Bill Gurley (@bgurley) is a general partner at Benchmark, a leading venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. Over his venture career, he has invested in and served on the boards of such companies as Nextdoor, OpenTable, Stitch Fix, Uber, and Zillow. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in computer science from the University of Florida and then his MBA from the University of Texas at Austin. For more than two decades, Bill has written about technology and other subjects on his popular blog Above the Crowd and on his social media accounts.
I interviewed Bill for the second time recently, and we got into his new book Runnin’ Down a Dream: How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love, which will come out next month and is now available for preorder.
To give you a taste, I asked Bill if we might reprint a chapter on the blog, and he and his publisher kindly agreed.
Enter Bill . . .
PRINCIPLE V
GO WHERE THE ACTION IS
If you want to start a tech company, go to Silicon Valley. If you want to be in movies, go to L.A. Geography still matters.
—Brian Chesky, cofounder and CEO of Airbnb
By the time Tony Fadell graduated from the University of Michigan, he already had more entrepreneurial experience in his field than virtually all of his peers. As a teenager in the mid-1980s, he created a semiconductor company that sold parts to Apple. He had another company that sold mail-order software for the Apple II, and he also started a third company, with one of his professors, that sold educational software for Mac computers. He skipped his first week of college classes to man a booth at the Applefest in San Francisco.
Tony had spent years reading everything he could about the computer industry, mostly in Byte Magazine and MacWorld. In story after story, he read about companies based in the Valley. Studying the ads in the magazines, he noted that most of the company addresses were also in Northern California.
He flew out to Silicon Valley a few times a year for meetings, all on his own dime, and he absolutely loved it. On one trip, he rented a car and drove to the original Fry’s Electronics in Sunnyvale—“a superstore, like Costco, for everything under the sun in the world of electronics.” For a kid who grew up obsessed with computers and building technology—in elementary school he rigged his clock radio to put a headphone jack in it so he could listen to music all night without his parents knowing—this journey felt more like a pilgrimage.
“I was like ‘Ho-ly shit!’” he told me. Decades later, you can still hear that original awe in his voice.
Tony knew that when he graduated, he needed to move to Silicon Valley, the epicenter of the industry he loved. At first he thought he wanted an internship at Apple, which was run by John Sculley at the time. The company flew Tony to Cupertino and put him up in a nice hotel with a fruit basket waiting in the room. But when they offered him the internship, Tony declined.
To his surprise, they offered him a full-time job, working at a joint venture Apple was doing with IBM. But again, stunningly, Tony turned them down. He had his eye on a different job. “I said, ‘No, I don’t want anything to do with that,’” he told me. “I wanted General Magic.”
At the time, Tony didn’t even know what General Magic was doing, but a few years earlier he read about Silicon Valley computer engineer legends Bill Atkinson and Andy Hertzfeld in a Rolling Stone story profiling the Mac team. As Tony was flying to the West Coast, doing these interviews, he read in the back of one of his tech magazines that some of these big names had begun a secretive spinoff from Apple. “I’m like, ‘Whatever it is,’” Tony told me, “‘that’s where I want to be.’”
Despite his remarkable résumé and network of contacts, Tony was told that there weren’t any openings at General Magic—but that just made him want it more. So on one of his trips to California, Tony decided to go to the General Magic building, in downtown Mountain View, and present himself unannounced. He found the address in the Yellow Pages and drove over at 8:30 a.m. He wore a jacket and tie and a big, naive midwestern smile. But when he got to the building, it was mostly empty. Security dogs roamed the halls, ready to attack any intruder. When he found the right floor, he walked up with his résumé in his hand. The office door was open. Inside, he found—nothing. “It was just cube wall after cube wall, a desolate cube area,” he says.
As he walked through the rows of cubes, he thought he was completely alone. But then he spotted two men in a cube and they looked like they’d been up all night. Undaunted, Tony made sure that this was indeed the General Magic office—they said it was—and offered up his résumé. Without even looking at it, the two men told him the company wasn’t hiring. So Tony left and went back home to Michigan.
At this point, leaving the Valley gave him something akin to withdrawal symptoms. Michigan seemed bleak. “I went back to Ann Arbor and it was literally a frozen tundra,” he told me. “I kept asking myself what I was doing there.”
It is different now, but at the time Michigan did not have a community of technology enthusiasts like those in the Valley. There were no startups. It felt like people there barely spoke the same language. So he was even more convinced that he needed to be in California— and more specifically, he needed to be at General Magic.
