Skyrocketing venture capital investments can also cause sleepless nights: a story of Uber, rising public ire, and the man trying to keep it all together

Venture capital fund Benchmark made an investment years ago in a startup that was disrupting the taxi industry. The name of the company was Uber and the investment was made at a $50 million valuation. Softbank - of Sprint fame - is currently undercutting recent funding valuations by offering to buy out a number of initial investors in Uber at a valuation of $48 BILLION. You can do the math. Benchmark made a fortune and is currently holding about $8 billion in Uber stock. And this is after the scandals that engulfed the company.

Bill Gurley is the man behind Benchmark's move into Uber, amid many other successful ventures. But Uber has far outperformed its other investments with massive, outsized, unrealized gains out of a fund that was initially "only" $425 million. Throughout 2017, Uber has gone through cataclysmic change, from the ousting of allegedly badly-behaved CEO Travis Kalanick to a complete overhaul of the company's bro culture.

Although investors may have dispassionately read disturbing headlines about the situation at Uber, Bill Gurley made the difficult decision to terminate the former CEO, hire his replacement, and work on repairing Uber's reputation. All the while, investors' calculus for evaluating Uber was shifting. Although the process was difficult, Softbank's current interest in Uber may be concrete evidence that he may just have been successful.

Read about Bill Gurley's year: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/14/bill-gurley-2017-profile-uber-stitchfix-snap.html