People got rich quick and a reset is coming
Benchmark general partner Bill Gurley said Monday that the AI wave is real and many people are getting rich quick, but he expects a “reset” to come.
“When people get rich quick, a whole bunch of people come along and want to get rich, and that’s why we end up with bubbles,” Gurley told CNBC’s “Money Movers.”
Gurley’s work was cited Carlota PerezThe economic expert who wrote the book “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and the Golden Ages” noted that “bubbles only exist when the real wave is real.”
Once the reset occurs, investors should have a price in mind to dump software-as-a-service stocks and “start swallowing them,” the venture capitalist said.
Artificial intelligence has threatened to disrupt segments of the economy, but software stocks have been hit particularly hard lately. sales force And ServiceNow The iShares Extended Technology Software Sector ETF has lost about 25% so far in 2026. (IGV)Tracking the industry overall, it’s down nearly 20% this year.
Technology companies are spending at record rates due to massive investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure and rising memory costs. AI spending Amazon, Meta, Google And Microsoft It is expected to be around $700 billion this year.
Benchmark was one of the first investors UberGurley played a key role in the departure of then-CEO Travis Kalanick in 2017.
Gurley said Uber’s $2 billion annual burn rate at the time of its involvement was “of high concern,” noting the much higher figures for today’s major model companies.
“God bless them,” Gurley said of AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI, which are flush with cash. “It’s a scary way to run a company.”
