Elad Gil
48 statements across 13 episodes · 15 bullish · 11 bearish · 10 people on the record · first statement May 24, 2017 by Mar Hershenson · said 218 times in 86 episodes since 2017 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Elad Gil's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Harry Stebbings (133), Saam Motamedi (9), Dan Siroker (9), Sarah Guo (7), Roger Dickey (7), Avichal Garg (7), Shiv Rao (6), Mar Hershenson (3)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 19 mentions in 9 episodes 2 per episode
- The Five Year Desert to Product Market Fit & a $5.3BN Valuation with Shiv Rao, Founder @ Abridge · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Cursor Acquired for $60BN | Anthropic Hits $1TRN in Secondary Markets & Figma, Adobe, Canva Dead? · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Gokul Rajaram: How to Analyse for Durability and Defensibility in a World of AI · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Anthropic's $30T Assumption & OpenAI Confirms IPO | Why Customer Service & Robotics are Overinflated
- The AI Boom Will Create Enormous Roadkill: Who Wins & Loses? | David Frankel
- DeepSeek Raises at $50B | The Rise of Open Source vs OpenAI & Anthropic | OpenAI Builds Own Chip · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- AppLovin CEO: Why Founders Shouldn't Angel Invest & Why the Best Don't Need Mentorship · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- "Cursor is Dead" is Total BS: Here is Why | Miles Clements · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 1 more episode that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 41 mentions in 11 episodes 4 per episode
- Why Apple Needs a Management Overhaul & Why Google is Catching Up with Hyperscalers · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- a16z GP, Martin Casado: Anthropic vs OpenAI & Why Open Source is a National Security Risk with China · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Predictions for 2026: Top Buy & Biggest Short | Why Salesforce Could Win & NVIDIA’s Challenges · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20VC Exclusive: Mercury Founder Launches First $26M Fund with Immad Akhund · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20VC: Max Altman on The New Seed War: Can Anyone Compete with Sequoia and a16z | Leaving $2BN on the Table with Reddit | Lessons from Backing Rippling at $25M Post | Why Climate Tech is a Mirage and Disaster
- 20VC: The Startup Adding $1M ARR Every Week | Competing Against OpenAI's Codex and Claude Code: Who Wins | Why Gemini is Failing and GPT-5 Is Winning | Do Margins Matter in a World of AI | The Ugly Truth About AI Coding with Zach Lloyd, Warp
- OpenAI's Multi-Billion Deal with AMD & Polymarket, Vercel and Supabase Raise Mega Rounds · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Sam Altman's Masterplan or a Gift to Anthropic? Palantir & Shopify Crush Earnings · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 3 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 20 mentions in 4 episodes 5 per episode
- Saam Motamedi: Why Series B Won’t Make Money & Why $1M ARR is a BS Milestone for Series A | E1177 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Dan Siroker: Second-Time Founders Are More Investable & Why Not To Hire People Out of College |E1153 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Torsten Reil, Helsing Founder: Raising $828M to Build the Defence Champion of Europe | E1237 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Keith Rabois on Rejoining Khosla Ventures | E1102 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 8 mentions in 2 episodes 4 per episode
2022 13 mentions in 3 episodes 4 per episode
- 20VC: Why Crypto is Software Eating Money, Why Crypto Firms Will Outcompete Traditional Venture Firms, How To Price Tokens and When To Have Them, DAOs: How Are They Structured and What Makes One Successful with Avichal Garg, Co-Founder @ Electric Capital
- Emil Michael: How I Negotiated the $4B Uber-China Deal, Why DoorDash Caught Up to Uber | 20VC #941 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- 20VC: Brex's Henrique Dubugras on Advice from Evan Spiegel and Eric Schmidt on CEOship, The Biggest Hiring Mistakes When Scaling, What Everyone Gets Wrong with Product Messaging and When is the Right Time to Launch Secondary Products
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 2 mentions in 1 episode
