All-In Summit: Bill Gurley presents 2,851 Miles
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters repeatedly recommend it as the clearest explanation of regulatory capture, and cite it in threads on AI regulation, GDPR and telecom.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 5 HN commenters across 6 different months, 2023 to 2026.
What Hacker News said
Strong rec nycdatasci · 2023-09 · on “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. [this video]
Strong rec filereaper · 2023-10 · on “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. [this video]
Strong rec filereaper · 2023-10 · on “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. [this video]
Recommends WestCoastJustin · 2023-11 · on “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] [this video]
Recommends miketery · 2024-01 · on “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 - [this video]
Recommends nycdatasci · 2024-04 · on “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. [this video] Glad to see the clause was nixed!
Recommends shivasaxena · 2025-07 · on “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 bott
Cites Seanambers · 2024-11 · on “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 ; [this video] Regulatory capture.