All-In Summit: Bill Gurley presents 2,851 Miles

All-In Podcast5 HN recommenders · 2023–2026
583K views · talk · evergreen · Uploaded 2023-09-16

Bill Gurley's talk at the All-In Summit 2023, titled 2,851 Miles after the distance between Washington and San Francisco. He describes how incumbents use lobbying and regulation to entrench themselves, followed by a conversation with the hosts.

HN commenters repeatedly recommend it as the clearest explanation of regulatory capture, and cite it in threads on AI regulation, GDPR and telecom.

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9 comments from Hacker News

@nycdatasci2023 · in “Saint Helena Island Communications”

Relatedly, it's worth watching the entire Bill Gurley talk at the recent All-In Summit. Edit: Updating link to jump to the relevant section of the talk. [VIDEO]

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@filereaper2023 · in “Congress Should Regulate Artificial Intelligence”

I strongly encourage watching Bill Gurley's talk from the All-In Summit about whenever Congress gets involved with regulations and technology. [VIDEO]

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@filereaper2023 · in “Canada Plans to Regulate Search and Social Media Use of AI”

I strongly encourage watching Bill Gurley's talk from the All-In Summit about whenever Government gets involved with regulations and technology. [VIDEO]

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@WestCoastJustin2023 · in “Establishment of the U.S. Artificial Intelligence Safety Institute”

Great way to understand how all this works is watching All-In Summit: Bill Gurley presents 2,851 Miles[1]. Basically, regulate your competition into the ground. [1] [VIDEO]

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@miketery2024 · in “Everyone hates the electronic medical record”

Related, I recommend watching Bill Gurley's talk [1] on regulatory capture from 4 months ago. It basically covers why the path to solving this is a difficult if not impossible one. 1 - [VIDEO]

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@nycdatasci2024 · in “Anti-municipal broadband budget amendment gets nixed in New York”

Bill Gurley’s talk during the 2023 All-In Summit provides interesting perspective on the type of regulatory capture that leads to bill modifications like this. It’s worth listening to if you have an idle 30 mins. [VIDEO] Glad to see the clause was nixed!

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@Seanambers2024 · in “Analysis of economic and productivity losses caused by cookie banners in Europe”

This is the EU in a nutshell. You also have quite a few people defending this. GDPR is basically exactly what Bill Gurley talks about here ; [VIDEO] Regulatory capture.

@shivasaxena2025 · in “EU Commission finds Temu in breach of online platform rules”

I work for a Swiss POS firm. We buy all our peripherals like tablet stands etc, and merchandising from Temu since it's 5-10x time cheaper and is same or better quality. We are competing with well funded companies like lighspeed/toast so it's been great help for us. Funny incident our CEO just mentioned to me yesterday: She ordered stickers from a local shop without asking the price, and on delivery had to pay 200 CHF for 20 stickers so 10 CHF/sticker. Next time she ordered from temu and got them at 20 CHF for 200 stickers so 0.1 CHF/sticker. At least to me it's clear this is plain and simple regulatory capture by inefficient european retailers. In supermarkets I have to pay 12 EUR for a bottle opener that I can get for 2 EUR on temu. Amazon.de for example launched free delivery to estonia and other small european countries only recently post rise of temu. These actions by EU commision are vehemently anti-consumer and anti-business under the transparent guise of being pro-consumer and pro-business. Would recommend Bill Gurly's talk about regulatory capture if anyone is interested [VIDEO]

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@positron262026 · in “OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line”

Bill Gureley's talk on regulation comes to mind: [VIDEO] The reason barking at open source will only get the dog thrown into the river is because there is a whole lot more cumulative power distributed among companies and consumers who don't want two incumbents to dictate which kinds of alternatives can exist. Note that those rushing to the "all corpos evil" talking points will turn around and advocate delegating these decisions to "the government." This is the same government that they also claim is bought by the corporations. It's also the same government that will enforce the regulatory capture on behalf of the yucky corporation against the broad, diverse interests. Thinking big vs small while embracing the biggest of the big is some kind of inconsistency that people need to deal with by looking in the mirror and finding some awareness. Nuance. If your problem model is wrong, so is every solution you propose except if your wrong model may get lucky from time to time. Not every broken model is a broken clock. Some broken models cannot admit the right answer ever. The real dynamic on display here is broad, correlated mass of overlapping interests, big and small. The big pile of people and entities that don't want to be governed by OpenAI and Anthropic can push harder and win the tug of war. You don't have to like your temporary allies all the time, but at least know who they are and when you are aligned.