Please enjoy this transcript of my interview with Elad Gil (@eladgil), CEO of Gil & Co, a multi-stage investment firm, holding company, and operating company working on the world’s most advanced technologies. Elad is a serial entrepreneur, operating executive, and investor or advisor to private companies, including AirBnB, Anduril, Coinbase, Figma, Instacart, OpenAI, SpaceX, and Stripe. He was previously VP of Corporate Strategy at Twitter and started mobile at Google. He was the founder and CEO of Mixerlabs and Color. Elad is the author of the bestseller High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups from 10 to 10,000 People.
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Tim Ferriss: Elad, nice to see you. Thanks for making the time. Appreciate it.
Elad Gil: Great to see you, as always.
Tim Ferriss: I thought we could begin with something we were chatting about, or you were explaining before we started recording, which is a new phenomenon of sorts. Could you explain what we were just talking about?
Elad Gil: Oh yeah, we were just talking about some of the acquisitions that are happening in the AI world. We saw that xAI just got an option to effectively purchase Cursor, it looks like. Obviously, Scale was partially taken by Meta. There’s been a variety of these deals that have been happening over the last year or two.
And separate from that, we were just talking about, well, what does that mean for the AI research community and the AI community in general? And I think the most interesting, or one of the interesting things that’s happened over the last year or so is Meta really started aggressively bidding on AI talent, which was a very rational strategy. They’re going to spend tens of billions of dollars on compute, so it made sense to have a real budget to go after people. And normally, what happens in tech is a single company will go public, and a bunch of people from that company will be enriched and then a subset of them will continue to be heads down and working really hard and focused on their original mission. And a subset of people will start to get distracted. They may go and work on passion projects for society. They may get involved with politics. They may go start a company. They may just check out and hang out or go to the beach kind of thing.
And what happened recently is because of the Meta offers and then all the other major tech companies having to match offers for their best researchers, somewhere between 50 and a few hundred people effectively had an IPO, but is a class of people. It wasn’t like they were at one company. They were spread across Silicon Valley, but all of their pay packages suddenly went up dramatically and they experienced the equivalent of an IPO, and that’s really unusual. It’s kind of the personal IPO. And the only time in history I can think of where I’ve seen it happen before is in crypto where a bunch of the really early crypto holders or founders suddenly as a class all went effectively public in ’20, I guess ’17-ish, and then again, more recently.
But this is really interesting, it’s under discussed. It may not have huge long-term implications, but it does mean a subset of people will change what they’re focused on, try and do big science projects to help humanity work on AI for science maybe. Maybe some people will go off and do personal quests or things like that.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Or just “quiet quit” and do lots of drugs and chase vices. I mean, there’s that too.
Elad Gil: Definitely that.
Tim Ferriss: In that case, you look around, say Austin, you’ve got the Dellionaires, which refers to Dell post-IPO or early employees and so on. But as a class of people, when that happens, I suppose we don’t know how large or how long term the implications are, but there seem to be implications. And I know only a few people who I would go to as technical enough and also broad enough in their awareness and networks to watch AI. To the extent that someone can watch it comprehensively, I would put you in that bucket. And you wrote this week just to talk about some of the other elements at play here, the compute constraints that AI labs are facing and the implications maybe for the next one to five years. This is in a piece people should check out: “Random Thoughts While Gazing at the Misty AI Frontier.” Good headline, by the way.
Elad Gil: Very dramatic.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, very dramatic, I love it. It’s very evocative. So would you mind explaining, actually, before we move to the compute constraints, because I do want you to talk to that next, but for people who don’t have any real context on the talent wars and what you were just mentioning earlier with Meta, on the high end, what does some of these pay/equity packages, compensation packages look like that are getting offered?
Elad Gil: Yeah. I don’t have exact knowledge of the full range and everything else. The rumors and the things that have made it into the press, the claims are that these things are between tens of millions and hundreds of millions of dollars per person. And again, it’s a very small number of people who would get anything that’s outsized. But I think the basic idea is we’re in one of the most important technology races of all times. The faster that we get to better and better AI, the more economic value will effectively show up. And therefore, people are really willing to pay in an outsized way for the handful of people who are the world’s best at this thing.
And five, 10 years ago, these people were well compensated, but it was a completely different ballgame because it just wasn’t the core of everything that’s happening in technology. But also honestly, societally and politically and for education and health, it’s going to have all these really broad, and I think largely positive implications for the world, but it is the moment of transformation, and so suddenly these pay packages were going way up.
Tim Ferriss: What are the compute constraints that you discussed in your recent piece?
Elad Gil: All the different — people call them labs now — that’s OpenAI, that’s Anthropic, that’s Google, that’s xAI, et cetera. All the labs are basically training these giant models. And effectively, what you do is you buy a bunch of chips from NVIDIA. You’re actually building out a system so you have chips from NVIDIA, you have memory from Hynix and Samsung and other places and you’re building out data center. There’s all these things that go into building these big systems and data centers and everything else. And you basically have clusters of hundreds of thousands or millions, or the scale keeps going up of systems that you’re buying from NVIDIA and from others. Google has your TPU, there’s other systems as well, and you’re using that to basically train an AI model.
What that means is you’re running huge amounts of data against these big clouds, and eventually the crazy thing is your output or your model is literally like a flat file. It’s almost like outputting a text doc or something. And that text doc is what you then load to run AI, which is insane if you think about it. You use a giant cloud for months and months and months, and your output is like a small file.
And that small file is a mix of representing all of humanity’s knowledge that’s available on the internet, plus logic and reasoning and other things built into it. And you can think about that in the context of your brain. You have three or four billion base pairs of DNA, and that’s more than enough to specify everything about your physical being, but also your brain and your mind and how it works and how you can see things and talk and taste things and all your senses and everything’s just encapsulated in these very small number of genes, actually. And so similarly, you can encapsulate all of human knowledge into this slot file effectively.
Tim Ferriss: How do you think about the constraints then? What are the constraints?
Elad Gil: Every year, the constraint on building out these big clouds to train AI, and then also what’s known as inference, where you’re actually using these chips to understand, to run the AI system itself, you need lots and lots of chips from NVIDIA to do this or TPUs or others, but then you also need other things. You need packaging to actually be able to package the chips, and so there’s a whole supply chain around building out these systems. Different parts of that supply chain have constraints of them at different times, and so right now the major constraint is memory or a specific type of memory that’s largely made by Korean companies, although there’s some broader providers of it. People think that that memory constraint will exist for about two years, maybe, plus or minus, because ultimately the capacity of those companies has been lower than the capacity for everything else in the system.
People think other constraints in the future may literally be building out the data centers or power and energy to run these things, but for today it’s this memory. Everybody in the industry is constrained in terms of how much compute they can buy to throw out these things. What that does is it creates a ceiling on top of how big you can scale these models up in the short run because every lab is buying as much as it can. A bunch of startups are buying as much of this compute as they can, and everybody’s constrained. What that means though is you have an artificial ceiling on how big a model can get in the short run, and how much inference can run or how many things you can actually do with AI right now.
That also means that you’re effectively enforcing a situation where no one lab can pull so far ahead of everybody else because they can’t buy 10 times as much compute as everybody else. And there are these scale laws that the more compute you have, the bigger the AI model you can build, in many cases, the more performant it can be eventually. That may mean that over the next two years-ish, all these labs should be roughly close to each other because nobody has the capacity to pull ahead. And when the constraint comes off, there is some world where you could make an argument that suddenly somebody can pull far ahead of everybody else. So right now, OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, they’re reasonably close in terms of capabilities, although some will pull ahead on one thing versus another. That should roughly continue everybody thinks for the next at least two years because of this.
Tim Ferriss: Google is also constrained by the memory from Samsung, Micron, et cetera. They’re similarly constrained as the other players?
Elad Gil: Right now, everybody is similarly constrained and a subset of these labs either are already making their own chips or systems like Google has TPUs and other things. Amazon has actually built its own chips called Trainiums. There’s basically different systems for different companies, but fundamentally all of them are limited in terms of how much they can either manufacture themselves, purchase themselves. And a year or two ago, the main constraint was packaging, now it’s memory. Two years from now, who knows, maybe it’s something else. We constantly are hitting the bottlenecks as we’re trying to do this build out.
Tim Ferriss: This is probably going to be a naive question because I’m a muggle and not able to write technical white papers or anything approaching that, but it seems to me that, I’m not the first person to say this, we’re better at forecasting problems than solutions, potentially. And so for instance, way back in the day, the price per gallon of gasoline or petrol goes above a certain point. Okay, people are forecasting doom and destruction, but past a certain price per barrel, suddenly new means of extraction became feasible and there were investments made in things like fracking and so on. Is there a plausible scenario in which there is some type of workaround? Along those lines, if that makes any sense. I don’t know. Maybe there isn’t.
Elad Gil: As far as I know, there, so far at least, is not. And part of that is because of the way that some of these things are built and it’s basically the capacity that you need, for example, for memory is basically a type of fab, and so you just need time to build out the fab and to get the equipment and put the lines in place. It’s a traditional CapEx into infrastructure cycle and these companies basically underinvested in that because they didn’t quite believe the demand forecast that other people had around this stuff, and so now they’re trying to catch up.
And so it’s one of these things where everybody keeps saying, “Well, AI is growing so fast, how can it possibly keep growing at this rate?” But it keeps growing at this rate, it just keeps going, and that’s because these capabilities are so impactful and so important. And so you look at the revenue of these companies and it’s interesting, I can send you the chart later, but Jared on my team pulled together a graph of how long did it take for companies to get to a billion dollars in revenue, and then from a billion to 10 billion, and then from 10 to 100. And there’s only a small number of companies that have ever done that. And you can literally look by generation of company how long it took. And so for example, I can’t remember, it was ADP or somebody, it took them 30 years to get to a billion in revenue or whatever it is, and Anthropic and OpenAI did that in a year.
So for Google, it took four years or whatever. I don’t remember exactly what the numbers are, but it was like as you go through these subsequent generations, it gets faster and faster to get to scale. Right now, OpenAI and Anthropic are each rumored to be roughly around $30 billion run rate.
Tim Ferriss: That’s crazy.
Elad Gil: Because four years ago they didn’t have any revenue. And that’s 0.1 percent of US GDP. So AI probably went from zero to half a percent of GDP, at least as a revenue contributor. And you extrapolate out, and if they hit 100 billion in revenue in the next year, two years, whatever it is, then we’re getting close to a place where each of these companies is a percent or two of GDP. That’s insane if you think about that.
Tim Ferriss: It’s bananas, yeah. It’s bananas.
Elad Gil: This stuff is really actually important and useful. That doesn’t include the cloud revenue for Azure for doing AI stuff or Google GCP or Amazon. It’s just those two companies. It’s insane.
Tim Ferriss: I would love to dig into your thinking because you’re one of the best first principles and also systems thinkers I’ve met, and I love having conversations with you because I always learn something new, and it’s not necessarily a data point, but often it might be a lens or a framework for thinking about different things. And that framework evolves for you as well. But for instance, if I was looking at this interview you did, this is a while back with first round capital and you were talking about market first and then strength of team second, but you talked about passing on investing in Lyft Series C. This was at the time, right? And ultimately, part of it seemed to hinge on winner-take-all versus oligopoly versus other.
