The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 22 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Gil: VCs Push Struggling Founders to Grind Because They Are Free Options
“Investors have a strong incentive for you to keep going because you're just an option once they put money in. And so if they get 50 cents on the dollar, they don't care, and they'd rather you just keep trying because you're just a free option. They already hav…”
Gil: Data Linking Social Media to Teen Mental Health Issues Is Weak
“I think I tend to look at data for these sorts of things. And I think the data on a lot of these topics is pretty weak.”
Gil: Big Wave of Enterprise AI Is Two to Three Years Away
“And I think from that is this under overhyped perspective, one could argue this is very under hyped in part because there's been so little true enterprise adoption. But despite that, you're seeing these massive waves of revenue and usage and everything else, a…”
Gil: Tech M&A will remain constrained by FTC and global regulators
“I think the M&A environment is going to be constrained due to our current FTC slash the more global regulatory viewpoint on whether they want M&A to happen or big tech to get bigger.”
Gil: Incumbents Can Launch AI Four Years Late and Still Win
“I also think honestly as an incumbent you have a couple years to figure it out because you tend to have so much distribution that you can launch four years later and still You know, when, as it were”
Gil: Startups captured internet value, but incumbents captured mobile value
“And in the internet wave, you could argue 80 or 90% of the value went to startups. And in mobile, it was the other way around. Almost all the value went to incumbents, and in part it was because it was an extension of access and UI.”
Gil: Automating 10% of Services Payroll Recreates the Entire SaaS Market
“And if you just look at the headcount resident in those services, legal and accounting and certain types of sales and nursing, and you just kind of go through it all. And you add up just the payroll. For those areas, it's about three and a half to five trillio…”
Gil: Google canceling Maven prompted defense tech pivot and backing Anduril
“I started getting into defense tech when Google shut down Maven because I was like, oh my gosh, if Google isn't doing it, what a great startup opportunity, you know? So I started looking for defense companies and then I met Anduril and I was like, oh my God, t…”
Gil: SaaS Was Just a SQL Wrapper and Still Generated Massive Value
“People say that these things are just wrappers on GPT in some cases, and you're like, well, SaaS is just a wrapper in a SQL database, and that worked out just fine for lots of people.”
Gil: Databricks Is Smart to Aggressively Acquire Startups Before Going Public
“And so it's actually harder to buy things as a public company as it is from a private company, which is why I think what Databricks is doing or some others in terms of buying things while you're private is really smart because it's going to get harder once you…”
Gil: Easy capital leads founders to keep failing startups alive too long
“I think if things aren't working, I think because money has been so available, people have kept their companies going longer than they should. And in a lot of circumstances more recently, where sometimes the best thing you can do is just kind of quit and resta…”
Gil: VCs avoid hard shutdown conversations to protect founder referrals
“Investors often don't want to have tough conversations because they want founders to refer their friends to them and they don't want to be the kind of tough person or whatever.”
Gil: Nobody wanted to start an OpenAI competitor after GPT-3
“And I remember when GPT-III came out, I tried to both pitch a bunch of people to start effectively an open AI competitor, and nobody wanted to do it, because they didn't think it was a good business model, as well as it was such a big technology step up if you…”
Gil: Biotech Is Brutal; Regrets Spending Years on a Biology PhD
“I got a PhD in biology, and I think biotech is a really tough place to work, right? As is academic biology. So, you know, arguably I got that wrong, and if I could get those, you know, four or five years back, I would kind of thing.”
Elad Gil: AI application defensibility requires owning the workflow rather than the model
“For the application layer, can you eventually take over a workflow? What is the workflow that you're enabling? Because really what you want is if you swap in and out underlying models, you're still sticky somehow, and a model improving doesn't commoditize you,…”
Gil: 99% of AI Companies Will Fail, But 1% Will Be Huge
“And I think it's clear that 90, whatever, 99% of AI companies are not going to work out, but the one percent that will could be quite large.”
Gil: Startup diversification differs across technology waves versus within one
“I think there's two types of diversification. There's diversification within a technology wave, and there's diversification across waves. And what I was referring to for that end of cycle post was diversification across waves... I think that's a little bit dif…”
Gil: Microsoft Azure AI Services Lift Adds $1 Billion Quarterly
“Azure in their last quarter announced a twenty five billion dollar quarter of which a five percent lift came from AI. So they added something like a billion and a half per quarter in new revenue for what they considered AI services on their cloud.”
Gil: Foundation model funding is mostly strategic hyperscalers, not VC
“Most of the money funding foundation models is strategic, right? Versus venture capital. Venture capital maybe funds things into the hundreds of millions, and then it gets handed off to Google and Amazon and Facebook and all the other folks to invest billions …”
Gil Predicts AI Cycle Will Take 10 to 15 Years to Fully Substantiate
“1015 years to fully substantiate, and the same thing is going to be true here.”
Elad Gil: Social networks became social media, leaving room for new networks
“All the things that used to be social networks turned into social media. You know, and so how we thought about networks versus broadcast shifted pretty dramatically, and there's probably still room for interesting networks.”