2020 9 mentions in 8 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Anduril Founder, Palmer Luckey: "I Am Here To Build a $50Bn Company", How Palmer Evaluates His Relationship To Money Pre & Post Oculus' $2.3Bn Exit & Why The US DOD Needs To Be More Like China in It's Approach
- 20VC: Retool Founder, David Hsu on Why YC Is Helpful Pre Product-Market Fit but Not Post and Why VCs Are Not Helpful Pre-Product Market-Fit but are Post, Why it is Difficult to Become Unprofitable if You Set Yourself Up For Profitability Early & Why VC Th
- 20VC: Sahil Lavingia on Rolling Funds and Their Impact on The Future of Venture, How To Evaluate Market, Team and Product, The Value of Party Rounds & The Pros and Cons of Multi-Stage Funds Investing at Seed
- 20VC: 8VC's Joe Lonsdale on How To Foster Contrarian Thinking Within Venture Partnerships, Why The Best VCs Are Company Builders & Why It Is Not Possible To Build Multi-Billion Dollar Companies and Have Worklife Balance
- 20VC: TripActions CEO Ariel Cohen on The Future of Business and Personal Travel & Layoffs; How To Do Them The Right Way & Maintain Company Culture and Morale
- 20VC: Notion's Fundraise with Index: The Most Anticipated Deal in The Valley: How It Came To Be | The Future of Remote Work |How Notion Approach The Balance of Growth and Profitability
- 20VC: Gusto Co-Founder, Tomer London on Why Most Founders Approach Fundraising With The Wrong Mindset Today, How To Construct A Values/Motivation Alignment Test To Determine The Right Investors For You & Why Delight Is So Crucial To The Success of Any Con
- 20VC: Moxxie Ventures' Katie Stanton on What It Takes To Raise A First Time Fund As A Solo GP, The Entrance of Multi-Stage Funds Into Seed Rounds and The Inverse Relationship of Those That Fund Diverse Managers and Those That Say They Do
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
2019 53 mentions in 28 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Brex Founder Henrique Dubugras on Why Being Mission Driven Is Not The Only Way To Build A Massive Business, Why You Should Not Associate Fundraising with The Cash Needs of Your Business & Why You Don't Have To Follow Startup Theory When It Comes To
- 20VC: Front's Mathilde Collin on Why Discipline Is More Important Than Vision, The Right Way To Approach Investor Updates and Director Reports & How To Effectively Structure 1-1s
- 20VC: Why You Must Have A Customer Acquisition Strategy From Day 1, How To Test and Validate Ideas At Speed & Why You Should Speak To Investors Before Starting Work On Your Idea with Kulveer Taggar, Founder @ CEO @ Zeus Living
- 20VC: Y Combinator's New President, Geoff Ralston on The Single Most Important Perspective An Investor Can Provide A Founder, The Biggest Lessons From Working Alongside Paul Graham & Why You Will Lose As An Investor If You "Profile Invest"
- 20VC: Softbank Managing Partner, Jeff Housenbold on How Softbank Approach Portfolio Construction, Their Optimal Investment Decision-Making Process and What Excites Softbank Most In Opportunities Today
- 20VC: How To Build True Human Relationships with VC Pre-Investment, Why Valuation Is Not The Only Term and When To Take Lower Offers & How To Approach Mental Health As A Founder with Jon Dishotsky, Founder & CEO @ Starcity
- 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on The Strategy Behind The New $600m "Back To The Future" Fund, The Truth To Price Sensitivity at Series A & Why Venture Team Building Is Like Basketball Team Building
- 20VC: Clearbanc's Michele Romanow on Why 40% of VC $ Raised Today Goes To Google and Facebook, How To Create A Financing Mechanism For The Repeatable Parts Of Your Business & Why We Need To Stop Celebrating Fundraises
- 20 more episodes that year, every mention in 2019 →
2018 27 mentions in 12 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: The 2 Core Areas Value Will Accrue In Crypto, Why Crypto Will Drive The Re-Centralisation of Talent Back Into Silicon Valley & Why Regulation Is The Opposite of What We Should Be Concerned By in Crypto with Avichal Managing Partner @ Electric Capita
- 20VC: General Catalyst's Hemant Taneja on Why We Are In A Golden Age For VC, Why Pro-Rata Is A Lazy Posture and Why He Does Not Focus On Price
- 20VC: Lessons From Slack and Opendoor on Price Sensitivity, Why The Best CEOs Are Able To Manage Momentum and Why Being A Board Member is a "Full Contact Sport" with Glenn Solomon, Managing Partner @ GGV Capital