I’m curious how you are thinking about that within the AI space, because I mean, you started skating for that puck before almost anyone I know, if not everyone I know. And so how are you thinking about that? And this ties into something that you mentioned in your piece that I haven’t heard anyone else talking about, but I’ll give the sentence as a cue. I don’t think you’ll need it, but founders running successful AI companies should all take a cold, hard look at exiting in the next 12 to 18 months, which might be a value maximizing moment for outcomes. And you went back to the dot-com bust and the survival rates and then breakout rates. How are you thinking about, could you just explain that sentence?
Elad Gil: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: And then also explain how you’re thinking about whether you think this will be winners-take-all, oligopoly, like what type of dynamic you think emerges?
Elad Gil: So in terms of the precedent, and that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen here, but if you look at every technology cycle, 90 percent, 95 percent, 99 percent of the companies in that cycle go bust. And that dates way back even to what was high-tech a hundred years ago, which was the automotive industry. Detroit had dozens of car companies and hundreds of suppliers, and it collapsed into a small number of auto companies essentially, and so this is not a new story. During the internet cycle or bubble of the ’90s, 450 companies went public in ’99, 450 or so companies went public in the first few months of 2000, and so that was 900 companies. And, say, another 500 to 1,000 went public in the couple years before that. So you had somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 companies go public.
Go public, so that means they kind of made it. And of those, how many have survived? A dozen, maybe two dozen. And so that’s out of 2,000 companies, 1,980 or so went under, one form or another, or maybe they got bought for a little bit. And so there’s no reason to think that AI cycle will be any different. And every cycle’s like that. SaaS was like that and mobile was like that and crypto was like that. Most companies are not going to make it. A handful will, and we can talk about those. And so if you’re running an AI company right now, you should ask yourself, what is the nature of the durability of your company? And are you one of that dozen or two that are going to be really important 10 years from now? Or is now a good moment for you to sell because what you’re doing will start to get commoditized, or will be competed by a lab, or will be something that the market will shift or the technology will shift and you’ll become obsolete?
There’s a handful of companies that will continue to be great. They should never sell, they should never exit, they should keep going. But there’s probably a lot of companies that now, or the next 12 to 18 months is the best moment for them possible in terms of the value that they’ll get for what they’re doing. For every company, there’s a value maximizing moment where they hit their peak, and it’s usually a window. Usually six, 12 months where what you’re doing is important enough, you’re scaling enough, everything’s working before some headwind hits you.
And sometimes it’s very predictable that that headwind is coming and you can see it. And often, you see it in the second derivative of growth. How fast are you growing starts to plateau a little bit and you’re either going to keep going up or you should sell. That’s really what that’s meant to be. I’m incredibly bullish around AI, as you can tell from the rest of the conversation. And so it’s less about the transformation that’s happening overall because of this technology, and more that only a handful of companies are going to continue to be really important, and so are you one of them or not? If you’re one of them, you should never, ever, ever sell.
Tim Ferriss: So what are the characteristics of that handful? The handful that have durable advantage, right? Because you look back at 2000 and it’s like, man, what would you have used to try to pick out Google and Amazon, right?
Elad Gil: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: And I’m not saying that’s the best comparator, but within the many just avalanche of AI companies, which are those that you think have durable advantage? I mean, of course, some of the name brand labs come to mind. Maybe they become the interface for everything else, who knows? But how would you answer that in terms of either shared characteristics or actual names? What sets apart the handful that you think will make it?
Elad Gil: Yeah. I mean, I think the core labs will be around for a while, so that’s OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, barring some accident or disaster or some blowup, but it seems like they’re in a relatable spot. And to your point on market structure, I wrote a Substack post, I don’t know, three years ago or something predicting that that would probably be an oligopoly market and there’d be a handful and then be aligned with the clouds, and that’s roughly what happened. I mean, there’s Meta and there’s xAI and there’s other players that may change this. It didn’t exist when I wrote that post. But it feels to me like in the short run, that’s an oligopoly. There’s no reason for that to be a monopoly market, unless one of them pulls ahead so much on capabilities that it just becomes the default for everyone. And that could happen, but so far it hasn’t. And again, this compute constraint may prevent that in the short run or at least provide an asset to it on it.
As you move up the stack and you say, “Well, there’s different application companies, there’s Harvey for legal, there’s Abridge for health, there’s Decagon and Sierra for customer success.” There’s these different companies per application. There’s three or four lenses that you can look at. One is if the underlying model gets better, does your product or service get dramatically better for your customers in a way that they still want to keep using you?
Second, how deep and broad are you going from a product perspective? Are you building out multiple products? Are they all integrated in a cohesive whole? Is it really being built directly into the processes in a company and a way that it’s hard to pull out? Often the issue for companies and adoption of AI isn’t how good is the AI, it’s how much do I have to change the workflows and the ways that my people do things in order to adopt it? It’s about change management, usually. It’s not about technology.
And so if you’ve been able to embed yourself enough into workflows and how people do business and how they work and how everything else ties together, that tends to be quite durable. Are you capturing and storing and using proprietary data? Sometimes it’s useful. I think data modes in general are overstated, but I think sometimes it can be actually quite useful and that’s usually the system of record view of the world. There’s a handful of criteria around, will this thing be long-term defensible or not? And at the application level, that’s often one potential lens on it.
Tim Ferriss: So, question, if people are listening to this and they are in the position of perhaps a founder who should consider identifying their short period of maximum valuation and perhaps hitting the parachute in some way, what are the options? Because I think of some of these companies, I’m not going to name them, but there are multiple companies that have multi-billion dollar valuations. There seems to be, again, from a mostly layperson perspective, i.e. me, that the labs probably can build what they are currently selling without too much trouble. Do they aim to be acquired by a lab, in which case there’s a build versus buy decision for the lab itself? Are they aiming for one of, not the OpenAIs or Anthropics, but maybe somebody who’s trying to get more skin in the game like Amazon or fill in the blank. What are the exit options?
Elad Gil: Yeah, I think there’s a lot of exit options. And the thing that’s crazy right now is if you go back 10 or 15 years, the biggest market cap in the world was 300 billion. And the biggest tech market cap was, I don’t know, 200-ish or something. I think the biggest one at the time was Exxon or somebody 15 years ago. And over the last 10 or 15 years, what happens is we suddenly ended up with these multi-trillion dollar market caps, which everybody thought was nuts at the time, but things will probably only get bigger. There’ll probably be more aggregation versus less into the biggest winners.
There’s more and more companies who have these market caps between say a hundred billion and a few trillion in a way that is unprecedented. And that means there’s enormous buying power because one percent of three trillion is 30 billion. We can dilute one percent and pay $30 billion for something, which is insane. That’s truly unprecedented. And that means that these really big acquisitions can happen.
Tim Ferriss: For the companies that I’m imagining, again, I don’t want to name names, that may have, seem to have a limited lifespan. When I’m in these small group threads with friends of mine who are oftentimes, not always, but I’m in a bunch of them. And when they’re tech investors, very successful tech investors, and I’m like, “Okay, these five companies, you’ve got 10 chips. How would you allocate your 10 chips?” There’s certain companies that can consistently get zero, even though they’re reasonably well known. Why would one of the labs buy one of those?
Elad Gil: Depends on what it is. And it may be a lab, it may be one of the big tech incumbents and Apple, Amazon, Google’s kind of both things. There’s Oracle, there’s Samsung, there’s Tesla, there’s SpaceX now in the market doing things that there’s a bunch of different buyers of different types. There’s Snowflake and Databricks. There’s Stripe, Coinbase if you’re doing financial service. There’s just a ton of companies that actually are quite large, that’s kind of the point. And so often you end up selling to one of four things, right? You can sell to one of the big labs or hyperscalers or giant tech companies.
You can sell to somebody who cares a lot about your vertical. For example, a Thomson Reuters if you’re doing legal or accounting or things that are kind of related to that. I mean, I think actually one thing that doesn’t happen enough is merger of competitors, particularly private companies where you can do that because ultimately if your primary vector is winning and you’re neck and neck with somebody and you’re competing on every deal and you’re destroying pricing for each other, maybe it’s better to just merge. That actually was X.com and PayPal in the ’90s. Elon Musk, Peter Thiel were running different companies and they merged because they said, “Were there two people doing this? Why fight?”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Or Uber, Lyft way back in the day. That might not have been a merger. It might have been an acquisition.
Elad Gil: Yeah. And the rumor is that that almost happened and then the Uber side walked away from it, but all the money that Uber spent on fighting Lyft for all those years maybe would’ve been better spent just buying them. Maybe not, I don’t know the exact math on it. But often, it actually does make sense to say, “You know what? We’ll just stop fighting it out and we’ll just combine and just go win.” Because if the primary purpose is to win the market, you’re already fighting all these big incumbents that already exist anyhow, so why make it even harder?
Tim Ferriss: As you know, and we talk about this a lot, but we’ll talk about you with your investing hat on. But before you even put that, let’s call it full-time investing hat on, you had a lot in your background that may or may not have helped you. And I’m curious, if you look at your biology background, the math background, do you think any of those things or other elements materially contributed to how you think about investing that has given you an advantage in, I suppose there are different stages to winning deals, but sometimes they’re not crowded, but let’s just talk about the selection, the selection process.
Elad Gil: The math stuff helped me, I think, in two ways. One is it’s helped me with certain aspects of technical or algorithmic CS and understanding it, and sometimes it’s useful in the context of how certain things work in AI or things like that or just fluency of numbers and data and I don’t have to call it nerd language or something. And I did the math degree, honestly, just for fun. I think that’s actually the thing that was helpful. I only did an undergrad degree in math, so I didn’t go that far with it, but I did the very abstract pure math stuff. And I think that was a good forcing function of how to really think logically step by step about things because roughly the way that at least I learned how to do proofs was you do the logical sequence, but then sometimes you do these intuitive leaps and then go back and try and prove it to yourself, or flesh out the reasoning behind that intuitively. And I think sometimes investing is a little bit like that.
Tim Ferriss: When did you first have the inkling that you could be good at investing? And that could be investing writ large, it could be maybe within the context of our conversations, startups and angel investing. When did you first go, “Huh, yeah, maybe I could be good at this”? Was there a moment or a deal or anything like that that comes to mind?
Elad Gil: Not really. I’m really hard on myself so even now I second guess myself a lot. Somebody was telling me that the two people that always beat themselves up the most in hindsight is me and this one other person who’s another well-known founder/investor. And so I don’t think there’s a single moment where I’m like, “Wow, this makes sense for me to do.” I think it just organically kept going because I was getting into some very strong companies, and then that allowed me to continue what I’m doing. Yeah, I wish I had a moment like that.
Tim Ferriss: Goddammit, you need to revise your genesis story like every good founder.
Elad Gil: Yeah, ever since I was seven, I’ve been thinking about investing in technology.