First, he racked his brain to think of anyone he knew at Apple, anyone who might be able to open a door there for him. He made some calls, pleading his case, and it took a few months, but eventually he got a call back from a woman at General Magic named Dee Gardetti. Tony didn’t know it at the time, but Dee was the fourth employee at the company and she was the head of HR. She told him she was impressed with his résumé and she would see what she could do. She told him to be patient.
But Tony is not a particularly patient person. He started mailing letters to the company. He estimates that he sent between fifteen and twenty old-school letters, pleading for a job. As time went by, he graduated from Michigan and moved back in with his parents. He sold his educational software company. He turned down numerous other jobs—much to the chagrin of his parents. He was relentless, but he was also charming. When he called Dee, he was able to make her laugh and win her support. Then, in November 1991, nearly seven months after that original unannounced visit, Tony was invited back for an interview.
He flew back out to the Valley, put on his jacket and tie, and showed up to General Magic’s new office in Mountain View. “There were no dogs this time,” he jokes.
But now, after all this time and this relentless pursuit, Tony began to feel something all of us have felt at one point or another: imposter syndrome. “I’m like, ‘What am I doing here?’ I’m totally melting. I’m seeing these people that I’ve idolized, my heroes, they’re interviewing me. I’m just a little kid.”
He was told to take off his tie and his jacket. He was told to sit on the floor like everyone else, around an arcade machine in the middle of the office. As he got more comfortable, Tony showed the General Magic team his senior project: a portable touchscreen computer— something most people had never heard of in 1991.
Well, it turned out that General Magic, this top-secret company of superstars, had been working on a portable device with a touchscreen, the earliest iterations of what would become the smartphone. Some of their partners and investors included Sony, Motorola, and AT&T.
Tony thought the interviews went well, but he left without a job offer. He went back to Michigan, where the chill of autumn was morphing into the bitter cold of winter. More than two weeks later, he finally got the call from Dee.
“I want to let you know you’re going to be a diagnostic engineer on the hardware team at General Magic,” she told him. “And you can start right away.”
Tony still remembers running around and screaming when he got the call. His salary was $28,000, below the cost of living in the Valley at the time, but he didn’t care. He packed up his car, said goodbye to his parents, left his mother crying in the driveway, and headed to California.
Tony is a good friend of mine, and we’ll discuss some of his incredible accomplishments later, but I want to highlight this part of his story for a reason. He made the audacious decision to move, not just to the geographic center of the industry he wanted to work in, but to the one company where so many of his idols had come together.
It’s a hard decision and often a hard pursuit, but if you have the chance, put yourself in the center of the action.
GO WHERE THE ACTION IS
As your dream job journey evolves, you may eventually confront a decision with enormous consequences: Should I physically relocate in order to maximize my chance of overall success?
Of course, many of us move away for the first time to attend college. And that is not the end of the world. We meet new people, we meet new friends, we are exposed to new cultures and experiences. We learn and grow. Making that decision a second time can and will have a profound impact on your chances of dream job success. It may seem incredibly intimidating, but it may also be the best decision you make in your entire life.
Your journey may not be as dramatic as Bob Dylan hitchhiking from Minnesota to Greenwich Village. I relocated twice in my career— first to New York and then to Silicon Valley—partly because I saw how my dad benefited from moving from Virginia to Houston to work at NASA.
The truth is, different industries are bigger and more prominent in different places—for all sorts of reasons. The tech industry and a disproportionate number of start-ups are in the San Francisco Bay Area. For finance and banking, it’s New York City. New York is also the center of the book publishing world and America’s theater scene. But for television and film, the epicenter is Los Angeles. Government and policy? Washington, D.C. Biotech and pharma? That’s Boston. Oil and energy? Houston. The automotive industry is still largely based in De- troit. If you want to make it as a singer-songwriter, you’ll probably have to spend some time in Nashville, regardless of your genre.
A few industries have multiple hubs, which means you’ll have more choices. The fashion industry, for example, is big in Milan, Paris, New York, and L.A. If you want to make it in esports, you can probably pick between Tokyo, Seoul, or Los Angeles—though you’ll have a ton of other factors to consider as you decide.
