Rick Tetzeli: So what are you telling your portfolio companies? Bill Gurley: I try to convey that they need to get in front of this. In a couple meetings, I’ve heard an owner or founder say, “Well, you know, we just need to buckle down until things get back to where they were.” And I’m, like, “No, the fantasy was the past five years.” What we’re in now may just be normal, right? This may be average. And that’s very hard for people. It’s especially hard for a founder. This will sound trite, but a founder who, say, owns 15 percent of a company that raised a round at $1 billion has done the math. They’ve mentally banked that they’re worth $150 million—pretax, of course, but they forget that.

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