Tim Ferriss: So getting into those deals, what allowed you to get into those deals? Because some people have an informational advantage and they put themselves in a position to have an informational advantage. And I think that had I not — I don’t want this to be a leading question, but it’s like had I not moved to Silicon Valley when I did, 2000, and then subsequently stayed there, moved to San Francisco specifically, nothing that I was able to do in angel investing would’ve been possible. But there’s more to your story because a lot of people moved there with hopes of startup riches in whatever capacity. Not saying that that’s why you moved there, but what was it that allowed you to get into those deals? There are certain things that come to mind based on our prior conversations, but I’ll just leave it at that. Why were you able to get into or select those deals?
Elad Gil: Yeah. I think there’s what happened early and what happens now, and I think those two things are different. I think to your point, the single most important thing for anybody wanting to break into any industry is go to the headquarters or cluster of that industry. Move to wherever that thing is, and all the advice that you can do anything from anywhere and everything’s remote is all BS. And you see that for every industry, not just tech.
If you wanted to get into the movie business, people wouldn’t say, “Hey, you can write a film script from anywhere, you can digitally score it from anywhere, you can edit it from anywhere, you can film it anywhere, go to Dallas and join their burgeoning film scene.”
They’d say, “Go to Hollywood.”
And if you want to do something in finance, and you’re like, “Well, you could raise money from anywhere and come up with trading strategies and a hedge fund strategy from anywhere and you could do it from anywhere.”
People would say, “Hey, go to whatever.” Seattle, they’d be like, “Go to New York or go to X, Y, Z financial center.”
So the same is true for tech. And Shreyan on my team has been performing this sort of unicorn analysis of where is all the private market cap aggregating for technology. And traditionally, about half of it’s been the US and then half of that has been the Bay Area. But with AI, 91 percent of private technology market cap is the Bay Area, 91 percent of the entire global set of AI market cap is all in one 10 by 10 area. If you want to do stuff in AI, you should probably be in the Bay Area. Probably the secondary place is New York, and then after that, it just drops off a cliff, and really it’s the Bay Area. If you want to do defense tech, you probably should be in Southern California, close to where SpaceX and Anduril are, and Irvine, Orange County, et cetera, or El Segundo. There’s a lot of startups there. If you want to do FinTech and crypto, maybe it’s New York.
But the reality is these are very strong clusters. To your point, number one, is I was just in the right location. I was in the right networks and a default was, I was running a startup myself. I was at Google for many years, and then I left to start a company. People just started coming to me for advice. The way I ended up investing in Airbnb is I was helping them when there were eight people or something, raise their Series A, and introduced them to a bunch of people and help with some of the strategy there in very light ways. They would’ve done it without me. They said, “Hey, at the end of it, do you want to invest a little bit?” I said, “Great, that sounds wonderful.” This was very organic.
Or the way I invested in Stripe is I had sold an infrastructure, early API company to Twitter. When Twitter was, say, 90 people or so, and I sent an email to Patrick, the CEO of Stripe, just saying, “Hey, I’ve heard great things about you and I really like what Stripe is doing and I would use it for my own startup. I sold this API company myself. Do you want to just talk about this stuff?” I went on a couple walks and then a week or two later he texted me and he’s like, “Hey, we’re doing a round. Do you want to invest?” The first few things that I did were very organic where the founders were like, “I want you on board.”
I didn’t think, “Oh, I should be an investor and I’m going to chase things.” I just really liked talking to smart people and I liked working on certain business problems, and I love technology and it’s translation to the world. I was just a nerd and I met other nerds and we hit it off. It’s the early story for me.
Tim Ferriss: But it just struck me that I’m sure people have heard, or I’m sure you’ve heard this before, but if you want money, ask for advice. If you want advice, ask for money. It just struck me that it goes the other way around too. It’s like, if you offer a bunch of advice, oftentimes you get to give money. If you try to give money, you might get solicited for advice.
Elad Gil: Yeah, good point.
Tim Ferriss: When did you write the High Growth Handbook? When was that published?
Elad Gil: It’s a while ago now. It’s probably seven-ish years ago, something like that.
Tim Ferriss: Seven years ago. All right. Yeah, we’re going to come back to that in a minute because you were in the right place geographically speaking. You were in the center of the switchboard. Like you said, some of these initial standout investments came about very organically. What I’d be curious to hear, because you also said yourself not too long ago that there’s what I did then, there’s what I did now. There’s also what you did in between along the way. I’m wondering, for instance, if you would still stand by this, this is from that first round interview I was mentioning.
“As a general rule, when I make investments, it’s market first and the strength of the team second,” and there’s more to it. But would you still agree with that?
Elad Gil: 90 percent, yes. Every once in a while you meet somebody exceptional and you just back them or something maybe so early. I led the first round of Perplexity, the very, very first round. The way that came about was Aravind, the CEO, I think he pinged me on LinkedIn, literally. This was when nobody was doing anything in AI and he was an OpenAI engineer or a researcher. He’s like, “Hey, I’m at OpenAI,” which nobody cares about at the time, “I’m thinking of doing something in AI. I heard that you’re talking about this stuff and nobody else is talking about it. Can we meet up?”
We just started meeting every two weeks and brainstorming, and then that led to investing in that. That was a people first thing where he was just so good. Every time we talk, he’d show up a week later with a thing that we discussed built. Who does that?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, that’s a good sign.
Elad Gil: It’s so good. Or, the way I ended up investing in Anduril. Google shuts down Maven, which was their defense project. I think, “Well, if the incumbents are going to do it, what a great place for startups to play.” Because there’s been a long history of the Silicon Valley and the defense industry. That’s HP and that’s a lot of the early brands. I was just looking for something or somebody to work on this area and it was very unpopular at the time. I ran into, I think it was Trae Stephens, who’s one of the co-founders of Anduril, who’s also at Founders Fund, at some blunch or something else. Again, right city to be in.
He said, “Oh, I’m working on this new defense thing.” I said, “Amazing. Let’s talk about it.” It was very just looking, sometimes just looking for these things too in a market and sometimes it’s people. Anduril was looking for a market and then finding amazing people. Perplexity was in between where it was like I was looking at everything in AI, because I thought it was going to be incredibly important, but not very many people were. Then I just ran across an exceptional individual, and that’s when I funded OpenAI. That’s when I funded Harvey, which is the early legal — I funded a lot of really early stuff because they were the only people doing anything in this market that I thought would be really important.
Tim Ferriss: Let me come back to a few things you said. You mentioned the Perplexity founder, or later the founder who said you’re talking about this stuff or heard or read or found you talking about this stuff, where was that? Was that post on your blog? Was it somewhere else? How did he actually find you talking about anything?
Elad Gil: Yeah, I think he pinged me in part because I was involved with a bunch of the prior wave of technology companies, Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase, Instacart, Square, a bunch of stuff like that. I think at that point I was already known as a founder and investor. But then on top of that, I was trolling AI researchers and just asking them about what’s going on because it was so interesting. There was a bunch of art that was being done with these things called GANs at the time, these generative adversarial networks.
I was playing around with that. I tried to hire engineers to build me effectively what’s Midj ourney, because I just thought it’d be really cool to make it easy to make AI art.
Tim Ferriss: Let me pause for a second because this is my second question and it’s a good time. When you mentioned AI, I thought it would be incredibly important. What were the indicators of that? What was the smoke in the distance where you’re like, “Oh, that’s an interesting direction.”
Elad Gil: Yeah, I think there was two or three things. AI was one of those things that people have always talked about. When I was doing my math degree, I took a lot of theoretical CS classes and there were the early neural network classes and things like that and the math behind it. There’s always this promise of building these artificial intelligences of different forms. One could argue Google was a first AI first company. Back then it was called machine learning and it was different technology basis in some sense. I think 2012 was when AlexNet came out and there’s this proof that you can start scaling things and have really interesting characteristics in terms of how AI systems work.
Then, 2017 is when Google, a team at Google invented the transformer architecture, which everything is based on now, or roughly everything. For example, if you look at GPT for ChatGPT, the T stands for transformer. Around 2020-ish I think was when GPT-3 came out, and that was such a big step from GPT-2. It still wasn’t good enough to really do stuff with, but you’re like, oh, shit, the scaling law papers are out. The step function and capabilities was huge. You suddenly have a generalizable model available via an API that anybody can ping. Just extrapolate that out to the next step and this is going to be really important.
It’s basically looking at that capability step and playing around with the technology, and then reading the scaling law papers, or just in general, the scaling law seem to work for everything. You’re like, wow, this is going to be really, really important, so let me start getting involved with it.
Tim Ferriss: Do you think you would have or could have done that without a mathematics background? I’m guessing there were probably some other folks, but that leads me to the question of, how are you finding and ingesting that? Was it the talk of the town? It was in a sense within your social circles and the networks that you’re a part of, it was a open discussion, so you were engaged with it. Or, are you ingesting vast quantities of information from different fields and this happened to be something that really caught your attention?
Elad Gil: I guess it’s three things. I’ve always ingested a lot of information from a lot of different fields just because I like learning about stuff. I was always this mix of math and biology and anime and art and other things. It was always a mix. Then it was something that my friends were talking about, but it was a bit more toy-like, “Oh, this is cool and look at what came out.” But most people didn’t then extrapolate. It’s like early crypto or Bitcoin, everybody was talking about it, but very few people bought it. I think that was part of it. Then third, honestly, I just thought it was really neat stuff that I kept playing around with.
This is back to the GAN stuff and the art where these different models would come out and you could mess around with them. One of the things that’s really underdiscussed in terms of the importance of it relative to this wave of foundation models and AI and everything else is, the way AI or machine learning used to work is your team at a company or wherever else would go and there’d be what’s known as an MLOps team. An operations team whose whole thing was helping you set up all the data and the pipelines and everything to train a model. You train a model that was accustomed to your use case and what you were trying to accomplish.
Then you had to build a bunch of internal services to interact with that model. It was a huge pain to get to the point where you had a working ML system up and running in production. Then suddenly, you have a thing where you just do an API call. With a line of code or a few lines of code, anybody anywhere in the world can ping it, but not just that, it’s generalizable. It’s not just specialized to one use case, like spell correction or whatever. You can use it for anything and it has all of the internet embedded in it in some sense, in terms of the knowledge base. It can start having these advanced reasoning capabilities. But one of the most important things is, hey, you can get it with a couple lines of code.
You don’t have to go and build an MLOps team. You don’t have to host it. You don’t have to interact with it. You don’t have to do all this extra stuff. It just works. That’s really important.
Tim Ferriss: It’s huge. Yeah, it’s hard to overstate.
I have a million questions for you. The problem with this is the embarrassment of riches of directions that we could go. I am using, in my team, Claude Code and assorted tools for all sorts of stuff right now. One of them, it just so happens, overlaps with an area of great skill for you and experience, which is angel investing. This is the first time where I feel really enabled to do, and there is some manual effort involved, as you might imagine, but to go back and do an analysis of 20 years of angel investing to try to do any number of things. I suspect that a lot of what interests me is not particularly useful, like doing some counter-factuals.