Being in these places puts you in the flow of the industry. You are surrounded by people who speak the language. You are closer to decision-makers, mentors, collaborators. You are able to learn faster, move faster, be seen more quickly. And sometimes, most importantly, you are simply reminded that this is real—that there are people who are doing the thing you want to do, every single day.
Regardless of the geography, there are at least ten ways relocating can help your career.
1. More jobs—There are just more opportunities where the industry is dense.
2. More networking—You’re greatly increasing the chances you’ll bump into people in your field.
3. More mentors and more peers—The best in the business are often just a coffee shop away.
4. More events—Meetups, panels, workshops—they’re happening much more often in the industry’s epicenter.
5. Exposure to trends—You’re first to see what’s next.
6. Résumé credibility—“She’s based in L.A.” or “He worked in New York” carries weight.
7. Faster advancement—Your chances of moving up go up when you’re where things are happening.
8. Higher pay—It’s more competitive and often more expensive, but these places also come with higher compensation.
9. Serendipity—The breakthrough meeting, the unexpected connection—it’s more likely to happen when you’re immersed. You create your own luck.
10. Fun and energy—You’re surrounded by people who care about the same things. That matters. If you truly love your chosen field, that will excite you.
I saw this in Silicon Valley. I watched people have lunch with billionaires, go to talks by start-up founders who had just IPO’d, meet cofounders over coffee. People in the Valley take time to respond to authentic requests for learning and advice. I felt it on the way up, and I have tried to reciprocate and continue the tradition. It is a vibe you don’t necessarily see in other places. I have heard plenty of similar stories about musicians in Nashville. They move there with no guarantees. But they know one thing: The best people are here. I want to be around that.
That’s the idea. You want to roll around in it. If the idea of being immersed in your industry doesn’t appeal to you, you might need to go back to the first principle and reconsider whether this is truly your passion. You should want to be so steeped in your craft that large parts of it become second nature.
Immersion isn’t passive—it’s transformative. When you’re fully submerged in the culture of your field’s epicenter, learning accelerates. Opportunities multiply. Your network organically expands. Immersion creates a powerful osmosis effect, exponentially accelerating your growth and visibility.
All of this can seem intimidating, I know. Maybe it sounds too competitive. Being nervous about a step like this is totally understandable. My advice: Try your best to remove those thoughts from your mind.
VIRTUAL AND EMERGING EPICENTERS
So what if you just really can’t relocate? We live in an era where physical relocation is not the only option. Virtual epicenters can also propel your career. You can engage deeply with Reddit groups and Twitter/X communities. You can consume or even participate in Twitch streams, podcasts, LinkedIn groups, virtual courses on almost any subject.
You can establish yourself with an online presence through content curation, expert interviews, and consistent digital engagement. If you have something interesting and thoughtful to say about a subject on a regular basis, you will build an audience eventually.
To be clear: These are all things you should be considering whether you have already relocated or not. This is part of the learning process, part of building a peer network, and part of seeking out mentors. Physical proximity will likely give you an extra advantage, but in today’s world you should be utilizing every tool available.
There are also industry epicenters that seem to bubble up, sometimes in surprising locales. In the 1970s, northern Florida became a hub of Southern Rock, producing a stunning lineup of bands that included Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Brothers Band, and 38 Special—all from Jacksonville. Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers formed around the same time down the road in Gainesville.
A few years ago, comedian Ron White encouraged Joe Rogan to relocate to Austin. For more than two decades, Rogan lived in Los Angeles, one of the two or three big hubs for top-tier stand-up comedy, along with New York and Boston. Rogan was a staple at The Comedy Store on the Sunset Strip. For years, he went several nights a week. He honed his act with two or three short sets in a night and spent the rest of his time hanging out with his fellow comedians in the venue’s legendary green room.
In March 2023, Rogan opened his own club, Comedy Mothership, on Sixth Street in downtown Austin. He named the bar Mitzi’s, after Mitzi Shore, the woman who owned The Comedy Store until her death in 2018. Rogan brought Adam Eget, one of The Comedy Store’s bookers, to Austin to help launch the business. Around the same time, other prominent national comedians relocated from both Los Angeles and New York. Within a few years, the Austin comedy scene included Tom Segura and his wife Christina P, Tony Hinchcliffe, and Shane Gillis. They are all regulars at the Mothership, and now nearly every big comic has to stop in Austin a few times a year.