- 20VC: Why Warm Intros Are Mostly Dumb, Why Ownership is Built On First Check and 4 Crucial Elements To Make Cold Inbound Attractive with Leo Polovets, General Partner @ Susa Ventures
- 20VC: A Framework For Approaching Risk and How It Affects Portfolio Construction | Lessons and Advice From Working with Dropbox's Drew Houston | Why Being A Learning Animal Is The Most Important Factor For Success with Ted Wang, Partner @ Cowboy Ventures
- 20VC: Scalar Capital's Linda Xjie on Who Will Win The Smart Contract War, The Future of Exchanges: Centralised or Decentralised & The Pros and Cons of Differing Privacy Coins
- 20VC: Phil Libin on Why The Concept of A Silicon Valley Style Startup Is Made To Benefit VCs, Why The Very Structure of Companies Is Outdated and Inefficient & What It Means To Build The Netflix of Product
- 20VC: Learnings From Backing The Likes of Spotify and Airbnb, The World of Growth Investing Today and The Right Way For Investors To Think About Liquidity with Woody Marshall, General Partner @ TCV
- 4 more episodes that year, every mention in 2018 →
2017 26 mentions in 8 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: If You Do Not Like VCs, You Have Not Worked With a Good One, How Andreesen Have Added The Same Level of Value As A Co-Founder, Why Market Is The First Thing To Consider When Angel Investing & Why Series A Is A Hiring Decision with Roger Dickey, Foun
- 20VC: Nuzzel's Jonathan Abrams on Why The Top VCs Do Not Have A PlayBook For Startup Success, Why Most Boards Are Not Successful & Why He Is Bored Of Hearing "I Fell Into VC"
- 20VC: Biggest Takeaways From Working With Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, Why You Should Put Off Hiring For As Long As Possible & Why Seed Stage Investing Is All About Optimising The Top Of The Funnel with Harj Taggar, Founder & CEO @ Triplebyte
- 20VC: The Biggest Indicators Of Success In Founding Teams, How To Balance Both Vision and Operations & Taking Money From "The Man At The Rug Store" with Mar Hershenson, Founding Managing Partner @ Pear.vc
- 20VC: Why You Should Build Your Investor Team Like A Sports Team & How To Leverage The Abilities Of Your Investors Effectively with Ted Blosser, Founder & CEO @ WorkRamp
- 20VC: Benchmark's Peter Fenton on How To Differentiate Between Good & Great VCs, Why Ownership Is A Bigger Determinant Of Returns Than Valuation & What Makes A Truly Exceptional Board Member
- 20VC: Preparing For The Next Big Trend, Why Conversational Will Be The Next Big Thing & How Entrepreneurs Should View Market Size with Sarah Guo @ Greylock Partners
- 20VC: What Is Core To The Best Investor - Founder Relationships, The Biggest Risk For Founders In The Early Days & Why EQ Is The Most Important Trait For Managers with Jack Altman, Founder & CEO @ Lattice
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
Everything said about Elad Gil, oldest first
May 24, 2017 positive
Jun 21, 2017
Jun 21, 2017
Jun 21, 2017 bearish
Gil: VCs applying software metrics to food tech and biotech will burn
“I think the place where it ends poorly is where somebody applies and assumes software-related models to non-software areas, and they don't think about the margin structure, and they don't think about dealing with physical goods, and that's where I think a lot …”
Jun 21, 2017
Gil: Winning Startups Recast Existing Behaviors Rather Than Creating New Ones
“So I just think, like often the most compelling things are capturing behavior that already exists, and then revamping it in a new way, or capturing it in a new medium, versus creating entirely new behaviors. I actually think there's very few things that exist …”
Jun 21, 2017 negative
Jun 21, 2017
Jun 21, 2017 bullish
Gil: Invested in Stripe and Gusto because he needed them as founder
“So for example, a few years ago, I invested in a set of companies based solely on the fact that I would have used them at my first startup. I would have used Stripe for payments. I invested in Stripe. I would have used Mailgun for email, and so I invested in M…”
Jun 21, 2017
Gil: Institutional VC funds are forced into rigid stage strategies
“I think many of the best investors I know are actually stage agnostic, but I think once you become a professionalized fund or firm, you're very much forced in many cases to choose, you know, what your sweet spot is or what your strategy is.”
