicon
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Valley seem to want them to come too I think they've read Stigler Circle please regulate us
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Brian's on later so this is risky the more regulation
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the more I think he's right by the way the more regulation the better for
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coinbase that's exactly what Stigler would say marker Zuckerberg needs wants and must
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have regulation I get it Mark
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and Sam's just getting started he wants regulation too
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now
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there's a really scary thing in this AI space the the incumbents that are running to meet with all the government
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um are spreading something that I don't think is accurate or Fair they're spreading a negative open source uh
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message and I think it's precisely because they know it's their biggest threat and I think what Matt has done
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with llama too is actually super interesting all right I'm going to wrap up with three things
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um three takeaways first I'm not convinced we're very good at regulation all four of the stories I told you were
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failures like they were a net loss for society as Stigler says this is a picture of Patrick Monahan who was one
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of the best Senators I think we've ever had he kept a picture of a pin behind his desk as a reminder he felt like
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Congress should have to have something similar to the Hippocratic Oath that doctors have first Do no harm and the
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reason he has that point of view is he feels personally responsible for the homeless situation in America he signed
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an act with JFK in 1963 that shut down the mental health institutions it had a
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second piece that was supposed to prop something up this happens with with policy second part didn't happen emptied
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out the mental health and when everyone talks about the homeless problem they should read this interview with him because they don't go back and talk
00:22:33
about this issue but it's very relevant so I don't think were very good at it that's the first thing second I think
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regulatory capture gives capitalism a Bad Name a couple people yesterday said oh we got to fix capitalism I think
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where capitalism's Brokenness where the capture is the highest right like I just showed you some examples
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you've seen these charts of Christ you know across time and the highly
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competitive products coming out of Silicon Valley are dropping like crazy it's health care and education and those
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kind of things where you have price increases lastly one of my favorite authors is Matt Ridley and these two
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books um really cover the the span of human time and he talks about how three things
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technology Commerce and the sharing of ideas
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leads to prosperity for people leads to increases in standard of living and my
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big fear is that regulation is the opposite of this it's a blocker to Innovation so if you care about
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prosperity and you kill Innovation you're going to kill Prosperity from my point of view so
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in closing the reason I picked this title is silicon Valley's 200 2851 miles
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away from Washington and as these people put their eyes towards this Iowa State
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the following the reason Silicon Valley has been so successful is because it's so [Â __Â ] far away from Washington DC
00:24:04
thank you
00:24:38
ladies and gentlemen Bill [Â __Â ] girlie
00:24:43
well that was it highlight I think we know the best let's all go home I think
00:24:49
the best the best talk in the history of all in um
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oh and uh we need to get it out there immediately so it can start going viral
00:25:00
and I think it will go very viral yeah
00:25:06
well you know I'm just a guy with some experiences and I put it together as a
00:25:11
deck and if you take from it whatever you get that's where it's gonna go the regulatory capture is bad so whenever um
00:25:20
four four away from it basically this is what we do as a poker
00:25:26
let's look you put a pin in it what's the solution what can we do I think you can go there yeah um
00:25:34
you know the first is politics an answer yeah the the the thing that's actionable
00:25:39
from my point of view is just massive transparency so I'd love to see what open Secrets does be kind of mandated
00:25:47
and way more transparent like the minute it check lands everyone knows put it on
00:25:52
Twitter yeah exit yeah whatever right like expose the hell out of it because there's a lot of like those meetings I
00:25:58
had don't show up as tropos they show up as all those people like there's a lot of obfuscation that's out there I think
00:26:06
that one's potentially solvable um that was really the only thing I thought blockchain could handle but
00:26:12
anyway that's just a sign um
00:26:17
it gets trickier after that one um
00:26:22
you guys talked about Christy with this when you're talking about the military industrial complex this rotating door
00:26:27
thing is a massive problem if you study there are tons and tons of senators
00:26:33
presidential candidates that are in the Senate they're out for two years and then they come back with 12 million
00:26:39
dollars in their pocket right and that's happening all over Washington all the time and I don't know how and and
00:26:45
Christy said it's impossible because they'd have to vote to stop this on their own and I I think citizens united
00:26:51
should go away right but it but it requires it requires the same boat you know and
00:26:59
Gurley is the existing regulatory capture like entropy it only goes in one direction or is it feasible Is it
00:27:05
feasible to unwind or it feels that way I mean yeah one one of the candidates you had on or maybe two were talking
00:27:10
about like shutting down stuff that onc got shut down which is actually kind of unusual and nice but yeah I I don't I
00:27:17
don't know I don't know I don't seem there have been attempts with with certain
00:27:23
um presidents you know and well in the past of kind of deregulating but but even if that's done by The Regulators
00:27:30
like I'm not even sure that totally well as I say you know on on AI I I
00:27:38
think that what um what was discussed at that hearing that Sam Altman testified
00:27:44
out I think it's an existential threat to Silicon Valley because you know what Sam proposed was well we should have a