What if I had held each of these for three years, for five years, for whatever? That’s like just Opus Dei, whipping myself in the back for the most part. But in doing an analysis like that, there are certain things that immediately come to mind for me that might be of interest. I want to hear what you would do if you would even do this. Part of it is, frankly, just curiosity. Are the stories I tell myself about this true or not? I’m interested, like who made certain introductions? Are there certain people who just took me there, basically people in hospice care, and shipped them over as a last ditch effort? Are there people who actually sent me good stuff consistently, et cetera?
There are a million and one ways I could try to interrogate the data and enrich it. We’re doing a pretty good job of enriching it, Claude and other tools. OpenAI is very good at this. What are some of the more interesting questions or lines of examination you think looking back, like whatever it is, in my case, it’s about roughly 20 years of stuff.
Elad Gil: Yeah. The weird thing I’ve been doing is uploading pictures of founders and asking the models to predict if they’d be good founders.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, wow.
Elad Gil: Because if you think about it, we do this all the time when we meet people. We quickly try to create an assessment of that person, their personality and what they’re like. There’s all these micro features. Do you have crow’s feet by your eyes which suggests that your smiles are genuine? What does that imply about the sense of humor you have? Or, have you furrowed your brow over time and what does that mean? There’s all these micro features. When you meet people, you actually can get a pretty quick impression of them pretty fast. It doesn’t mean it’s correct, right? But we actually do this really fast as people.
I have this whole set of prompts that I’ve been messing around with just for fun around, can you extrapolate a person’s personality based off of a few images? Therefore, can you be predictive about their behavior in any way? I think that’s fun, right?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. You’re finding any signal there or not? TBD?
Elad Gil: Yeah, it actually works pretty well. I’ve been doing weird shirt, right?
Tim Ferriss: Right, practice smiling people.
Elad Gil: Yeah, yeah. No, but I think it’s interesting because we do this all the time where we read people and that’s part of the prompt. It’s like you’re a very good cold reader of people based on micro features and et cetera, spell it out. Then based on that, not only you give me your interpretation of this person, but explain the specific micro features for each thing that you’re stating about the person, and it will break it down for you. It’s amazing. Imagine what this technology is. It’s crazy. Again, I’m not saying it’s fully accurate and I’m not saying it’ll be predictive, but it’s done pretty well in terms of nailing people.
It’s even done things like, “Oh, this person probably has this type of sense of humor.” Or, “This person probably holds themselves back in most social settings and then chimes in with a witty wry thing that nobody expects or whatever.” It’s very specific.
Tim Ferriss: Very specific.
Elad Gil: Yeah. It’s amazing. I’ve been doing stuff like that, which may not be your question, but I’ve been finding it really fun.
Tim Ferriss: Well, it’s related in the sense that, and I’m sure I’m missing some steps, but I love angel investing and the dose makes the poison, so there’s usually a case to be made when I get to a certain threshold. I’m like, “Okay, this isn’t fun anymore.” I love dark chocolate too, but I don’t want just to be force-fed dark chocolate all day. I’ve talked about this, but I really do enjoy the learning and the sport of it, frankly, and interacting with some very, very smart people. Not all of them work out as far as founders of companies, but ultimately, I’m trying to figure out how to separate signal from noise.
Also, it’s fun to try to use anything, but in this case investing, to sharpen your own thinking and to stress test your own beliefs and the assumptions that undergird some of your predictions, things like that. I’m just wondering if you’ve ever done a retrospective analysis of your startup investing or if you’re like, “No, more Marc Andreessen style, only forward.”
Elad Gil: Yeah. Early on when I was first starting to invest, I would have this long grid of things by which I would score each company, and then I’d go back and see if it was correct. It was roughly correct. I think the hard part is there’s a lot of randomness in outcomes. There’s the company that sells for a few billion dollars that you thought was dead or whatever it is, right?
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Elad Gil: How do you score things like that? It’s like, well, right now we’re in this really weird market moment where trillions of dollars of market cap are all chasing the same prize. They’re going to do all sorts of stuff that wouldn’t happen normally. It’s really hard to account for that kind of thing relative to all this. I’m much more in the Marc Andreessen camp of, I think very little about the past. I think close to zero about my own past, I just am like, “Let’s keep going.” Maybe that’s bad and there should be dramatically more self-reflection.
I try to self-reflect in the moment, but I don’t try to re-extrapolate and examine my entire life and decisions. If anything, most of the decisions have been ones where I’m really upset with myself for not being more aggressive on something. In other words, I’ve invested in the company, but I should have tried even harder to invest more even if I tried really, really hard because there’s a handful of companies that really matter, and that’s all that matters as an investor. Obviously, as a person, I enjoy getting involved with different companies and different founders and helping them whether the thing works or not, or I think the technology’s interesting or whatever.
But the realities from a returns perspective, there’s a very clear power law that people talk about and it’s true. I remember a friend of mine did this analysis, I think it may have been Yuri Milner or someone where it’s like, look at all the companies from, I don’t remember the exact dates, 2000 or 2004 until today in technology. It was something like a hundred companies drove like 90 something percent of all the returns and 10 companies total drove 80 percent of all returns over a two decade period in technology. If you weren’t in that 10 companies, you were a bad investor. Once you start dealing with these power laws and these outsize outcomes and all of that, how can you rate that?
It’s basically, did you hit one of 10 things or not? That’s really the rating. That’s probably the correct rating for investment.
Tim Ferriss: I’d love to try to focus on some early-ish decisions on this podcast, right? Because like you said, they’re the earlier decisions. There’s how you did things then, there are how you’re doing things now, which isn’t to say that one is better than the other, but certainly what you do in the past tends to inform what you’re able to do and what you do in the present. What I’m curious about, and we won’t spend a ton of time on this, but it might be interesting to folks, is to discuss when you moved from purely doing angel investing yourself to involving other investors in your deals, right?
There are multiple ways to do this, but the reason I want to ask this is because you did a number of SPVs, I’ll explain what that is, special purpose vehicle, but for folks, you might be familiar with venture capital firm. They have funds and they raise, let’s just call it $100 million for a fund. It can be more or less, of course. Then they invest in a bunch of different companies and then you see who wins, who lose, and then if there are profits, like I guess conventionally, let’s just use the textbook example, the venture capital firm takes 20 percent of the upside and then the LPs, the investors get 80 percent.
The venture capital firm takes a management fee to keep the lights on, although it usually does a lot more than keep the lights on. With the SPVs, you’re investing in, let’s just say, for simplicity, a single company, right? There are advantages to that in simplicity, for somebody who’s putting together, the SPV, but you also have a lot of reputational risk, because if you have a fund, you have a couple of losers. Your investors don’t automatically go to zero, but if you have an SPV and it goes to zero, that could really hurt you reputationally.
When I look at some of your early SPVs, which I think included, certainly, a number of name brands like Instacart and so on, how did you choose which companies to do the SPVs with? Because that seems like a very important set of decisions to lay the groundwork for creating optionality for what you do after that.
Elad Gil: Yeah. I think to your point, I’ve always been terrified of losing other people’s money. I’m fine if I lose my own money. It’s my decision. I’m an adult. It’s okay, but I’ve always been — people giving money are adults or institutions, et cetera, to invest on their behalf. But similarly there, I was just terrified of ever losing money for people. I’ve tried over time to be judicious behind the SPVs that I did early on and the focus was on things that I thought would really be outsized companies. That was, to your point, Instacart, it was early Stripe, it was Coinbase, it was a couple things like that that were amongst my very first SPVs.
The emphasis was very much on, do I think this can be a massive thing? Also, do I think there’s enough downside protection in some sense that even if it didn’t work as well as I thought it would still be a good outcome for people. Yeah, I try to do that very diligently. It’s interesting because a lot of people ping me for help as they think about becoming investors or they’re scouts for a fund, which means basically they’re given a small amount of money by a venture capital fund. Sequoia famously has this program, they give people money and then those people invest money on their behalf. Some of the scouts that I’ve talked to basically treat it like free money or an option.
They’re just like, “Oh, just throw out a bunch of stuff, maybe something works.” I’ve pointed out to them, “Hey, if you actually want to become a professional investor at some point, this is your track record.” A, you’re a fiduciary in some sense, and maybe I’ll be more careful from that perspective, but B, this will establish your track record, and do you want to have a good one or a bad one? How do you think about that? Again, sometimes people just get lucky and they hit the one thing out of a hundred, but that more than returns everything and they look great. But it’s hard to be consistently good at this stuff or consistently hit great companies.
Tim Ferriss: All right. I want to double click on a few things you said and maybe you could walk us through a pseudonymous example. It doesn’t need to be a named company, but when you’re talking about setting your track record, you did an excellent job of that before you then went on later to raise funds and so on. I would love you to perhaps explain some of the things you do in diligence or how you weight things differently and also how you think about the capped minimum downside. I’m not sure that’s the exact wording that you used in selecting those deals, because you could have selected any number of deals on a due diligence level. What’s the kind of stuff that you focus on maybe more than others and what are the things you pay less attention to than others?
Elad Gil: Yeah, I think there’s a big difference between early and late things. On the early side, to the point earlier, I tend to spend a lot more time on the market than most early stage investors. Most early stage investors say, “I just care about the team and how good are they?” But I’ve seen great teams crushed by terrible markets and I’ve seen reasonably crappy teams do very well. At this point, I think the market is more important, although I think obviously great teams can find their way if they decide to shift around a bit. I index a lot on market early and that may be customer calls, that maybe is trying to understand, do I think something could be big?
It could just be some intuition around, “Hey, defense is really important. Nobody’s doing defense. Let me find a defense company.” I tend to index a lot on that. Relatedly, I’ve tended to avoid science projects. There are some people who get really distracted by, “Wow, this is really cool. It’s quantum and it’s this and it’s that.” I’ve largely avoided those things. Sometimes I miss things that were really good, but often that was the right call. I actually think SPAC saved the hard tech and science-based investing industry because if you look at what happened basically at the market peak, a bunch of SPACs took a bunch of companies public that would not have been able to raise money in private markets later.
They gave them enough money to keep going, but more importantly, they returned a bunch of money to these hard tech funds and that saved them from going under. It gave them all the returns. It was basically the SPAC era. Chamath basically saved hard tech. I mean that seriously, not tongue-in-cheek. I largely avoided that kind of class of companies. I’m not saying I was smart. I would’ve made money off of it. I just thought there was all capitalization issues and science risk and market risk and other things to them. For later stage stuff, the hard part often is everything on paper gets modeled out for a late stage company as a two to three X from that investment point.
Because all the funds that are driving the rounds underwrite against some IRR clock, 25 percent IRR, whatever it is. They all come up with these models and then the models all say all these companies are basically going to two to three X. The art there or the science there, whatever you want to call it is, is that a 0.5 X company? Is it going to drop in value or is that a 10X? How do you know it’s a 10X versus a two to three X versus a 0.5? That’s the harder part of growth investing. There’s a subset of things that you’re like, this thing will just keep going and here’s why.