But something else happened, too. Other smaller comedy clubs started popping up all over town. There were more open mics and more paying gigs. As Tony Hinchcliffe’s podcast, Kill Tony, got more popular, more and more aspiring comics migrated to Austin instead of New York or L.A. Austin has officially become a comedy hub. Though they tour a lot, comedians still need a quality base to sculpt and workshop their material.
Of course, some professions are itinerant by nature. Some industries don’t have traditional hubs. Think about sports. If you want to be a college or professional coach, you will probably need to relocate several times. That is true whether you are an assistant or a head coach. It is certainly true for athletic directors. Chances are your next job will not be in the same place as your last one. This is true of journalists, too. As you come up in the industry, you will likely have to move a few times.
But even these itinerant occupations have industry events, reasons to come together in the same place. There are annual conferences, key networking events that function as temporary epicenters. In these industries, it’s even more important to seek out and connect with mentors and experts and to stay in touch with peers.
RELOCATING IS HARD
I know this is not easy. Moving is expensive and stressful. Most of us are not nomadic by nature. We crave stability. Relocating is one of the single most disruptive things you can do in life. Maybe your parents live nearby, and you are the one they lean on. Maybe your kids love their school and your weekends are filled with soccer games and birthday parties. Maybe you have built a close-knit community over years, or decades, and the idea of leaving that feels like tearing something sacred.
Moving also means facing more intense competition. You might know more about a subject than anyone else in your graduating class, but once you move to an industry hub, you are suddenly the lowest person on the totem pole. But careers are not zero-sum games. Competition is a tide that raises all boats. Sure, for a while everyone you encounter will know more than you, but that just means you will have the opportunity to learn infinitely faster than you would if you stayed at home.
You might also need a “support job” while you grind. Plenty of struggling actors found other gigs to pay the rent—sometimes for years—before landing a breakthrough role. Some of the best musicians in America spent substantial portions of their lives busking on sidewalks or playing for free in grimy bars. That perseverance can pay off. Sometimes the first job will not be the big career winner. It may just be a critical stepping-stone.
That is what happened with Tony Fadell.
After he finally got that job at General Magic, he worked there for three and a half years. But the company was not a success story. General Magic’s failure has become one of the most important legends in the history of Silicon Valley. (It’s also the subject of a great documentary that I would highly encourage everyone to watch.) However, joining General Magic put Tony squarely in the epicenter of the Valley. And the connections he made there were part of an amazing foundation that would help launch him to greater and greater heights.
After leaving General Magic, Tony continued his pursuit and passion for designing breakthrough portable computing devices. His next stop was building the Philips Mobile Computing group, where he assumed the role of CTO at the age of twenty-five. After four years there and a brief dance with Real Networks, he started his own company in 1999 called Fuse, which aimed to be the “Dell of Consumer Electronics.” That timing was not ideal, as the dot-com crash made it difficult for Fuse to raise its second round of financing. Tony kept grinding.
After ten years, Apple hired Tony through an eight-week consulting contract to develop a new MP3 music player. Tony’s nine years in Silicon Valley, and the learning he had done through nearly a decade of working on mobile computing products, were finally about to pay off. After a successful consulting gig, Apple hired Tony internally. Within a year, Apple would launch their first MP3 player, the iPod, which would eventually sell over 450 million units. After that, Tony assumed the role of head of engineering for the iPhone. We all know how that turned out. Apple has sold 2.3 billion iPhones, making it the most successful mobile computing device of all time.
Tony wasn’t done. He later left Apple to build yet another mass consumer product via Nest Labs. Nest launched a breakthrough product—the Nest Learning Thermostat—which would revolutionize the home automation industry. If you don’t have one, you’ve probably stayed in an Airbnb with a Nest thermostat.
Google eventually acquired Nest for $3.2 billion. Since leaving Google, Tony has become a prolific angel investor and has authored a bestselling book that I would recommend to everyone dedicated to finding their own unique career pathway—Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making.
Think of your dream as a seed. The epicenter of your industry is the fertile soil that allows that seed to flourish. Embrace the challenge—not as an end in itself, but as the necessary step toward meaningful growth. If the idea of moving ignites something within you, trust that instinct. You already have your answer. Go where the action is.
From Runnin’ Down a Dream: How to Thrive in a Career You Actually Love by Bill Gurley, available for preorder, to be published on 2/24/2026 by Crown Currency, an imprint of The Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2026 by Bill Gurley. Reprinted with permission.
Photo by Zetong Li
