Autorentext

Bill Gurley is a general partner at Benchmark, a leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. Over his venture career, he has invested in and served on the board of such companies as Nextdoor, OpenTable, Stitch Fix, Uber, and Zillow. Born in Dickinson, Texas, Gurley earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of Florida and later received an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin. In 2025, he received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the University of Texas alumni association. For more than two decades, Gurley has written about technology and other subjects on his popular blog, Above the Crowd, and on his social media accounts.

Klappentext

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Life is a use-it-or-lose-it proposition. Shouldn’t you spend it doing something you love? This book will teach you how to find your dream job and avoid a career you’ll regret—from a leading venture capitalist, based on his viral college talk.

“Fantastic. A variety of useful insights and examples that converge into one story that underlies remarkable success in nearly any field: The relentless hunger to learn about the thing you love.”—James Clear, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Atomic Habits**

For many young people, the path to success feels like a conveyor belt—onto the next test, the next application, the next college—without ever stopping to ask what do I actually want to do with my life? Parents know the pressure can be overwhelming, yet the system pushes everyone forward anyway.

After college Bill Gurley landed a job at a famous tech company. It should have been a dream come true—but he was surprisingly bored. So, Gurley leapt into the unknown, eventually finding his place in the world of venture capital, the beginning of a remarkable investing career.

It turns out, Gurley’s happy ending is rare. Nearly six in ten people would do things differently if they could start over. This is the trap of “career regret.” So how can we avoid it? What can we learn from people at the top of their fields who love what they do? The culmination of Gurley’s decade-long project to unpack the components of success, Runnin’ Down a Dream identifies six principles to flourish in your chosen career: the antidotes to career regret. From developing “obsessive” curiosity to the art of building strong peer groups, these timeless principles add up to a playbook not just for success, but a purpose-filled life.

Written in Gurley’s straight-talk voice and revealing the captivating stories of industry titans like talent agent Lorrie Bartlett, restaurateur Danny Meyer, and sports executive Sam Hinkie, Runnin’ Down a Dream will inspire a new generation to find their place in the world, while offering a much-needed rebuttal to the idea that hustle and happiness are incompatible.

Leseprobe
Profile One

The Never-Ending Quest for the Perfect Restaurant

Danny still remembers what he ate for dinner the night he had the most important conversation of his life. He’s not great at memorizing phone numbers or dates, but he has a near-perfect memory for meals he’s eaten and things he’s heard. That night, a Friday in 1983, he was with his aunt Virginia, his uncle Richard, and his grandmother Rosetta Harris at Elio’s, an upscale Italian restaurant on Second Avenue in Manhattan. Danny ordered green and white pasta with a cream sauce and Parmesan along with a serving of pollo al mattone—Italian for “chicken under a brick,” because of the way it’s roasted. His family was enjoying delicious Chianti Classico, something Danny, then about twenty-five years old and built like a long-distance runner, usually loved. But that night he wasn’t drinking. He knew he needed to wake up at 5 a.m. the next morning to take the LSAT, the law school entry exam, and he was dreading it.

Danny had moved to New York in 1980 to work at Checkpoint Systems, a company that made electronic tags to stop shoplifters. In three years, he’d become the firm’s top salesperson. He’d made a lot of money—$125,000 a year, the equivalent of nearly half a million today—and invested most of it in the company’s stock, which quintupled in his time there. Impressed by Danny’s work ethic, his bosses began sending him all over the country to train other salespeople in Chicago, Los Angeles, and Seattle, and when he traveled he dined in some of the best restaurants in America. His bosses asked Danny if he wanted to open an office in London, so he spent two weeks alone there, trying to obtain a feel for the city. This was before the internet, so he used a Gault & Millau guide to learn everything he could about London’s restaurant scene, dining out every single night—including the night he took himself to a Boy George concert.

Danny had a great time on the trip, but at the end of it he did something that shocked his bosses: He gave notice. He liked his job, but he knew that he didn’t want to sell electronic tags for the rest of his life.

As an undergrad at Trinity College in Connecticut Danny had majored in political science, though he spent a lot of his free time going down to New York City, planning his trips around where to eat and drink. Still, the obvious path seemed like a career in journalism or politics. He landed a job right out of college as a production assistant at a public television station in Chicago—a few hours from where he grew up, in St. Louis. Then he worked on the short-lived 1980 presidential campaign of John Anderson, who ran as an independent against both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. When that long-shot campaign flamed out, Danny headed back to New York.

He looked into a few journalism schools, including UC Berkeley and Northwestern University in Evanston—two of the best programs in the country. He ultimately decided on law school, thinking a law degree would provide more options for a career in politics or public service. At the time, it seemed like an eminently reasonable plan. Looking back now, though, Danny realizes he was lost.

He enrolled in an LSAT prep class—and hated every minute. He knew, deep down, that he didn’t want to be a lawyer. The legal field thrived on conflict. Danny didn’t want to wake up every morning looking for a fight. If anything, he loved bringing people together, making people happy. Now, on the eve of the exam, sitting with his family at Elio’s, he observed his tablemates eating great food and drinking great wine while he stewed about the test he would take in a few hours.

His uncle Richard noticed. Uncle Richard was one-of-a-kind: a prolific artist, a father of five, an early writer for Sesame Street, and an oral historian who knew how to ask the revealing questions. The ensuing conversation went something like this.

“What the hell is eating you?” Danny remembers his uncle saying.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this LSAT thing tomorrow,” Danny told him. “I don’t even want to be a lawyer.”

Danny remembers thinking his uncle looked so mad he might throw his pasta spoon. He didn’t. Instead, he asked a series of questions that changed the shape and direction of Danny’s life.

“Do you have any idea how long you’re going to be dead?” Uncle Richard asked.

“No?”

“I don’t know either, but I’ll tell you one thing,” Uncle Richard said. “You’re going to be dead a hell of a lot longer than you’re going to be alive. So why in the world would you do something that you have no passion around?”

Danny told him he wasn’t sure what el…