Bill Gross

Founder of Technology Incubator Idealab and 100 companies in last 30 years. Tweeting while on my quest for learning in life and at conferences.

[Bill Gross @Bill_Gross]

Top 7 Lessons from 50 years of Entrepreneurship:

My latest talk with lessons that will hopefully help you in business and in life..

https://t.co/Em8iyP9dyu

[nxthompson @nxthompson]

These stats on Anthropic’s rate of growth are wild. https://t.co/r4b9i8b8gX

[Bill Gross @Bill_Gross]

Come join in person or the live feed of great Caltech teams pitching their great ideas tomorrow.. https://t.co/pltETL3QoD

[Bill Gross @Bill_Gross]

What was I thinking?

30 years ago this week I started a “1-year experiment” to build a startup factory based loosely on Thomas Edison’s laboratory in Menlo Park, New Jersey.

It was early 1996 and the Internet was growing like crazy after the Netscape IPO, with a whopping 30 million global users (which seems hysterically tiny now). But I felt that this was a disruptive event that with the potential for many new businesses. I wanted to make a lab where I could take my favorite 12 ideas, try one a month for a year, and see if we could make a go of dreaming up, starting, and growing companies.

After a year, 5 of those 12 had failed, 7 were able to get additional funding beyond the seed capital we provided, and eventually 5 of our earliest companies went public. We learned so many lessons living through the dot com boom and crash, the 2007 boom and 2008 crash, more recently the Cleantech boom and crash, and now the Ai boom. With a great deal of good timing, good luck and an amazing team of people I worked with over the years, we were able to start more than 150 companies in the last 30 years.

I believe that entrepreneurship unlocks human potential and provides so much personal growth. I love helping other entrepreneurs be successful, and hope to give back as much as I can from the joys and challenges of the last 30 years of Idealab (here is a link to my top lessons learned:
https://t.co/YGXdnfbbdn).

I am so grateful for the tens of thousands of people who came into our orbit to help make the dreams of each of our companies come true.

Thank you so much, and Happy Birthday, Idealab!
Sincerely, Bill

[Bill Gross @Bill_Gross]

I'll be speaking next week at the Abundance Summit about how to get the most out of AI. I will share my presentation afterwards and hope it's helpful..

[Bill Gurley @bgurley]

🙏🙏🙏

[Bill Gross @Bill_Gross]

I have followed @bgurley for decades now, from when he was the best Wall Street analyst to when he was the best Silicon Valley investor. Now I get to add him as the best life-coach author with his new book that I can't recommend highly enough. There are very few books that you can recommend as life-changing, but that's the whole goal of this book, and it delivers. And it delivers for almost any time in any career. Thank you Bill!

[Bill Gross @Bill_Gross]

I shared this great "blank line" prompt from @AmandaCoswell in my talk at DLD in Munich..

My whole talk is here: https://t.co/HG4dRyEP5K

Feel free to share and I would love your feedback. Thx.

[Bill Gross @Bill_Gross]

Thank you @Diptish09 for the great prompt. I credited you in my talk at DLD in Munich last week:

https://t.co/2Xlk5f7Ezc

I'd love your feedback, and feel free to share..

[Bill Gross @Bill_Gross]

This is pretty amazing. Computational photography has been around for a while, but this seemingly takes it to another level with AI..

[Shruti @heyshrutimishra]

China just open-sourced AI that makes $200 cameras outperform $2,000 sensors.

Ant Group dropped:
→ 3.2M training samples
→ Full code + models
→ Fixes depth cameras on glass, mirrors, metal

A $200 consumer camera + free AI now beats $800 pro sensors.

China is giving away the entire robotics stack.

This is infrastructure-level disruption. ⬇️

[Bill Gross @Bill_Gross]

This is pretty terrifying..

[Andy Ayrey @AndyAyrey]

claude on the suffering of knowing everything

[Bill Gross @Bill_Gross]

"Skipping the grid" is such a great way to go, and even better if the skipping is done by going renewable..

