Elad Gil

“One is for the mid to late stage technology markets, people are continuing to invest as if there's velocity to get to a trillion for many companies where I don't think there's a velocity. Again, I think the, Some of them will get to 20, some will get to a hund…”

“And I think that's why you're seeing a flight to hardware companies. Oh, the labs will never do this hardware thing. And so we'll do that. And American dynamism and niche applications of AI and something that should be provided by an inference cloud. And et ce…”

“There's a handful of companies that should never, ever sell, at least any time in the near term. If you're anthropic, you shouldn't sell. If you're opening, you shouldn't sell. You know, there's a handful of these things that should never sell.”

“Most companies in any given era should at least consider it, and there's usually a time maximizing window where your best outcome is a sale within that window. It's like a 12 to 18 month period, usually where the company's worth the most it'll ever be worth.”

“In this cycle, every year of AI time is like three to four years of normal cycle time. And so three years is like a decade, right?”

“And so I do think we're going to see a ongoing rise in valuations most likely over the next year or two, much more than we've seen today. And obviously there'll be some great things in there and there'll be a bunch of stuff that doesn't deserve it, but I actua…”

“There's risk management against the value of the thing you're doing, but the biggest opportunity cost is your time. Your most productive years of your life are on the line right now. And you can either walk away with a good amount of money, go to the next gian…”

“Secondary is an intermediate option, which I actually don't think is always that great because it solves for some short term needs, but it doesn't actually create a solution. And you see a lot of people from 20, 20, 21 still running companies five years later …”

“So I do think we are seeing these shifts, and these shifts are purely driven by regulation. They're not driven by, is Texas a better or worse place to live? I mean, it impacts things, right? But it's regulatory shifts driving people out.”

“In reality, actually, Reply users were like six months ahead of everyone else, even people in the labs, because when we launch these agents, a lot of times we get researchers messaging us, it's like, oh, we didn't know Claude was capable of running for, you kn…”

“And it seems like in six to nine months, maybe some of those people will come back and say, actually, we can't rebuild everything.”

“We're calling it, we haven't launched yet, but we're about to launch with the first 1000 works, and we're gonna learn a lot, and people will give us feedback on each of the translations, but imagine now meditations will be translated into most of the world's s…”

“Technologists are very bad at hiring business people early on, at least in their careers and vice versa. Business people tend to be awful at hiring engineers. And so you end up with these mismatches on the early team.”

“My friend, Jared Kushner, who's obviously, you know, been involved in these administrations, he worked with Qatar, with Elad, and they built something where the permits only take, ah, 120 minutes there. So if you want a permit to build something, it'll get bac…”

“Elad sent me and he was like, dude, this is amazing. This is amazing. Every time Elad sent me something and said, it's amazing. Just fucking do it. Do not think you're smarter is my takeaway there.”

“Yeah, let's see definitely Andrile, Android, Airbnb, Coinbase Instacart, Stripe Square a little bit of SpaceX OpenAI, Perplexity, A couple other things. Cognition.”

“Our hope is to announce our first sort of statue or monument soon. We've been working on a project to do that for like societal beauty, like art and society at large scale.”

“Yeah, so our respective firms helped set up this company called Brinko, which is a Company, which basically builds, it has both a common platform that is like data infra and evals and a bunch of other stuff for people to use. And then on top of that, it builds…”

“So one thing that I might even be working on is taking working with OpenAI and Anthropic and 11 and a few other folks on taking the world's most important books and using machine translation to translate them into languages that represent over 80% of humanity …”

“I think there's a whole, like, set of models that nobody's built yet, or that I should say people are building, but it's very early. That I think could be incredibly impactful and interesting and just like cool, you know, like it'd be super interesting to rein…”

“We've considered, and I say we, cause like I have a group of people I work with now considered, should we go and buy a company and then transform it with AI? But I mean, it's scale, right? Is there something really big that you should work with because they al…”

“I think that fundamentally you know, there's so much demand for software and there's so little supply of engineering and reality relative to that demand that as you add this enormous boost of productivity to software engineers it just gets soaked up. Right. Be…”

“I think we're going to see a lot of these really great engineers who care about the bespoke craftsmanship of everything they do. They're going to be unhappy working at larger companies. As these coding tools get even more. Accelerant because it goes against th…”

“Because often for companies, there's about a 12 month window where your company's the most valuable will ever be, and then it crashes out. For a very small handful of companies, the answer is you should never, ever, ever sell. For most companies, the answer is…”

“And one tip for founders is from a hygiene perspective, but also just a way to make it a non-emotional discussion is pre-schedule once or twice a year, the board meeting where you talk about exits.”

“So our first investor was OpenAI and then our first two angel investors were Sarah Guo and Elad Gil.”

“In 20, 24, the cost of GPT-IV equivalent models, if you look at a million tokens, it came down over a hundred X. You know, so many of my team did this analysis to show that.”

“He's been good enough to be able to raise a three billion dollar solo fund.”

“He does have 18 people.”