But often it’s not mathematical. Often that’s just like some market dynamic or some key core insight or some market share question. People tend to make that stuff really complicated and they have these really complicated multi-page models and 50-page memos and all the rest. Often these things boil down to one single question. What is the one thing I need to believe about this company that makes me think it’s going to continue to be really big? If it’s three things, it’s too complicated, it’s probably not going to work. If it’s no things, then it doesn’t make much sense. Usually, there’s one or two things that are really the core insights you need to understand the outcome for something.
Tim Ferriss: Can you give an example of one of those beliefs for any company that comes to mind?
Elad Gil: Yeah, I’ll give you two or three of them. I mean, Coinbase, part of it was just, hey, this is an index on crypto and crypto will keep growing. Because if Coinbase trades every main cryptocurrency and they take a cut of every transaction and they have enough volume, they’ve effectively bought a basket of every cryptocurrency by investing in Coinbase. That was the premise there. Stripe, they’re an index on e-commerce and e-commerce will keep growing. Back then, now it’s much more complex and there’s all sorts of great drivers of its performance. Anduril was, hey, machine vision and drones are going to be important, AI and drones are going to be important for defense.
Tim Ferriss: That’s it.
Elad Gil: I mean, it was more complicated than that. I’m just saying.
Tim Ferriss: Right, right. Well, that was it for the belief, the core belief.
Elad Gil: There was cost-plus model versus hardware margin. Anduril actually had four or five things that were important there, that were kind of like a checklist for a defense tech company. But for a lot of the other ones, it was like e-commerce is good.
Tim Ferriss: This is probably too inside baseball, but what were the stages of the companies that you mentioned when you created the SPVs? Roughly. Yeah.
Elad Gil: Stripe. Well, I first invested in Stripe when it was eight people, and then I kept following on. And I ran out of my own money, frankly, and that’s when I started doing SPVs. So I think I did my first SPV in Stripe around the Series C-ish, somewhere around there, something like that.
Tim Ferriss: Got it. And were the others more or less similar-ish, Instacart, et cetera?
Elad Gil: It was probably roughly in that ballpark, C, D, that range. I didn’t have funds and everything else, and I was putting as much as I could personally into these things, both earlier, but honestly, I just kept going when I could.
Tim Ferriss: When you’re looking at trying to determine if something is a 0.5X or a 10X, in addition to the core belief, what are other layers of due diligence that you bring to bear on trying to ascertain that, where something falls on that spectrum?
Elad Gil: Oh, I mean, I do enormous due diligence. So meet with the CFO multiple times, walk through all the financials, walk through the financial model, walk through customers, call customers, look at executive team. It’s a bunch of stuff. My fund is the only one I know that actually does cash reconciliations, where we’ll go through and do a cash audit to look at cash flows for later stage things. So I do enormous diligence, because I want to make sure I’m not doing something inappropriate. But the flip side of it is, most of it just collapses into what’s the one thing. So when I work with a company, I actually try to be very fast and straightforward on the diligence in terms of saying, let’s just talk about, A, we need to just make sure financials are correct and there’s the basics, but let’s collapse it down into one or two core questions that help us understand if this thing will keep going. Not, here’s 30 pages of questions that don’t matter, right?
Tim Ferriss: Right.
Elad Gil: Which is what a lot of people, they’re like, hey, we need to know the secondary cohort on this fucking thing that’s like a tiny product, that who cares. They just waste time. They waste the finder’s time, the team’s time. And I try very, very hard not to do that. As a former entrepreneur myself, I know how precious the time is and I know how annoying those questions are.
Tim Ferriss: Well, I was actually going to, at one point, ask you about this, but we don’t need to spend too much time on it. You have a post, this is from a while back, 2011, listing questions a VC will ask a startup. You omitted some of the questions, like the one that you just mentioned, but I am curious if any of these questions or additional questions come to mind when you are talking to founders, could be early stage or later stage, that you actually apply yourself. And I know it’s from 2011, so I’m not expecting you to remember the post itself.
Elad Gil: Yeah. I haven’t looked at that post in a really long time. I’m actually writing another book now that is sort of the zero to one startup phase, and it gets into some questions like that. I think the reality is venture capital has changed dramatically since I wrote that post, because in 2011, the venture capital funds were largely doing seeds through Series D, E maybe, and then companies would go public. And this whole 20-year private company thing didn’t exist. And so a lot of — do you know why there’s a four-year vest on stock?
Tim Ferriss: No. Why is that? I can kind of guess now that we’re talking about IPOs, but go ahead. Why?
Elad Gil: Yeah. In the 1970s, they came up with a four-year vest on stock options for employees because companies would go public within four years. And so then you’re done. Literally, right? And so it was like a four-year clock usually. And then when Google took six years to go public, everybody’s like, oh my gosh, it took them so long to go public, six years. They just sat on their hands. Do you know what I mean?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Elad Gil: Literally, people would say that. And so what happened is venture capital used to be very early stage, and then what we now call growth investing was public market investing. That was the stuff that people in the public markets would do after four or five years of a company’s life. And so public markets used to be involved very early. And then as Sarbanes-Oxley came out and companies decided they didn’t want to go public and there was more private capital available, the timeline until going public stretched out. And so suddenly venture capital firms were doing all the growth investing that used to be public market investing. And in 2011, that really wasn’t happening much. It was kind of Yuri Milner from DST and a few other folks, but it wasn’t that much of an industry. And so the nature of venture capital shifted radically over the last 15 years. And that means that those questions that I listed there didn’t include what I’d consider more growth-centric questions because there wasn’t a lot of growth investing in venture. Venture —
Tim Ferriss: What would be examples of growth-centric questions?
Elad Gil: Honestly, it would overlap with some of the earlier stages, but it would be much more — by the time you hit a very late stage, it’s very financially driven. And so often what, at least I and my team look at is, what is just the core business and how do we extrapolate that going? And then what are these ancillary things that the company’s doing that are almost like options in the future that may or may not come through? And so usually we base our investment on that core. Can they just keep doing the thing they’re doing forever? Because most companies mainly get big off of one thing. At least for the first decade. There’s very few companies that have multiple things that all work.
Usually it’s one thing, and then 10 years later you maybe come up with a second thing that really works, like Google Cloud for Google, although obviously there’s YouTube and there’s a bunch of other stuff, and Waymo and all these interesting things now. But it took a while. For a long time it was just search, search and ads. But then sometimes there are these extra things that are potential really interesting drivers on a business. That SpaceX was launch and then it became satellite, right, it became Starlink.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, man. Starlink, what a thing. It’s too bad I have so much tree cover here, I can’t use it anywhere I spend time. But let’s turn to the High Growth Handbook for a second. So that was, let’s just call it seven-ish years ago. It is an outstanding book, people should really check it out. I mean, especially if you’re playing in the venture back game. What’s the subtitle? The subtitle is, Scaling Startups from 10 to 10,000 People. There’s a lot of good advice in this book. I wanted to ask you if there’s anything in this book that you wish startup founders, the book was intended for, would pay more attention to? Or if there’s anything that you would add or expand to the book?
Elad Gil: Yeah. So when I wrote the book, I had an outline for it that was two, three times the length of the actual book in terms of chapter. So there’s a lot of stuff I didn’t write about, sales and marketing and growth and a bunch of other stuff. But the book was basically written as a tactical guide, it wasn’t meant to be read it from start to finish. There’s a bunch of interviews with different people who are, I think, amongst the best practitioners in the world at those areas. But fundamentally, it was meant to be more like, you’re suddenly involved with the M&A, jump to the chapter and read that, and then put it aside until something else comes up around hiring that you need to look at or whatever. And so it really is meant to be a handbook or guide or companion to a founder versus, hey, I’m just going to read it start to finish. And there’ll be some pithy quotes in it or whatever.
Or one concept over 500 pages. I try to avoid stuff like that. So it’s very tactical, it’s very tangible, it’s very specific. And this new book that I’m working on is basically the zero to one version of that. It’s like, how do you hire your first five employees as a startup? Somebody tries to buy you, what do you do? How do you raise your first round of funding? It’s that kind of stuff. So it’s kind of like the zero to one tactical guide.
Tim Ferriss: Let me ask you about one specific section. I think this is chapter two, this is on boards. And if this is getting too in the weeds, tell me, we can hop to something else. But I am curious if you could talk about — there are two things. Take a better board member over a slightly higher valuation, and if you want to revise these, that’s fine too. But there are two things —
Elad Gil: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: — I’d love to hear you talk about, just because this is something that founders I’ve been involved with bump up against constantly. Take a better board member over a slightly higher valuation and then write a board member job spec. And then specifically for independence maybe, I’d love to hear you maybe just elaborate. But could you speak to either or both of those a bit? And if you want to take it a different direction, I mean, it’s really just boards writ large.
Elad Gil: Yeah. So I think when founders pull together boards, often the early boards are investors because the investors ask for a board seat as part of it or as part of the investment. And sometimes the founders want somebody on board who’s really committed to the company and will help out extra. And to some extent when somebody takes a board seat, it really means, or it should mean that they’re all in to help you, right, versus you can have lots and lots of investors but have very few board members. Reid Hoffman has this thing, which is a board member at its best is a co-founder that you wouldn’t be able to hire otherwise. And so you bring them onto your board and it’s somebody that you want to spend more time with on specific issues related to the company. Fundamentally, your board should be able to help with different areas of the company.
It could be strategic direction, it could be closing candidates, it could be product areas, it could be customer intros, it could be a variety of things. And usually, you want to think of your board members as a portfolio of people. It’s going to change between an early stage company and a late stage in a public one, you’ll need different types of people over time usually. But most companies are very reactive on their board versus proactive. And so, they tend to end up with a couple investors and then they add somebody from an industry seat and they don’t really think through who they want and why. And if your co-founder is kind of like your spouse, your work spouse, your work husband or your work wife, your board members are like your in laws. You have to see them at Thanksgiving and you have to chat with them all the time.
And so, hopefully you have somebody you want to see all the time and who’s helpful and wonderful. And the bad version is like, ugh, it’s the father-in-law or mother-in-law who’s always berating you or whatever. And so you kind of need to find the right person. And it’s for many, many years, right, you end up sometimes with people on your board for a decade, and if they’re an investor, you can’t get rid of them. You literally can’t fire this person, because they have a contractual ability to be on your board because of the investment. So that’s why it’s really important to figure out the right person, and that’s back to valuation.
Sometimes founders will take a better price from a worse person because it’s a better price. And our mutual friend, Naval, has this great quote that “valuation is temporary, but control is forever.”
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Elad Gil: Very Naval, right?
Tim Ferriss: Very Naval.
Elad Gil: And I think that’s very true. And so if you’re choosing a board member and part of that is a control thing, right, people who control the board can in some cases fire the CEO, you really want to choose the right people. And maybe take a worse price for somebody who’s really going to be helpful and they’re minimally non-destructive, and hope you get to have around for 10 years.
