About Bill Gurley

Bill Gurley joined Benchmark Capital in 1999 after spending two years as a partner with Hummer Winblad Venture Partners.

Before entering the venture capital business, Bill spent four years on Wall Street as a top-ranked research analyst, including three years at CS First Boston focusing on personal computer hardware and software. His research coverage included such companies as Dell, Compaq, and Microsoft, and he was the lead analyst on the Amazon IPO. In both 1995 and 1996, Bill was a member of the Institutional Investor All-American Research Team.

Prior to his investment career, Bill was a design engineer at Compaq Computer, where he worked on products such as the 486/50 and Compaq’s first multi-processor server. Before Compaq, he served in the technical marketing group of Advanced Micro Devices’ embedded processor division.

For the past twelve years, Bill has authored the Above the Crowd newsletter which focuses on the evolution and economics of high technology businesses.

Current Investments: Linden Lab/SecondLife, LiveOps, Move Networks, Nanosolar, OpenTable, Red 5 Studios, Tropos Networks, VUDU, and Zillow.com.

Previous Investments: Avamar Technologies (acquired by EMC), Business.com (acquired by R.H. Donnelley), Crossgain (acquired by BEA Systems), Employease (acquired by ADP), JAMDAT (IPO: JMDT; acquired by Electronic Arts), Nordstrom.com (acquired by Nordstrom), Shopping.com (IPO: SHOP; acquired by eBay), and The Knot (IPO: KNOT).

Other Affiliations: Advisory board of the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas.

Education: MBA from the University of Texas, 1993; and a BS in computer science from the University of Florida, 1989. Chartered Financial Analyst.

Follow me on Twitter: www.twitter.com/bgurley  I can also be reached at bgurley@benchmark.com.