Runnin’ Down a Dream

Background

Bill Gurley is a general partner at the venture firm Benchmark and a graduate of the MBA program at the University of Texas at Austin. On September 14, 2018, he came back to the McCombs School of Business with a talk he said he’d been thinking about giving for a decade. He borrowed the title from Tom Petty.

Gurley had noticed the same pattern in the biographies of three people from unrelated fields — basketball coach Bobby Knight, Bob Dylan, and restaurateur Danny Meyer — and turned it into five guidelines for finding and thriving in a career you love, then added two newer stories: Sam Hinkie and Stitch Fix founder Katrina Lake. He posted the talk on his own YouTube channel, and later spent six years expanding it into a book of the same name.

From the talk

Why chase a dream job at all:

My partner Kevin Harvey has a phrase that I love … “Life is a use it or lose it proposition.” For most humans, they take one career path … why not do what makes you most happy?

On passion, and the test for it:

This is one of my favorite quotes from Bobby Knight. He says, “Everybody has the will to win. People don’t have the will to practice.” I think this is the test for whether or not you’re actually pursuing your dream job … Do you enjoy the preparation? Everybody enjoys winning. Do you enjoy the preparation?

On honing your craft:

It’s extremely important to be obsessive about understanding everything you possibly can about your craft … I can’t make you the smartest or the brightest, but it’s quite doable to be the most knowledgeable.

On Picasso, who had mastered classical painting by fifteen:

He had spent time studying the way you would if you had set out to be the greatest painter in the world, and that’s why I made this statement, “Greatness isn’t random, it’s earned.”

On peers:

When I got to MBA school everybody said, “Network, network, network.” I thought it was a social activity … What I’ve come to realize is, no, it’s not about that. It’s about connecting with the people that you have the most overlap with because you’ll be able to help each other along the way, along the journey.

On thanking the people who helped you, and his favorite professor at Texas:

When he passed I didn’t have all this anxiety, like, “I didn’t get a chance to tell him.” I took the chances to tell him, and I would encourage you guys to do that type of stuff along the way.

And his summary of all five guidelines:

Pick a career you’re passionate about. Be obsessive about the learning. Lean on mentors, lean on peers. Give the credit to someone else, and pay it forward.

© 2018 Bill Gurley. Short excerpts quoted for commentary, transcribed from the video Bill Gurley published.

Go to the source

Watch the full talk →
Bill Gurley’s own upload of the full talk

Get Runnin’ Down a Dream on Amazon →
Gurley’s book-length version of the talk, with the research and many more stories

Above the Crowd →
Gurley’s blog, where he writes about the book and venture capital