Tim Ferriss: Any other books or resources for people who, outside of the High Growth Handbook, who specifically want to learn about boards, recruiting, incentivizing the co-founders that you couldn’t hire to join the board, et cetera, et cetera? Any particular approach you would take there if they wanted to get more conversant?
Elad Gil: I don’t have anything super useful there. I think the best thing is to call other founders, other people who’ve added people to their board, and see how they approached it. I do think writing up a job spec, you write a job spec for everything else in your company, why wouldn’t you write one for a board member? So it’s good to write that up and say, what am I actually looking for and why? And what am I optimizing for? So there’s a common view of that. You can use search firms, you can ask people, you can target people that you know. If you have angel investors, getting to know them is a great way to see if you want to add one of them eventually to your board. That’s what we did at Color, we eventually added Sue Wagner, who was a co-founder of BlackRock onto our board.
Her other board seats were Apple, BlackRock, and Swiss Re when she joined our board. But I just got to know her through just, she invested and we just started working together, and really enjoyed her feedback and insights. And so we added her to the board there. So it’s kind of like that, you kind of want to maybe get to know some people.
Tim Ferriss: Next, I want to come to our — we were joking earlier about the, in some case, sort of revisionist history genesis stories.
Elad Gil: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: So I’m looking at, this is from 2018, this is a while back, this is on Y Combinator’s blog and you’re being interviewed about the High Growth Handbook. But the sort of end of this piece that I’m looking at says, “These stories are never told. People always say, ‘Oh, these things just grow organically and isn’t it amazing.’” But almost every company that ended up tens of billions or hundreds of billions in markcap did this, which is taking an aggressive approach to distribution, whether that’s sort of Google and the Firefox story, or Facebook running ads against people’s names in Europe. I just wanted to hear you tell some of these stories, because it is the stuff that kind of conveniently that gets left out of TED Talks later. Do you know what I mean?
Elad Gil: Oh yeah, yeah. I mean, actually the origin stories for founders is always like, “Ever since Sarah was three years old, she dreamed of starting an accounting software firm.” Come on. You know what I mean?
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Yeah.
Elad Gil: It’s so ridiculous. And so a lot of the stories that are told about founders are very revisionist and they make it the life’s passion of this — sometimes it really is. But you’re like, no, when they were five they did not collect things and then that turned into Pinterest 30 years later or whatever, they always dreamed of building AGI when they were four, and that’s why Sam started OpenAI or whatever. So I think a lot of these things are very kind of ridiculous in terms of how they’re written later.nd I think the product really, really matters and I think sometimes great product just wins. And the reason great product just wins is it opens up a form of distribution that didn’t exist before or people will buy it despite the lack of distribution or relationships for a company.
And the flip side of it is that the companies that are really good have an enormously good product engine, and then they have an amazing distribution engine. And sometimes that distribution engine is built into the product, that’s like Cursor or Windsurf just distributing through product like growth where developers just find it and start using it and it helps them. And so they tell other developers and it spreads word of mouth. But often there’s very aggressive sales, marketing, other components to it. And so for example, when I was at Google, they were spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year, which at the time was real money, on distributing search. And they had this little thing called the toolbar that would fit into a browser, because right now browsers, with Chrome, you type in words or whatever, and then it instantly searches it. Back then, the main browsers were Netscape and Internet Explorer, et cetera, and the browser bar thing didn’t exist.
And they had this little client app that you’d install and they paid basically every company on the internet to cross download it. In other words, you’re installing Adobe, you’d be installing some malware detector thing, and it would always download the toolbar because they got paid to distribute it. So very aggressive distribution tactics. And to your point, Facebook buying ads against people’s names in Europe —
Tim Ferriss: Can you explain that? What are they doing? Yeah. What was their end game?
Elad Gil: Yeah. They were basically trying to create network liquidity in markets where they were earlier behind. And so they would basically buy ads of literally a person’s name. And one of the most common queries is people searching themselves, and so you’d be like, oh, let me look up Tim Ferriss on Google, or whatever. And there’d be a Facebook ad saying, “Hey, Tim Ferriss on Facebook.” And you’d click and you’d land on a signup flow for Facebook. This was years ago. This was TikTok and ByteDance, right, it was basically, they spent billions of dollars distributing TikTok so they could build enough of a network to train AI algorithms to start telling people what to do and also to get content creators on it.
Tim Ferriss: Where did they spend that money on distribution in this case of, say, TikTok?
Elad Gil: My sense is, it’s ads again.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Elad Gil: But you kind of see this over and over again. I mean, for enterprise, Snowflake spent billions of dollars on salespeople and compensation and channel partnerships. So again, distribution is really important. And every once in a while you see a company that actually wins, not because of product, but because they’re just better at sales and marketing and distribution. And often that’s a bummer for technologists such as myself, because you’re like, the best product should always win. And sometimes it does, but sometimes it’s just who was early and developed a brand, or who got ahead on distribution.
Tim Ferriss: I’m looking at a piece in front of me, this is from a while ago, but it’s you discussing long-held dogma that ends up being unviable. So for instance, the common held belief after PayPal’s sale to eBay that fraud will kill you in the payment space. And I’m wondering how you orient yourself as an investor to stress test those types of dogma.
Elad Gil: It’s really hard because you often end up, you start off with some set of beliefs, you think something’s interesting and maybe you invest in it, maybe you start a company in it, and then it turns out the thing you think is really interesting turns out to be really hard and you get killed. And then five years later, a company comes up that actually does it and wins. And the question is, why? Why did the things suddenly work when it didn’t before? Or there’s 10 attempts to do X, and then suddenly is it the technology got good enough? It could be a regulatory change, it could be a market shift, it could be whatever. An example of that may be Harvey and legal, where selling to law firms traditionally has been awful. And Harvey’s not much broader than that, they also have very strong enterprise adoption and lots of different people using them in different ways. But the dogma was always like, building stuff for law firms is crappy as a business and you should never do it.
But what AI did is it shifted things from selling tools to selling work product, or selling units of labor. That’s really the shift in generative AI. We’re going from seats and we’re going from software and SaaS and we’re moving into a world where we’re selling human labor equivalents. We’re selling work hours or labor hours, or whatever you want to call it. It’s of cognition. And so, Harvey is effectively helping really augment lawyers in different ways. And part of that’s a knowledge corpus, but a lot of it is this tooling that really helps lawyers achieve the goals that they have in different ways, in a collaborative manner in some cases. And so it’s just a fundamentally different type of product from what people were selling before. And so it opened up the market in a way that the market wasn’t open before. There’s actually a broader conversation around, is the world market limited or founder limited in terms of entrepreneurial success?
The Y Combinator school of thought is that we just don’t have enough founders. And if we had 10 times as many founders, we’d have 10 times as many big companies. And there’s an alternate school of thought, which is how many markets are actually open in any given moment in time. And those are the ones where you can build big companies. Because if the market isn’t open to innovation or change or whatever or is undergoing a shift, you can’t really build anything there anyhow, so why do it? And the striking thing about AI is it’s opened up tons and tons of markets that were closed for a long time, and it’s opened it up because of capabilities, but it’s also opened it up because every CEO is asking themselves, what’s my AI story? And so there’s way more openness to try things than I’ve ever seen in my life. And so we have this odd moment in time where things are massively available for founders to do new things.
And if you’re an AI company and you’re not seeing explosive growth quickly, something’s fundamentally broken, because the markets are so open that you can suddenly grow at a rate that you’ve never grown before. There’s always been cases of companies that just go like this. But again, you look at the ramps of OpenAI and Anthropic and it’s the fastest ramps to tens of billions ever. It’s like percentages of GDP, it’s like crazy.
Tim Ferriss: So if we come back to your comment of not necessarily market first and strength of team second all the time, but like you said, you 90 percent agree with that. And if you have an excellent team in a terrible market, that’s going to be a difficult one to execute. How do you determine what is a good versus great market? Or just, what is a great market? What do you look for? And the example you gave, I might be overreading this, but when you said, that when Google shut down, I think it was Maven, and then that’s an interesting kind of event-based approach as an input to investing. Because you’re like, okay, if they’re not going to build it, that suddenly creates a playing field for startups to play in that space. So could you speak to more of how you determine or look for great markets?
Elad Gil: Yeah. I mean, there’s a few different ways to think about it. One is, some people take the framework of, why now? What’s shifted now that makes this suddenly an interesting market? Because people have been trying to do things for a long time in every market. And so that may be a regulatory shift. Samsara, the fleet management company benefited from the fact that suddenly there’s regulation around needing end cap monitoring of drivers. So you had suddenly cameras watching people so they don’t fall asleep while they’re driving trucks on the road. So that was their entry point to then start building out a suite of software, but it was a regulatory shift. Sometimes there’s technology shifts, like what’s happening in AI.
And the crazy thing about the AI shift is, the foundation models instantly plugged into a massive set of markets, which is basically all enterprise data and information and email and just all white collar work was suddenly available to AI, because it was the perfect for that. It also plugged into code, which is a type of white collar work. So it’s just suddenly it just inserts into language and language is used everywhere in enterprises as well as in consumer, and so there’s just a massive market to tap into and transform, or set of markets. Robotics is a little bit different from that because even if you had the world’s best robotic model, the sub-markets that already have robotic hardware are quite small, on a relative basis. And so you don’t have that instant runway that you would with language, unless you come up with something new there. That’s kind of an aside. But I think robotics is really interesting and it’ll be important, it’s more just that nuance of what’s the instant thing you plug into commercially.
And then there’s regulatory shifts, there’s technology shifts, there’s incumbency or company shifts, competitive shifts. A company may blow itself up, it may get bought by a competitor. One company I’m excited about on the security side is called Infisical, and they’re basically competing in part with Hashi. Hashi got bought by IBM. Anytime you get bought by IBM, you slow down a lot usually. So suddenly it creates more opportunity for a startup. So I just feel like there are these different things that can change in a given moment in time. It could be the market’s growing really fast, it’s Coinbase and crypto, you just have suddenly this adoption and proliferation of token types. So there’s lots and lots and lots of different markets that are interesting. The commonality is usually like, is it also big?
Is there a big enough TAM? And there’s two types of TAMs. There’s fake TAM.
Tim Ferriss: So just for people listening, who might not have it, total addressable market.
Elad Gil: Yeah, total addressable market. So what’s a market you’re in? And sometimes people come up with these fake markets. They’re like, oh, well, we are facilitating global e-commerce and global e-commerce, I’m making up the number, is $30 billion a year, and so it’s, I mean $30 trillion a year, and so we’re in a $30 trillion a year market. And if we get just a 10th of a percent of that, it’s 300 billion of revenue. And you’re like, that’s not your market. Your market is like, you built this little optimization engine for SMB websites or whatever, that’s not a $30 trillion market. And so really it’s kind of defining the market. There’s a really famous example of this, where defining your market changes how you think about it. And so that was Coca-Cola. So Coke and Pepsi were roughly neck and neck in terms of market share for decades.