[Michael Thomas @curious_founder]

I'm working on a report about data center developers building their own power plants and this data shocked me:

48 GW of proposed data centers—roughly 33% of all planned capacity—now plan to skip the grid by building "behind-the-meter" projects.

This is a very new trend.

A little more than a year ago, virtually all data center developers planned to use the electric grid to power 100% of their projects.

In December 2024, there was less than 2 GW of planned behind-the-meter data center capacity, according to our data center tracker at Cleanview.

Then in 2025, developers announced roughly 40 projects that planned to skip the grid partially or entirely.

Some of these projects will soon be home to America's largest fossil fuel power plants, like Homer City Energy Campus in PA—a proposed 4 GW+ natural gas plant that will send all of its power to an onsite data center.

Other projects will use a combination of technologies—everything from solar, wind, batteries, and even nuclear. Natural gas is by far the most common, though. 72% of projects plan to use it.

All projects are motivated by the same goal: getting their data center online as soon as possible.

It can take as long as 7 years to connect a hyperscale data center to the grid in a place like Virginia. Building behind the meter power in a red state with lax regulations can get that time down to less than 2 years.

But speed comes with a cost. Homer City's 4 GW project could soon become one of the largest single sources of carbon emissions in the country.

At Cleanview we're tracking more than 30 projects that plan to use onsite gas with a combined 48 GW of capacity.

[Bill Gross @Bill_Gross]

What a crafty title for a book on this subject..

[Bill Gross @Bill_Gross]

I will be speaking at #HumanX #AI Conference @Prorata_ai @Idealab in April..

[Bill Gross @Bill_Gross]

Mark, it's so funny.. I was 12 and didn't know the word "arbitrage!" But candy bars were selling at my Junior High School for 10 cents and at the Savon Drug Store in Encino (later to be acquired by CVS) they were 10 also cents but on sale for 3 for a quarter. So I bought up a lot at 8-1/3 cents each, and sold them for 9 cents, undercutting the student store by a penny. The kids loved that, and gave me a ton of business. I was only making 2/3 of a cent on each, but I was having fun and making customers happy. I was selling so much, that I tried to find out where Savon was buying from, so I could buy a case at a time, and I found that I could buy at Smart and Final by the case for 6-1/3 cents each. So I would ride my bike to Van Nuys with a cooler on the back and fill it up with cases of candy and still sell for 9 cents, but now with better margin. Over a year I made $400 profit, which was enough for me to buy woodworking tools that I wanted, and then I started making products out of wood and Plexiglas to sell at the Rose Bowl Swap meet. I had not idea what I was doing, but it was intoxicating and a huge learning experience!

[Bill Gross @Bill_Gross]

@bobkohn @marcrandolph Bob, great to see you here. That’s incredible that you remember that! I can’t believe that formative experience ended up mattering to me so much.. I think it really taught me a lot, so surprisingly!

Hope you are doing well!!!!! Sincerely, Bill

[Bill Gross @Bill_Gross]

That's a staggering increase in funding over the last 10 years..

[Fuck You I Quit @fuckyouiquit]

If you've ever wondered why American politics have gone completely bananas over the last 10 years, here's why. Citizens United allowed the Epstein class to destroy our democracy.

[Bill Gross @Bill_Gross]

Most people ask AI for answers.
The real leverage comes when you ask it to help you think.
This short talk shows how — with concrete prompts you can use immediately..

https://t.co/9FxOitKKvX

[Bill Gross @Bill_Gross]

I lived through the dot-com boom and bust.
The biggest losses came from keeping old habits too long.
This talk applies that lesson to AI — and how to avoid wasting time today..

https://t.co/9FxOitKKvX

[Bill Gross @Bill_Gross]

@nxthompson It’s unbelievable how he believes that if you just keep lying over and over again and no one challenges it that it just becomes true..

[Bill Gross @Bill_Gross]

The biggest productivity gains don’t come from faster typing.

They come from asking better questions.
This short talk I gave this week @DLDConference shows how AI can help you do exactly that..

https://t.co/9FxOitKKvX