Benchmark general partner Bill Gurley on Monday said the artificial intelligence wave is real and a lot of people got rich quick, but he expects a “reset” to come.
“When people get rich quick, a whole bunch of people come in and want to get rich too, and that’s why we end up with bubbles,” Gurley told CNBC’s “Money Movers.”
Gurley referenced the work of Carlota Perez, an economic scholar who wrote “Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages,” and noted that “bubbles only exist when the actual wave is real.”
The venture capitalist said that when the reset happens, investors should have a price in mind for beat-down software-as-a-service stocks, “and start gobbling them up.”
AI has threatened to disrupt segments across the economy, but software stocks have been particularly hard-hit recently. Salesforce and ServiceNow have each lost about 25% so far in 2026. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF (IGV), which generally tracks the sector, is down about 20% this year.
Tech companies are spending at record rates, due to massive investments in AI infrastructure and soaring memory costs. AI spending for Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft is projected to be about $700 billion this year.
Benchmark was an early investor in Uber, and Gurley played a key role in the exit of then-CEO Travis Kalanick in 2017.
Gurley said Uber’s annual burn rate of $2 billion during his involvement was “high anxiety” as he pointed to the much higher numbers from today’s big model companies.
“God bless them,” Gurley said of AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI that are burning through cash. “It’s a scary way to run a company.”
