This is Mesters in Business with Barry Reynolds on Bloomberg Radio.

This week on the podcast, boy, do I have an extra special guest?

Venture Capitalist, Bill Gurley of Benchmark, what a rock star.

He's been just right at the forefront of everything that's been going on in venture capital over the past 20 years.

Grubhub, OpenTableZillow, he was one of the very first investors into Uber, was a board member there.

Really just a fascinating career from a design engineer at Compact to becoming a Wall Street analyst.

Turns out he's the lead analyst on the Amazon IPO to eventually becoming a VC at Benchmark,

where really he just has tremendous insight into entrepreneurs and technology,

and to think about things like the network effect, and what is this technology also parallel to,

and where can we see scale and leverage in capital all come together in a way that is unique.

Just really a fascinating, fascinating person, very forthcoming, including about things that were really challenging periods of his career,

that I would imagine wasn't a whole lot of fun if you read the book Super Pumped about Uber.

Really, he's the only guy that comes through that whole book with his reputation intact.

He's really the only good guy in the book.

And the book is an amazing story about Uber, which in and of itself is just madness.

So if you are at all remotely interested in venture capital investing, technology, direct listings, replacing IPOs,

I think you're going to find this conversation to be absolutely fascinating.

So with no further ado, my conversation with Benchmarks, Bill Gurley.

This is Masters in Business with Barry Redholz on Bloomberg Radio.

My extra special guest this week is Bill Gurley.

He is a legendary venture capital investor at Benchmark, where he's been since 1999.

Some of his better known investments have included Grubhub, next door, open table, Zillow, and of course Uber.

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