đŹThe Bill Gurley Test for Determining a Tech Hub
Looking at the ideas behind and adjacent to a Tweet
Hello! Glad to have you back for another Urban Tech Thursday. đ
Welcome to the ~15 new folks who have joined us since last week â you wonât regret it.
Todayâs edition provides an excellent opportunity to take a step back before some of the incredible conversations, stories, and analysis we have on deck. While January was 100% Urban Techâs best month, I think February will quickly surpass it with the content we have on deck.
Occasionally, I like to use Urban Tech Thursdays as a chance to reorient the conversation for our future exploration of the intersection of cities and tech. My dad is a ship captain â promise, Iâm not bullshitting â so in my mind, I picture weeks like this as the chance to ease up on the thrust of the Urban Tech cruise liner of insights. đł
Easing up before diving into specific topics, themes and conversations, ensures our journey forward is safe for all passengers â and filled with a comprehensive perspective of how all the ideas we explore are interconnected.
Today is one of those occasions. Like anyone who is too online, the âstoryâ for today starts with a tweet; but before I get to that, a couple of quick notes:
Remember, if you want to keep the conversation about cities and tech going outside the two times a week UT shows up in your inbox, you can follow Urban Tech and me on Twitter.Â
Like I said above, a bunch of excellent content is on deck for February. Next weekâs edition will feature a conversation with former New York City Deputy Mayor Cas Holloway. In 2019, Cas joined a startup called Unqork as its head of public enterprise.
His work right now is largely focused on making local government communication with communities more affordable and efficient. Because of the budget constraints that local governments face, the IT landscape is incredibly fragmented and wasteful.
Essentially, Unqork comes in and builds on top of these legacy systems to help governments digitize services efficiently.
JFYI, Youâll be hearing from me briefly either later today or tomorrow when the next episode of the Urban Tech podcast is available.
As I mentioned, the focus of this weekâs piece was inspired by a tweet that I couldnât get out of my head. Here is the culprit:
If youâre not familiar with the Silicon Valley legend and notably tall guy Bill Gurley, hereâs his background. This context should give you an idea of why heâs influential:
Bill Gurley has spent over 15 years as a General Partner at Benchmark Capital. Prior to Benchmark, Bill was 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 Compaqâs first multi-processor server. For the past fifteen years, Bill has authored the Above the Crowd blog which focuses on the evolution and economics of high technology businesses.
Over his venture career, he has worked with such companies as GrubHub (IPO: GRUB), Nextdoor, OpenTable (IPO: OPEN, Acquired by Priceline), Stitch Fix (IPO: SFIX), Uber, and Zillow.com (IPO: Z).
As you can tell from that last section, Gurley has been heavily involved in propelling not only urban tech forward, but many of the biggest tech companies of the last several decades. If youâre interested in what Gurley is up to these days, Venture Expert Connie Loizos had a great story last year when news broke Gurley would finally be taking a step back at Benchmark.
While a Gurley profile is one of the many projects on the future Urban Tech editions list, today is not that day. Today is a chance to look at the idea around Gurleyâs comments in the tweet above.
There are a few reasons this tweet stuck with me the last week.
I find the premise of developing a metric like this a fascinating conversation to learn from.
Probably the biggest reason I couldnât stop thinking about Gurleyâs comment was that I think this tweet exemplifies many of the problems with the current conversation around cities and tech.
After thinking about the second reason enough, Iâve been able to find some optimism for where the conversation can improve.
Probably the least important cause, but worth noting: Bill Gurleyâs hometown â Dickinson, TX â is the neighboring town to the town I grew up in. We are both fellow kids of suburban Houston. đ€
Why the premise of this exercise is fascinating
This optimistic point seems like the easiest to explain.
If youâre reading this post and havenât given up on it yet, Iâm assuming the fascination component of the tweetâs premise is there for you too. Overall, the tweet is just another example showing cities are top of mind for everyone in Silicon Valley right now, even if they arenât as vocal about it as others.
Before I get to the ânegative nancyâ part, I want to call out some other useful things for thinking about this concept of an easy test for tech hub viability. Someone like Gurley chiming in leads to many smart people chiming in to push ideas further â ultimately, ideas around the intersection of cities and tech being challenged and pushed is good for everyone to get better results.
Iâve also followed Gurley for years and think heâs a thoughtful guy who understands the nuances of conversations like this, so Iâm excited heâs beginning to engage with these themes more publicly.
But, time for me to be a little negative about the ideas and themes that seem to surround this tweet.
