Opinion
Gil: Half of private unicorns are not worth $1 billion
“I would posit that about half of the unicorns are not worth a billion dollars or more. In other words, 50% of the companies that are valued in the private markets as being worth more than a billion shouldn't be worth more than a billion.”
Insight
Gil: Structured late-stage venture deals are debt masquerading as equity
“On the late stages, some companies start building in very complicated structures and because they want that very high valuation, and a firm may be willing to give it, but then they build in extra preference or participation for the investor, or things that eff…”
Insight
Gil: Semiconductor layer provides the best way to index machine learning
“It's a way to effectively index machine learning, because I think it's very hard to invest in, quote, unquote, a machine learning company.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gil: Nobody is currently building scalable apps on Ethereum
“Nobody's really building scalable apps on Ethereum right now.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Gil: Most current crypto projects will go to zero
“Most crypto projects from today are going to go to zero. There's a few that are going to be incredibly valuable and already are, and that's going to grow, but I think most are going to go to zero.”
Insight
Gil: Founders should hire executives for 12 to 18 month horizons
“You should always be thinking of the person as the right person for the next 12 to 18 months, not the person for the next five years, and so I think a common mistake is that people will end up hiring, you know, they'll have a twenty-person engineering team, an…”
Insight
Gil: Startups tolerate good executives for too long instead of finding great ones
“Second, people tolerate good versus great hires for too long. And so they'll have a good VP marketing versus the person who's truly exceptional and a great fit for what they're doing.”
Opinion
Gil: Silicon Valley has very few truly strong product organizations
“There's very few, very strong product organizations in Silicon Valley. Google has a great product org. Facebook has a great product org. There's a handful of them.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Gil: Premature crypto ideas will become amazing within 15 years
“Yeah, I think we're going to see the same thing in crypto where there's all these ideas that are early and there's no infrastructure and in 15 years they're going to be amazing.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gil: Custom ASICs can outperform GPUs by 1,000x in machine learning
“There is room to create things that are 1000 times better or faster or more performant from a power perspective by creating custom ASICs for ML.”
Assertion Partly supported
Gil: Rapamycin and metformin extend organism lifespans by 5% to 30%
“There's at least two FDA approved drugs that in multiple organisms will extend lifespan between five and 30%. One of them is rapamycin, which in mice, for example, extend lifespan 10 to 30%, and it also extends lifespan And flies and worms and other organisms.…”
Insight
Gil: Scientific progress requires older generations of scientists to die off
“If you look at the Kuhnian paradigm of scientific change, it basically says you need the old guard to die in order for scientific progress to happen.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Gil: Lifespan extension could lock in power structures and hurt global self-renewal
“It does lock in societal structures, and it does lock in power structures, and so from that perspective, one can argue that it could really hurt self-renewal in a global system”
Insight
Gil: Startup success requires cash, co-founder harmony, and product-market fit
“If you think about it, the surface area of an early stage company is actually really simple. It's don't run out of money, don't fight with your co-founder, and find product market fit, and that's all you have to do, and you'll be successful to some extent.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gil: 100-person startups have two to three management layers
“If you're a hundred people, there's two to three layers between the CEO and every other person.”
Insight
Gil: Early startup employees must accept temporary shrinkage of responsibility
“And the other thing you should expect as an old timer is your role is gonna shrink and then it'll expand. And you need to be okay with that shrinking period. And you need to be okay with you losing responsibility before you suddenly gain tons of responsibility…”
Insight
Gil: Enterprise product managers act as buffers between engineering and sales
“There's typically a natural tension between product and other organizations. And a sort of a second role that they often play, particularly in enterprise companies, is they're almost a buffer between engineering and the rest of the world, but they're also a co…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Gil: Machine learning is the only active sector for tech acquisitions
“So maybe the only area where people are very aggressively buying right now is machine learning, and so maybe there's a lack of why now.”
Assertion Supported
Gil: Coinbase made five to six acquisitions under Emily Choi's leadership
“And so Coinbase is a good example where over the last, you know, 12 months, I think they've made five or six acquisitions and in part that may be driven by them hiring Emily Choi to come in and You know, really drive that function in a smart way.”
Disclosure
Gil: Biopharma drugs extending human lifespan are a key investment focus
“I'm personally very interested in sort of longevity and anti-aging technologies. And by that, I mean true biopharma, which is translating existing science that's existed in labs for 1020 years, and is trying to turn it into drugs that can extend lifespan prett…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Gil: Dozen billion-dollar companies will be created by API-ifying internal software
“I still think there's a dozen billion dollar plus companies to be created where you're just taking something that everybody's building internally over and over again, and you're just turning it into an API.”
Insight
Gil: Every major tech wave produces a major silicon company
“Every major technology wave also had a major silicon company created in it, and right now to some extent that's Nvidia for not only graphics processing but also for machine learning purposes.”
Insight
Gil: Biopharma's focus on specific diseases creates longevity market opportunity
“Biopharma in general tends to be focused on oncology or cancer and a few other areas. And they're not really thinking about how can I push disease back in general, you know, with a drug. So I do think there's a big market gap, which creates a really interestin…”
Elad Gil