Jun 21, 2017
Gil: Career success requires shifting from saying yes to saying no
“Early in your career, the way to be successful in some sense is to say yes to everything, because a set of opportunities that you have are quite limited. And so any opportunity in some sense is an interesting opportunity. As you advance in your career, the fli…”
Oct 18, 2017 neutral
Arbesman: Frontier tech is too broad to be treated as a single category
“While there might be certain similarities, I think frontier tech overall, and it's really this, it's very broad and diffuse space, and so in many ways I'm almost hesitant to group it all under kind of that umbrella term. And because the knowledge you need to d…”
May 29, 2018 bullish
Jul 17, 2018 positive
Gil: Founders underestimate the upside of selling early to breakout acquirers
“On the financial side, I actually think people tend to undercount the value of exiting early to a breakout company, because if a company is truly breaking out and it still has a five or 10 or 20 X on top of it, then that magnifies the impact of the acquisition…”
Jul 17, 2018 positive
Gil: Multi-billion-dollar startups should aggressively pursue M&A for talent and product
“Any company that has a market cap of a few billion or more, in my opinion, if they're new, should actually be buying up other companies pretty rapidly, and I think in some cases, those teams just haven't hired a corp dev person, or they haven't professionalize…”
Jul 17, 2018 positive
Gil: Every manager should write a one-page guide on how to work with them
“And I think that every executive or potentially every manager Should basically write up the one page description of how to engage them, how to work with them. What are the things that work well or don't work with well with them?”
Jul 17, 2018
Elad Gil: Fast-Scaling Startups Must Sometimes Slow Growth to Protect Culture
“And so you sometimes actually have to slow down growth rather than accelerate it, not because of capital constraints. Usually you have the money to do it if things are really working well. But more because you're just going to kind of blow up the way that the …”
Jul 17, 2018
Jul 17, 2018
Gil: Pre-PMF startups should hire generalists over functional specialists
“The type of team that you want very early on is the team that can be geared towards finding product market fit, which generally means either generalists or Are people who know the industry well enough, but who can do other functions or roles?”
Jul 17, 2018
Gil: Career success relies on identifying and maximizing time with a core network
“I think when all is said and done, the key thing to navigating a career is to figure out who's the network or group of people that you kind of want to work with repeatedly, and how do you increase the amount of time spent with those individuals”
Jul 17, 2018 bearish
Jul 17, 2018 negative
Elad Gil: Average Startup Quality Has Fallen as Seed Volume Quadrupled
“The average company has gotten worse rather than better, and the number of companies has gone up dramatically. I think there's now a few thousand venture-backed companies a year, or seed companies, I should say, a year, when a few years ago was maybe a quarter…”
Jul 17, 2018
Elad Gil: Hire Executives Tailored for Next 12 to 18 Months
“A key point, I think Ben Horowitz makes this in his book is, and I think it's a general truism is to really focus on hiring people who will be great for the next 12 to 18 months. Hiring somebody who's ran a multi-thousand person team, if you're only a 50 perso…”
Jul 17, 2018 bullish
Elad Gil: Twitter's Valuation Grew Over 10x Following Its Acquisition of MixerLabs
“When I sold my last startup, or my second to last startup to Twitter, we sold in part because we were really excited about Twitter, and we thought we could have a lot of impact there, and I thought my team would be really happy there. But we also sold in part …”
Jul 17, 2018 negative
Gil: Preemptive VC Capital Locks Founders In and Destroys Early Exit Options
“And so I think the downside of preemptive rounds and extra capital is it also locks in the entrepreneur to a longer story, and it removes the option value of actually exiting at a valuation where lots of people would have bought them.”