00:27:50
new regulatory agency kind of like the atomic energy commission and we should have standards before AI software can
00:27:57
get released and it gets vetted and we'll help you write the standards you remember and the reaction the pleasure
00:28:04
and the reaction of the politicians I remember like all these Senators recorded saying wow this is such a nice young man
00:28:11
this is not like the other Tech CEOs who've been testifying up here basically you know uh defying us you know how do
00:28:18
we work with this person and they were saying all these nice things about him but the reason why I think this is an existential threat is because The
00:28:24
Cutting Edge of all software development right now is AI you look at what every software company is doing AI is now part
00:28:31
of their road maps so if you subject AI to regulation you're basically turning
00:28:38
software into the next big Pharma or into the next you know military industrial complex Washington will run
00:28:45
the software industry and everything we do in terms of funding these little startups you know these companies with
00:28:52
you know fresh ideas it'll just be over the government's going to do a code review industry oh that's similar to
00:28:57
what happened with that that there was a there was an Excel spreadsheet in that EHR example of the features you had to
00:29:03
have in your product like can you imagine the government like mandating features of a software I got
00:29:10
some product managers going to Washington getting approval for where what they add to the product another
00:29:15
answer um might be just uh to your original question Dave is just awareness so
00:29:20
getting people more aware and hopefully this kind of thing can help um I think knowing what committees your
00:29:26
legislators are on and when they're traveling to visit other states and other companies and stuff that have
00:29:33
nothing to do with your local you know situation they're supposed to be looking after that'd be helpful right but but
00:29:39
once again the people that you think it's just to mandate this are the ones doing it is it just the nature of
00:29:46
government that it has to scale with time that it it because we all think about the government sitting outside of
00:29:52
a market but the government is a player in the market they consume capital and they distribute capital and the U.S
00:29:58
federal government now is the largest consumer and distributor of capital in the history of humankind of of our
00:30:03
civilization I fear and you had dalio's charts of decline you know I fear that
00:30:09
this is one of those things that causes the decline and I fear that the democracy and capitalism you know will
00:30:16
kill each other over time you know for this very reason I might point that we
00:30:21
study the UK a little bit more they've kind of gone longer than most societies do they have some clever policies like
00:30:28
losing party pays which causes one tenth of the litigation that we have and so I
00:30:35
wonder if there's something to learn from from our um our previous ancestors the thing when you dip your toe into
00:30:42
that world that is shocking is it's the low how low the threshold is of the
00:30:48
dollars it takes to actually influence it's hundreds of billions of dollars of
00:30:53
laws getting written and that's where you also see some of this wrong-mindedness because you can get any
00:30:59
Tom Dick and Harry to cut you know Cobble together enough money to get in front of that Senator or that Congress
00:31:04
person and all of a sudden you see it reflected in law it's shocking actually I was talking some of you know David
00:31:10
crane who um who an operative in California helping people try and get things done and I
00:31:16
asked him about this and he said the one thing you have to keep in mind is that is the duration of how long that person
00:31:24
is going to be there so someone from Silicon Valley has a problem they run to Washington and they think they get one
00:31:30
meeting but are they coming back you know the teachers union is going to be there for a hundred years right so if
00:31:37
you're cozy up to them it's forever it's forever money yeah
00:31:42
why'd you do this personally would I do this yeah you're just frustrated like just like you're mad as
00:31:50
hell and there's a powerful I mean you know
00:31:55
you've worked on this for a while yeah this presentation I saw an early draft it was clearly coming together it's
00:32:01
something you've been thinking about a long long time I I've kept notes on it for 15 years every time I see something
00:32:07
I write it down yeah and you're at a point in your life now where oh that's true yeah yeah like I probably can't get
00:32:12
a meeting in Washington I mean I have trouble with investment Banks
00:32:19
also but um you saw you saw the guys um before talking about energy
00:32:27
um it's a huge industry there's enormous amounts of regulatory capture and
00:32:32
um and lots of manipulation of laws in that sector um from that perspective in that lens
00:32:38
are you Pro Fusion and the possibilities of fusion not less but less technologically more yeah well not
00:32:44
diffusion but but Vision I just retweeted something like an hour ago apparently they're gonna that one of the
00:32:50
the plant one of the fission plants that's been shut down in America they just voted to restate which is a great
00:32:57
you know progress right we turned around the anti-nuclear sentiment in what five years it seems like hopefully but
00:33:03
there's a long way to go because one of the reasons fission's so expensive in the U.S and way more expensive than
00:33:08
China is the regulatory exactly China's building 400 nuclear fission power
00:33:14
plants right now that's their plan that's their plan it's not just in China and if you look at the if you look at
00:33:19
the antigen testing imagine with the complexity of but this is what I want to ask you is like you know these large
00:33:25
energy generators the the existing utilities what is their incentive to not try to pull a Comcast when they see Bob
00:33:33
and David close to the Finish oh you have to imagine that the oil and gas Industries been doing that this whole
00:33:39
way right for traditional nuclear yeah yeah for traditional nuclear yes
00:33:46
I wonder and I say this with a lot of nivete I wonder if if you could use open
00:33:51
source around fission to try and lower the cost of building it and and try and
00:33:57
get more consistent well the big Achilles healing energy as an example where it's impossible to to capture
00:34:03
regulatorily is that the big opening they left is that every individual here can become their own utility and they're
00:34:09
subject to no oversight and so the real question is to your point if an open source or some very small modular
00:34:15
reactor can be put in the hands of every individual and then they can make an individual decision that's very hard to regulate but in the Solar Market which I
00:34:22
know you spend a lot of time in the rules on whether or not you can run power back in and at what rate that's
00:34:30
right are arbitrary across the entire country that's right guys um I know I
00:34:36
speak for everyone when I say that this has been an unbelievable highlight and a real treat Bill thank you so much
00:34:50
wow wow [Applause]
00:34:57
[Music]
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Rain Man David's house
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and they've just gone [Music]
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besties [Music]
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oh
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foreign [Music]
