Gil: Early tech startups need the 'Jobs, Wozniak, and Cook' archetype framework
Elad Gil · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · May 13, 2025 · at 5:38
Investor Elad Gil describes his framework for evaluating early startup team composition using Apple's founding and scaling leadership as a model.
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“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 just an amazing salesperson. And selling means selling employees to join you. It means raising money. It means selling your first customers. It's negotiating your supply chain. Those are all aspects of sales in some sense or negotiation. And so you need at least one person who can do that, unless you're just doing a consumer product that you threw out there, right? And it just grows, and then people join you because it's growing. Then you need somebody who can build stuff and build it in a uniquely good way, and that was Wozniak, right? The way that he was able to hack things together, drop chips from the original design of Apple devices, et cetera, was just considered legendary. And then as the thing starts working, you eventually need somebody like Tim Cook who can help scale the company”
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