Gurley splits learning into two halves. The first is the bedrock: the history of your field, the people who founded it and the classic work everyone builds on. The second is the edge: the new tools and whatever changed in the field this year. On The Knowledge Project, Gurley said that if you hold both, you become a power player in your field.
For the first half he tells stories. His Benchmark partner bought a dinner with John Lasseter, the creative force behind Pixar, at a charity auction. Lasseter served a ten-course meal in his screening room, and each course went with a classic cartoon he thought you had to know to understand animation. Magnus Carlsen won a trivia contest on chess history held during a break at a world tournament. Picasso painted as an accomplished realist at 14, years before cubism. Before New York, Bob Dylan studied folk music in Minnesota so deeply that Gurley thinks he knew more about it than anyone else in the state. He borrowed his friends' albums and sat in record-store listening booths. People who knew him in New York said he could mimic any song.
Gurley did this himself. He started on Wall Street, not in venture, and read the investing canon first. He thinks Peter Lynch's One Up on Wall Street was his first investing book. Then came Burton Malkiel's A Random Walk Down Wall Street, all of Warren Buffett's letters, Ben Graham and Howard Marks. He calls the result a strong bedrock of financial understanding. Asked on The Knowledge Project how Buffett carried over to venture, he said the foundation is what you build on once you see the need to innovate.
The second half comes from his venture work. Every technology wave opens a gap that newcomers can take from incumbents, and right now that wave is AI. The founders working it, he says, go home at night and read everything they can, because the edge keeps moving. Gurley keeps five paid AI accounts so he does not miss something.
