State of Series A's, VC dry powder, IPO window opens + more with Bill Gurley & Brad Gerstner

With Chamath absent, the hosts welcome Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner as the 'BG squared' pairing. Gurley reports he still sits on nine Benchmark boards, does occasional angel deals at a fraction of Jason's frequency, and is writing a book with a co-writer, extending a University of Texas talk about chasing and succeeding in a dream job rather than a generic venture-capital treatise. Asked what he got right, he names two concrete themes: studying history, specifically knowing the patriarchs of your industry and how they thought, and relentless networking, which he argues is easier today.

The biography thread yields specific examples rather than abstractions. Gurley cites Danny Meyer's 'Setting the Table,' noting Meyer abandoned a law-school path and took a roughly 90% pay cut to a $10,000-a-year restaurant job before studying his way to Shake Shack and Union Square Cafe. Friedberg credits Walter Isaacson's Steve Jobs biography with directly changing how he managed The Climate Corporation in 2011, his first CEO role: a faster cadence, directness, full engagement, immediate decisions and commitment, which he says produced results almost immediately.

Jason seeks advice on a HarperCollins book extending his software-company blog. Gurley argues Jason's position is unusual because his goal is impact on founders, not merely being published, so he should write the book he believes in, define his audience, and set publishers aside until he has a treatment and first chapters, then bring it to two or three top agents. Jason adds that business techniques are already widely available; what an author uniquely owns are personal anecdotes, the approach he used in 'Angel,' pairing borrowed techniques from Gurley and Michael Moritz with his own lived experiences to give readers narrative.

Sacks reinforces the point through a counterexample from his PayPal-era reading of 'Good to Great': one chapter urged sticking to a core idea, the next urged flexibility, and he came away feeling such how-to books were too theoretical because they never specify which situations call for which principle. Biographies, by contrast, let you see why a technique was deployed, which is why Brad advises Sacks to write about visceral experiences that happen to teach, not a how-to manual.