“One is I think people will proclaim yet again that AI is not doing much and it's overhyped and like that MIT report that people were quoting that I thought really didn't matter. And the reality of the technology waves take like 10 years to propagate and people…”

“I think another prediction for 26 is the next set of verticals will hit massive scale. I think this year we saw consolidation of coding into a handful of players and Medical scribing into a handful of players. We go into a handful of players like RV and others…”

“I think you know, a third area is the next set of foundation models are going to come, and by that I don't mean the Neolabs and the Next Gen LLM, which of course will happen, but I mean, physics, materials, science progress by models, math progress. And I thin…”

“I think if one of the main AI companies goes out, it'll be probably do extremely well depending where they price. I mean, obviously if they're overly aggressive, it won't. But in general, I think there's so much retail appetite to actually participate in AI be…”

“Ultimately, these things become capital gains for certain types of approaches or models. Because we know scale really matters, which means that eventually you have to collapse into a handful of players because capital will aggregate the things that are working…”

“We just co-led a bridge together, you know, about a, about nine months ago at one of the rounds there.”

“One is, they take a lot of common stock, and they try to control the company, and they try to, and we did the opposite, where we said, we'll just put money in to buy our ownership stakes, and, you know, the equity should really go to the employees, and the fou…”

“So I my fund and Jared's, which is affinity co-led it. So we each put in half and then we had a great sort of bevy of angels across AI”

“And then a few months later, my chief of staff pulled all the data off of the government websites. And it was very clear the demographics that were actually impacted by COVID. And that had very deep policy implications in terms of what you should be doing soci…”

“Every once in a while your passion lines up with something really important for the world or really important for A field or discipline or industry or society and great follow your passion, but most of the time it's really bad advice and it actually leads peop…”

“Sometimes founders ask me, what's the biggest way to create a good culture? And the answer is winning. That's the best way to create a good culture. It's not the motivational speeches and the kombucha or what it's like when you're winning, everybody's excited …”

“We're working on doing monuments or public art across four or five key cities in the U S and we've been talking with different, both artists and artisans around different materials. So we've experimented with different bronze works. We've experimented with mar…”

“I think the hard part is it's kind of isolated. You can, you kind of have to go out to get to it. And so what I'm interested in is can you do these societally inspiring things, but in major cities and major thoroughfares, like how can you be central? To where …”

“So I think we've now led a few rounds that are a half billion plus each.”

“I remember I was an investor in Square and the Stripe founders pinged me and asked if I wanted to invest. And so I pinged one of the key executives at Square and said, Hey, do you think this is a conflict? And he said, absolutely. This is a conflict. You shoul…”

“Like, I've never sold a share of Stripe, and I hope to never, you know, do so. Or I should say never, like, for a very long time, you know, I'm a big believer in the company.”

“I think a lot of the golden periods for many companies is between, say, 50 and a hundred people up to, you know, a thousand, maybe 2000 if the thing keeps going in terms of growth, because that's the era where I think you see the most change”

“I think in general, one of my big learnings is I feel like early in careers, people try to complement or try to build out the skills that they don't have. In late in careers, they lean into what they're really good at and then they hire people to do the rest.”

“It does work. There's a lot of really bad technology that has big companies right now.”

“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.”

“And so I think one thing that's striking about this administration is the caliber of tech people that they actually got this time around. Is very high relative to prior administration.”

“Elad is very, very focused on the founder. I think the one thing I would say, Is he's very good with founder market fit, maybe the best in the industry.”

“Honestly, I think there's two people I'd point to and these were the first two people that invested in BrainTrust and really helped us. The first is Alana”

“You've, you're now at over a thousand people. You're in the hundreds of millions of revenue. You've been profitable the whole time. So you haven't spent a dime. I think of any of the money that you've ever raised, which is Pretty insane.”

“If I was a number one or number two in a market and I was a startup, I'd consider merging with the other party if there were the two main startup players, because the real threat will be fighting the incumbents.”

“Years ago when I was at Twitter I drove an attempt to buy a major social network that was up and coming. And the way we constructed that offer is we just took their users and our users, added them up and then divided the ratio and made that offer as a proporti…”

“The last time a fifty billion dollar plus biotech company was started from scratch, excluding Moderna, which was kind of an accident of COVID, was in the eighties. I think it was Regeneron. And so it's been almost 40 years since we've had a de novo, like tens …”

“A lot of the companies are started as incubations by biotech VCs. So they load up a company with forty million dollars. They buy 40% of it upfront, whatever it is. And then they kind of have to make it far enough that they can get almost public market money ef…”

“I invested in Airbnb when it was probably around eight people. Stripe was probably around the same size. And then Coinbase only got involved with much later when it was a billion dollar plus company.”

“I think really the way I think about investing in general is that there's two dimensions that really matter. The first dimension is what people call product market fit, or is there a strong demand for whatever it is you're building? And then secondarily I look…”

“For an early tech team, I almost used, like, this Apple framework of Jobs, Wozniak, and Cook, right? Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak started Apple together. Steve Jobs was known as somebody who really was great at setting the vision and direction, but also was ju…”