And then one of the Coke CEOs said, “Hey, maybe we should be thinking about our share as share of liquids sold, like drinks, not share of soda.” And so we just went from 50 percent market share to 0.5 percent, and that’s why they bought Dasani and that’s why they entered all these other markets. Because they said our definition of our market is wrong, we’re not in the soda pop business, we’re in the drinks business. And so I think also sometimes reconceptualizing what you’re doing can really help change your scope of ambition or how you think about what you’re doing or —
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. If you were trying to spot along the lines of, the fraud will kill you in the payment space, any dogma in the AI world, the sphere of AI, anything hop to mind where you think, eh, maybe that’s not true now? Or maybe in two years it’ll be completely untrue, but people will have latched onto this belief as one of the, thou shalt not or thou shall commandment.
Elad Gil: Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, there’s some things that have circulated in the past around what’s the ROI on the CapEx spend of the, and will it ever be paid back? I think that stuff is probably off. But yeah, I think fundamentally there are moments in time where it’s very smart to be contrarian, and there’s moments in time where being consensus is the smartest possible thing you can do. And I think right now we’re in a moment in time where being consensus is very right. And you can really overthink it, and what’s a contrarian thing? We should go do a bunch of hardware stuff because blah, blah, blah. And you’re like, maybe just buy more AI. You know what I mean? I think people make these things way too complicated.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, yeah, true. In every aspect of life, probably. What for you then has gone on the — let’s just say you were mentoring, this is somebody you really care about, right? We can make up an avatar, whatever, like nephew of one of your best friends or son of one of your best friends or daughter who’s really smart, got an engineering degree, came out of MIT, has a couple of hits in angel investing and they’re like, all right, I think I’m going to raise a fund. But they don’t have the access necessarily that you do to AI, let’s just say. Are there any things categorically you would say would be on the do not invest list because they’re likely to be annihilated or consumed or replicated by AI?
Elad Gil: I think the reality is that when people start off as investors, a lot of the times the reason they have early stage funds is because you can always get access at the earliest stages of companies if you just start helping people. I mean, that’s what I did accidentally, but the reality is I’ve seen it over and over. You follow in with the right group of people, because the smartest people all self-aggregate together, and you just start helping people out and they just ask if you want to invest and you start investing and suddenly you have a great track record and you raise bigger funds, and then you go later stage because that same cohort has grown up and they’ve started doing later stuff and then suddenly you can get access to everything else. That’s kind of the traditional venture story and it has been, I think, for decades in some sense. So I think that’s still very tenable and you can still do it for AI and you can do it for anything. I don’t think you have to go off and do energy investing or something.
Tim Ferriss: You have mentioned in the past a key learning, maybe that’s an overstatement, but you can correct me, from Vinod Khosla. And I think the wording is along the lines of, your market entry strategy is often different from your market disruption strategy.
Elad Gil: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: Could you speak to that?
Elad Gil: There’s sort of two or three versions of this. Version one is, you do something that’s really weird and it starts off looking like a toy and then it turns out to be really important. And that would be Instagram or Twitter or some of these more social products, where the initial use case is very different from how it’s used today and it kind of evolved as a product and how people perceive it and use it. And so that’s one version of it, and that’s usually more consumer centric. Another version of that would be SpaceX and Starlink, where they started off with launch and getting things up into space and they realized, hey, they have a cost advantage for satellites. And then they built out the Starlink network, which is now a major driver of their business. And so what they did expanded a lot and kind of shifted in terms of, their market entry was space launch, their disruption is Starlink, in some sense. So I do think there’s lots of examples like that over time.
Tim Ferriss: Coming back to information and just consumption, how do you consume most of your information? What would the pie chart break down to, in terms of if he listens to podcasts versus books versus X versus white papers versus something else?
Elad Gil: Yeah, I think a lot of what I’ve done is collapsed into three things. It’s X, it’s reading some technical papers/journals. In some cases, if it’s more of the biology side, although I don’t do biology investing, I just like it. But papers, although the papers in the AI industry have really dropped off given the competitive nature of everything now. And then talking to people. And so I found that 20 minutes with somebody really smart on a topic gives me more information and insights and leads on what to go read about than doing some exhaustive search. Actually, the fourth thing is now using models to do research for me. So that could be OpenAI, that could be Claude, that could be Perplexity, that could be Gemini. And for each of them, I actually use different things or I do different things with each of them.
Tim Ferriss: What do you do with the different models?
Elad Gil: I’ll just give you one example versus go through every single one of them. But —
Tim Ferriss: Sure.
Elad Gil: — Gemini, I actually feel like if I’m looking up more activities, like, “Hey, I’m planning a trip somewhere.” I actually feel like the Google Corpus and all the stuff they built over time is quite useful for travel tips of certain types. And so that’d be a Gemini-specific thing. That doesn’t mean the other models can’t do it well. It’s more just like I’ve tended to get more accurate rankings of things that way. And I’ll ask for breakdowns and rankings across multiple dimensions and all this stuff for scoring of things. I did a deep dive on a few different areas of ADHD and ASD.
Tim Ferriss: What’s ASD?
Elad Gil: Oh, I’m sorry. It’s autism spectrum.
Tim Ferriss: I see. I got it.
Elad Gil: So basically, if you look at autism, it went from — I’m going to misquote the numbers, so I should look this up later. But I think it’s something like one in a few thousand of the population was diagnosed with autism 30 years ago, 40 years ago, and now it’s like 3 percent. So you’re like, well, what is that? Is that a change in older parents having more kids? Which it turns out that’s not the driver. Is it some shift in the environment? It turns out it’s just diagnostic criteria shifted. And then there’s a lot of incentives to actually diagnose people in the schools. That’s roughly the summary of why we have so many kids that are classified as either having attention deficit where there’s also a financial incentive for doctors to do it because they can prescribe drugs versus autism, but both have gone up dramatically in terms of diagnoses. And it’s unclear to me that more people actually have it. It’s just diagnosed dramatically more broadly.
Tim Ferriss: Which model were you investigating that with?
Elad Gil: Usually when I do things like that, I use two or three models at once and then I ask for primary literature and then ask for summary charts. And I actually have this whole breakdown of stuff that I asked for it to output so that I can go back and double check the data and then read through the literature and everything else. And there’s really interesting things that came out of the autism one in particular, because it turned out maternal age actually has a bigger impact than paternal age in some of the studies. And people always talk about paternal age. And then you’re like, “Why are people only talking about paternal age? Is there a societal incentive for that? Is it a political belief system? Why is that the point of emphasis?” Which I thought was really [inaudible], right? So there’s other things that kind of come out of that in terms of questions, in terms of the why of things.
Tim Ferriss: Why were you looking into that specifically?
Elad Gil: I thought it was interesting.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Okay.
Elad Gil: “Seems like it’s gone up a lot. Let me try and understand why.” And so I started looking into it. I was also talking to a friend of mine who is in her sort of mid to late 30s, and she was dating a guy who was in his late 40s, early 50s, and she brought up, oh, she was worried about autism and what would happen with them if they had kids and all this stuff. And so then I did this deep dive as part of that too. And the takeaway was, I can’t remember exactly what it was. It was like, I’m making it up, so please don’t quote me on this. I can look it up later, but it was like there’s a 10 percent increase for every 5 to 10 years incremental paternal and maternal age.
And again, maternal was actually a little bit stronger in some of the data sets. And the thing is though, if you believe that it’s 1 in 5,000 or one in whatever in the population, that 10 percent, 20 percent difference doesn’t matter from a population frequency perspective. This diagnostic criteria went way up.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, it’s true for a lot of diagnoses.
Elad Gil: A lot of stuff, but societally we’re told, “Oh, it’s the age of the parents that’s driving all these autism rates up.” And you’re like, “No, it’s all these incentives.” And then you look at some of the school systems, it was like 60 percent of all the autism diagnoses, and I think it was the state of New Jersey or something, were not actually based on any clinical criteria. It was a teacher randomly saying this person has autism.
Tim Ferriss: Oh, God. Terrible.
Elad Gil: And so you start digging into these things and you’re like, wow, this is super interesting. And these models are really valuable and helpful for that. So I’ve been doing a lot of back to your question of where do I get information? Part of it has been these deep dives with models into questions that I just find interesting where I ask them to aggregate clinical trial data or aggregate different types of information and then give me the primary sources and then give me summaries and double check things. And so I have a whole series of prompts around that to also clean data and check it. And so it’s really fun. And then I always set it up in multiple models and just see what they each come up with.
Tim Ferriss: When you talk to people, and this may be too much of a kind of amorphous topic for us to dive into in a meaningful way, but let’s just say you find somebody you want to talk to for 20 minutes, right? How do you typically find those people? I suspect there are a lot of ways, but are you finding them on X versus finding them in a technical paper versus finding them somewhere else just to get an idea? And then when you get on the phone with such a person, are there repeating trains of questioning or certain ways that you like to approach it?
Elad Gil: Oh, I think there’s three different types of things. One is, “Hey, I’m doing a deep dive in an area just because I think it’s interesting or maybe it’s relevant to an area I want to invest in.” Often, honestly, just is interesting. And then I’ll try to quickly triangulate who are the smartest people on the thing and that may be technical papers that may just be asking each person I talk to who’s really smart. There’s one form of that which is, hey, it’s very informational and I’m trying to do a deep dive on something. I mean, I worked with some of the early AI researchers at Google. That’s how I knew Noam Shazeer who started Character and then went back to Google and that’s how I’ve met a bunch of other folks. But some of the people I just met, just interesting paper, let me look them up, or, “Hey, everybody says this person’s really smart. Let me talk to them.” That’s one form.
A second form is I do think really smart people tend to aggregate. And so if you’re just hanging out with smart people who keep meeting other smart people, and people who are polymathic tend to hang out with people who are polymathic and people who are — it’s kind of like attracts like for all sorts of things. So that’s sort of a second set. Those are probably the two main things. I mean, sometimes people also just refer people over to me. They’ll say, “Hey, I think you two would like chatting.” There’s a separate thing, which is there’s people that I go back to recurrently, which is more like, I think this is one of the smartest people about where AI is heading and let me talk to them all the time.
Or there’s one of the smartest people about longevity. Like Kristen, the CEO of BioAge, I call sometimes about random longevity-related things because she knows so much about every topic in it. She’s very thoughtful. She’s very willing to question her own assumptions. It’s very just truth seeking in a way that people aren’t. And people always use that term and say, but she really is just like, “What’s correct? Let me just figure it out.” She’s like a PhD and postdoc in bioinformatics and aging and all. She’s super legit. And so that’s an example of somebody that I’ll call for longevity stuff. And so I just have certain people I’ll call for certain topics.
Tim Ferriss: So you have literacy in biologies. It’s kind of quaint how I went to the first Quantified Self meetup in whenever it was, 2008 or something with 12 people sitting around in Kevin Kelly’s house talking about measuring things with Excel spreadsheets. The world has changed, right? So there are armies of tens of thousands of self-described biohackers and so on, talking about longevity. There’s a lot of nonsense. For yourself personally, where have you landed in terms of interventions or thinking about interventions for yourself?