Jul 17, 2018 negative
Gil: Extended Privatization Traps Capital and Talent in Undeserving Startups
“It's actually been positive for them to be private for longer, but it may be bad for the ecosystem overall because it's tying up a lot of capital and talent into pockets that may not deserve that capital and talent as much.”
Jul 17, 2018
Jul 17, 2018 negative
Jul 17, 2018
Elad Gil: Interview Domain Experts Before Hiring Unfamiliar Executive Roles
“One of the best tactics is to really go almost on a tour of the experts in a specific functional area. So for example, if you've never hired a general counsel, or if you've never hired a CFO, really what you want to do is figure out what is great in that role.…”
Jul 17, 2018
Elad Gil: I Took Lower Valuations at Both Startups for Better Investors
“Or anything else, you know, for my own companies, as I've run them, I've started two companies. And in both cases, there have been rounds where I've taken lower valuations to get a better investor on board or somebody that I thought would be more helpful. So I…”
Jul 17, 2018
Jul 17, 2018 negative
Oct 14, 2019 positive
Elad Gil and Scott Belsky drive strong Series A signaling
“Investors like a lot Gil, Scott Belsky, the entire collective of hashtag angels, angels who are both helpful, but I think most importantly, they've established this track record in the ecosystem where they have the ears of series A investors.”
May 26, 2020 negative
Elad Gil: Profitable late-stage startups were forced into emergency COVID fundraises
“And I've seen a number of late stage companies now have to go into an emergency fundraise, not because they weren't great companies who weren't, they were profitable three months ago. It's just COVID hit them so hard. Suddenly they needed to raise money in a v…”
May 26, 2020 negative
May 26, 2020
Elad Gil: Startups conducting layoffs should cut deeply in a single round
“And in general, when you do a layoff, you want to be able to do something significant all at once and So when cutting, you should cut more deeply than you think you should. And anyone who's marginal or you need to figure out, unfortunately, you should default …”
May 26, 2020 bullish
Elad Gil: M&A buyer activity will surge within 6 to 18 months
“I think there will definitely be a number of buyers coming into the market and that's actually one of the offensive things that you can do as a company if you're late stage is you can start planning ahead in terms of what are the companies you want to buy and …”
May 26, 2020 bullish
Elad Gil: Selling to a 10x breakout acquirer yields optimal exit outcomes
“If you do sell, if you can sell to a company that's breaking out itself and has a clear 10 X on it, that may actually be the smartest way to exit all else being equal. A, because you're going to end up with a much bigger financial outcome because, you know, th…”
May 26, 2020 neutral
May 26, 2020
May 26, 2020
May 26, 2020 bearish
Apr 11, 2022 positive
Garg: Elad Gil seeded Electric Capital with $1M and raised first $10M
“He was the catalyst. He was the person who came to us and said, you guys are really good at this, and there's a real market opportunity here for a thing that's not a traditional VC firm, and that's not a hedge fund, that's built differently, and you guys have …”
Jul 28, 2025 positive
Jul 31, 2025 positive
Stebbings: Recent top breakout VC firms are all single-person led
“When you look at, Bundly, the best performing managers, or the breakout managers the last few years, I think you put probably Thrive, Green Oaks, Founders Fund, and Eli Gill definitely up there. And all four of them are one person led.”
Dec 22, 2025 positive
Dec 22, 2025 neutral
Jan 19, 2026
Mar 16, 2026 bullish