Start-ups nowadays present a greater risk to investors because they're getting too much money before maturing as companies, Bill Gurley said Friday.
"The problem that's driving the risk is just the large amounts of money that are going into these nascent private companies," the general partner at Benchmark told CNBC's "Squawk Alley." "If you go back 10 to 15 years ago, it was very rare for any company to raise more than, say, $50 million prior to their IPO. Now we're cramming hundreds of millions of dollars into companies that are very early-staged."
The Wall Street Journal reported on Feb. 18 that there are 73 start-ups valued at at least $1 billion around the world.
Gurley added that receiving large amounts of money at such an early stage can ultimately cripple startups down the road. "The money that goes in piles up in terms of liquidation preference and eventually that turns into such a big weight that they can't get more financing. You saw that with Aereo," he said.
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Aereo, a company that provided live television streaming on Internet-connected devices, filed for bankruptcy last November and raised about $2 million from its assets auction this week.
Hopefully, if we get five to 10 of those, people will start acting a little more sane," he also said. Nevertheless, Gurley said he believed this trend would continue. "From my point of view, it's better if we don't accelerate the stupidity. If that happens, we're going to have a really big correction. I'd rather see something that's more pragmatic."