Elad Gil: Oh, I haven’t done a ton. It feels like a lot collapses into sleep well, exercise a lot, et cetera. There’s a handful of things that kind of matter, eat well. And so I’ve kind of collapsed some of that stuff. I think there’s one or two things that maybe you can take that are helpful. And then there’s some things I always thought it’d be fun to experiment with that I haven’t done yet.
Tim Ferriss: Like what?
Elad Gil: I thought it’d be cool to try a rapamycin pulse or something. So stuff like that. But the reality is that I’m kind of waiting for the real drugs to come out and then maybe I’d use those. Some of the ones that I actually think will really impinge on longevity or certain systems like we were talking earlier about how as you age, the muscle that holds the lens of your eye weakens, and that’s part of the reason that your ability to focus gets screwed up. And so there should be eyedrops for that. There’s a bunch of stuff around neurosensory aging that I’d love to fund a startup. There’s a bunch of stuff around the cosmetics of aging that I’ve long been talking about trying to fund. I actually funded a clinical trial at Stanford to work on that, for example, because I think it’s very underinvested in. And peptides to me is basically that. I think a lot of the people are taking peptides as certain forms of health, but also certain forms of cosmetic applications like 5-HKCU and melatonin and all these things are basically cosmetic in nature.
Tim Ferriss: Well, you mentioned a handful of things that seem helpful to take. Are those just the vitamin D or are we talking about other things? What are more on that shortlist?
Elad Gil: Vitamin D and creatine.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. Got it.
Elad Gil: If you want to a lift.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah.
Elad Gil: I don’t know. What’s on your list? I mean, you’ve thought about this so much more than I have. What are you taking or what are you thinking about or —
Tim Ferriss: I’m much more conservative than I think people would expect. I played around with a lot of things in my earlier days and a lot of it is very, I would say, capped risk. If you’re experimenting as I was with first generation Dexcom continuous glucose monitors in 2008 or 2009, very unpleasant to wear. And I wasn’t aware of any non-type one diabetics using them at the time, but I wasn’t using much in terms of, let’s just say, questionable gene therapy flying to other countries to use something like a follistatin, not to throw it under the bus, but I feel like the general heuristic of no biological free lunch, I recognize it’s very simplistic, but it’s pretty helpful. At least it will aid you in avoiding a lot of pitfalls. So I mean, there are things I’m experimenting with. Different forms of ketone esters and salts, for instance, I think some could be very, very interesting for cerebral vasculature.
And since I have Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s, et cetera, in my family, including for people who are APOE3, so there are certainly many other risk factors. I’m paying a lot of attention to that side of things. Obicetrapib, I think, is one to keep an eye on that’s not yet ready for prime time, but rapamycin’s interesting. I do think rapamycin is interesting with a lot of asterisks because you can screw yourself up if you don’t know what you’re doing. And if you’re playing with any immunosuppressant, I mean, you just have to be very careful. But looking at combining that, for instance, one of the experiments that I might do is — and I would have a cleaner read of signal if I only did one intervention, but real life is different from waiting for science sometimes.
So possibly combining a Norwegian four by four interval training with rapamycin pulsing to look at volumetric changes, if any, in the hippocampus and other areas. I think that’s a pretty interesting hypothesis worth testing, but otherwise it’s basic-basic, right? It’s creatine, it’s the vitamin D is look, if you have methylation issues or you’re taking medication as I am like omeprazole, which can inhibit magnesium absorption and other things, you want to keep an eye on that, but not too fancy. I think urolithin A is pretty interesting. The data keeps mounting on that. So I do have a key and interest in mitochondrial health. So if there are things, which could also include regular intermittent fasting and occasional three to seven day fasting, which could be a fast mimicking diet most recently for me based on the input from Dr. Dominic D’Agostino. Trying to foster autophagy and mitophagy with some regularity, not all the time.
Elad Gil: Sure.
Tim Ferriss: I’m not trying to optimize for that all the time.
Elad Gil: One thing I’ve been wondering, so if you look at a computer and often the key to fixing your laptop or the key to fixing any system is you just fucking reboot it, right? You reload the system and it just works magically and there’s a bunch of crap that kind of can — is there a equivalent of that? Is it like going under for anesthesia? There’s some nerve freezing thing that some people have been doing recently.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah, I don’t know. It sounds scary. Oh, maybe stellate ganglion block?
Elad Gil: Yeah, that’s it. The stellate ganglion block.
Tim Ferriss: Yeah. I mean, the rebooting — oh, man, I’m letting out an exhale because there are some interesting options for very specific use cases, right?
It makes sense conceptually. I mean, you’re more qualified to speak to this, but I would say just spending a lot of time around neuroscientists, and I spend a lot of my time in terms of information intake, reading or doing my best. Fortunately with AI tools, it’s become a lot easier, not just getting a synopsis, but actually using it to help you learn concepts that you can kind of layer in some rational sequence. But I read a lot of neuroscience stuff and a lot of optical stuff, there’s actually a surprising amount of — I mean, there’s maybe not so surprising, like very strong intersection there. So if you’re looking at PBM and photobiomodulation through the eyes, I mean, you can do it transcranially as well. I would give a note of caution for that for folks.
But the reboot side, I would say, for instance, and people who have experienced this to a lesser extent with GLP-1 agonists, if they take it for weight loss, maybe they stop smoking or they cut back on drinking, or they have these kind of system-wide decreases or increases in impulse control, right?
Elad Gil: Yeah.
Tim Ferriss: For someone who’s, say, an opiate addict, I think that ibogaine, which, in the future may take the form of an active metabolite or something like that, in flood dosing, at least that seems pretty necessary at this point, relatively high doses. Under medical supervision, because you can have fatal cardiac events, co-administration of magnesium seems to help, but it’s dangerous stuff. People should be careful. You can, and there are lots of people historically who deserve a lot of credit for this, like Howard Lotsof and his wife, but opioid addicts can go through flood dosing of ibogaine and come out and they’re basically given a window with which they won’t experience withdrawal symptoms, physical withdrawal symptoms.
And I think there’re probably applications to other things with ibogaine or pharmacological interventions like ibogaine. I mean, some of the craziest stuff, honestly, related to that molecule is the — and I’m skeptical of this simple description, but sort of reversal and brain age. So it changes in the brain based on MRIs, Nolan Williams, rest in peace, and his lab looked at this pretty closely pre and post dosing of ibogaine for veterans with traumatic brain injury. And some of that might be due to something called glial derived neurotrophic factor, right? People might be familiar with like BDNF.
So ibogaine is one interesting option. Anesthesia, I’ve become a lot more cautious with general anesthesia. I just had surgery yesterday and I opted for local anesthesia, which in this case was not a big deal because it was just, you can see it, like had something cut out of my head, but coming back to the — and I’m going to riff for a second here, but the autism spectrum disorder and ADHD example you were unpacking where you talked about the incentives, they might be in perverse incentives to diagnose, well, I mean, not to quote Munger, but it’s like, follow the money, right?
And a lot of people are put under general who really don’t need to be put under general, but it adds a very, very, very huge line item to the tab. And there are people who go under anesthesia and wake up and do not retain the same ability to recall memories and so on. Their personalities become in some way destabilized. And the fact of the matter is that a lot of anesthesia is very poorly understood, really poorly. We know it works, but it’s very poorly understood. And I don’t think a lot of people realize, because why would they, unless they’ve just spending a lot of time looking into this. There are lots of medications that are incredibly well-known, commonly prescribed, for which the mechanisms of action are really poorly understood if they’re understood at all.
We know based on studies, they appear to be well tolerated, like side effects profiles include A through Z, and it certainly seems to exert this effect or have an impact on biomarker X, but we don’t actually fucking know how it works. And there’s just a lot of stuff that falls into that bucket. And so I am cautious with a lot of it, but to come back to your question, I went off on a bit of a TED Talk. The most interesting reboot that I’ve seen, and I don’t want to really water it down to the dopaminergic system because there’s a lot more to it, but ibogaine, I think more so than ibogaine itself shows what is possible. And I don’t know if that’s limited to drugs, right? I am very bullish and they’re going to be fuck-ups. There are going to be some sidebars that don’t look so good, but brain stimulation, I think is, and bioelectric medicine, broadly speaking, is one of the great next frontiers, certainly in treating what we might consider psychiatric disorders, but also for performance enhancement.
And we’re at a point kind of looking for those external why now answers, right? There are actually some really good answers to why now for this as a field. And I think people will be experimenting a lot with this, but without the use of pills and potions and IVs and actually non-invasive brain stimulation, maybe some invasive in the case of implants. So that’s a long answer, but yeah, that’s somewhat I’m thinking about and tracking.
And I mean, some of this stuff we’ll see, but I think a lot of this stuff could be outpatient procedure. You walk in, you’re in there for an hour or two, and then you’re out. So we’ll see. Let me ask just a couple of last questions, and then if there’s anything else we want to bat around, we can bat it around, but I appreciate the time.
Tim Ferriss: Elad of five years from now is looking back at Elad of today. Are there any beliefs, positions, could be related to AI or otherwise, that you think are more likely than others to be wrong?
Elad Gil: That’s a good question. I think there’s all sorts of things I’m going to get wrong, and I think we’re living through a period of big change, which means big uncertainty. And so I wouldn’t be surprised if half the things I think are going to happen don’t or happen even more so or whatever it may be. And that’s part of the fun of it in terms of if we had a perfectly predictive future, it’d be very boring because we’d know exactly what’s coming and it’d be awful. And this ties into notions of free will and all sorts of other things. So I’m sure there’s a lot. I think there’s a separate question of just one exercise I’ve been going through recently is, and I’ve never done this before, a lot of what you do in life, it’s back to the John Lennon quote life is what happens when you’re making other plans.
For the first time, I’m actually thinking, what’s my 10-year plan across a few different dimensions of life? And the basic question is, I won’t get it right. I can try and have a plan for 10 years. Of course, it’s not going to be what I think, but it’s more, does it change the scope of ambition that you have? Does it change how you think about life? And so I’ve been trying to think in those terms, what do I want to do over the next decade? And then what does that mean in terms of the near term what I do in order to get there in 10 years?
And so I think that’s been very eye-opening for me in terms of shifting some of my mindset around what I should be trying or not trying to do. Now, the AGI people will say, “Well, in two years we have AGI, so it doesn’t matter where your plans are.” But I find that to be a very defeatist view of the world. It’s like, I’m going to give up because of those versus saying, “Great, I’m going to have this plan and I can adjust it as needed.” But through this time of change, there’ll be some really interesting things maybe to do in the world.
Tim Ferriss: Elad, do you have anything else you’d like to say, comments, requests for the audience, things to point people to anything at all before we wind to a close? People can find you on X @eladgil, eladgil.com, certainly the Substack blog, blog.eladgil.com, and elsewhere. We’ll link to everything in the show notes, but anything else that you’d like to add?
Elad Gil: Yeah, wonderful to chat with you as always. I really enjoy it, so thanks for having me on.Tim Ferriss: Yeah, thanks, man. Always a pleasure. And to everybody listening or watching, we will link to everything in the show notes, tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, as always, be a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself, thanks for tuning in.
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