Education and Early Career
Gurley was born in Dickinson, Texas, outside of Houston, on May 10, 1966. Gurley received his MBA from the University of Texas in 1993 and his Bachelor of Science from the University of Florida in 1989, where he was a member of the men’s basketball team.
Prior to his investment career, Gurley was a design engineer at Compaq Computer, where he worked on products such as the 486/50 and Compaq's first multi-processor server. Before Compaq, he worked in the technical marketing group of Advanced Micro Devices' embedded processor division. With both a financial/business and engineering background he “has a way of sizing things up that makes him both intriguing and highly quotable."
Before joining Benchmark in 1999, Gurley was a partner at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. He had also spent four years on Wall Street as a research analyst, including three years at CS First Boston. He was considered “one of Wall Street’s premier technology analysts." He covered companies including Dell, Compaq and Microsoft and was the lead analyst on the Amazon.com IPO.
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