Why the premise of this question is concerning
Before getting too far, I'm not trying to to be critical of the context and ideas of Gurley's tweet itself. Gurley is a super sharp guy who is just answering a question on Twitter. That's great. I'm all for it.
The parts of the tweet that I find problematic are the ideas around it and the larger conversation it's engaging in. To me, they signal many of the problems in city and tech conversations happening right now.
To me, the conversation around Gurley's tweet and the discussion it's participating in reveal many of the pitfalls that tech and business fall into when they look at the opportunities involving cities. Because of their obligations and incentives, the conversation quickly leads down a path that simplifies what a city truly is.
My biggest fear on where I see this tech and cities conversation going right now is:
Suppose we were to lean into a simple test like this too much. In that case, we run the risk of creating another meaningless litmus-test of legitimacy (like the term unicorn for startups before) that ultimately reduces the true complexity of cities to simply chess pieces manipulated for the benefits of financial returns.
I don't think this happens out of any true intentions of the parties involved. Truthfully, I think it's because we are still so early in the conversation about tech and cities. To me, people on the urban side and people on the tech side are still learning how to talk to each other. They are still in many ways learning the pressures that each faces in fulfilling their respective obligations.
For someone like Gurley, investors, and even companies, thinking about cities in these terms is essential to doing their job and fulfilling their obligations.Â
It's just increasingly crucial for people, particularly for influential people like Gurley, to remember in their conversations that these are real places, with real people, who live whole, complicated lives, and the changes of innovation don't always make their lives better.Â
Most of these people you won't find on Twitter. I know everyone knows this, but it's always worth a reminder since so much of the tech/media conversation happens in our Twitter bubble.
All of us in or adjacent to tech (myself included) need to remind ourselves of cities' complexity continually, so we aren't speaking about communities in the same zero-sum terms dominating the current conversation.
While it's easy to talk about cities in terms that simplify them to technical systems at work, cities' systems are much more akin to the systems of an organism. Considering thousands or millions of real organisms, aka humans, comprise cities, it seems like we should be super intentional to keep this fact in mind.
The conversation can't always be in dollar terms for this space. We have to challenge ourselves to do better than that. In my mind, if you're working on any product/innovation aiming to solve urban problems, it's imperative to consider their real-world impact beyond the bottom line. It's also the only way I think you can build a sustainable business in a highly-regulated space like urban tech.
Cities and the people who live in them deserve a broader, more inclusive conversation about the places they live and call home.
While I'm anxious right now about where the conversation is at, there's plenty to be hopeful about when you zoom into specific areas of the urban tech space. The area I love to always point to is micromobility.
Why Iâm still hopeful
The conversation at the intersection of cities and tech is only just beginning. Iâm incredibly hopeful tech can move in a direction to be better partners with cities; likewise, cities to be better partners with tech, and most importantly, for both parties to create opportunities that lead to economic benefits for the real people.
There are plenty of examples in the broad urban tech space to see a better ethos of working with cities to advance goals that can benefit a wide array of people in the places these companies are planting flags.
One of my favorite places to looks whenever I need a shot of optimism is the micromobility space.
Micromobility is only one subset of the massive transportation sector. Still, I think the ethos of micromobility towards cities is the perfect roadmap for how adjacent sectors in the broader urban tech space can productively approach cities.
This week, the entire micromobility sector has gathered virtually for Micromobility World. Iâve been fortunate to attend and participate in some of the conversations happening at the conference.
Even with many competitors in the room together, and people with different ideas on how business should be done, everyone is talking genuinely about how we can make cities better, make customersâ lives better, and even the lives of non-customers better.
Iâm hoping this productivity will trickle up to the more broad tech and cities conversation that frankly at times feels like itâs a framing of Tech vs. Cities, which perpetuates each side to dig in further.
Thanks for reading todayâs edition. I hope you enjoyed it. Youâll be getting a quick note from me either later today or tomorrow on some new Urban Tech content we are piloting and planning to work into the flow regularly moving forward. More on that to come.
A final ask: please continue to share Urban Tech across your professional and personal networks. Our growth velocity is increasing at an exciting pace. For the last 4-5 weeks, every morning that I wake up, there are at least a few new subscribers; sometimes even as many as 10-12.
This trend was not happening even a couple of months ago, and I know itâs 100% because you all share this little corner of the internet with people who also believe innovation and cities are fascinating â and increasingly important by the day.
Truly, thank you. Building this with you and for you is the coolest thing that Iâve ever done, so I donât take it lightly.
Talk soon,
âïžJT