The Ledger
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Gil: Parker Conrad and Palmer Luckey were unfairly thrown under the bus
“Palmer Luckey is another one where I backed Andrew in the very first round, and he was controversial given what happened at Meta early on with him. I think in both cases, they basically got thrown under the bus in one form or another.”
Gil: State-level regulations like California's could curtail US AI progress
“And the dangerous part in AI was there's state level initiatives that have been very negative or could have been very negative for AI. I think Scott Wiener proposed one in California. I think there's others that have been proposed in other states that you coul…”
Gil: Early AI founders should pursue easy ideas over complex ones
“Early in technology waves, that's when you have all the low hanging fruit. And so one of my pieces of advice to founders is often who are doing really hard things right now in AI. I'm like, why are you doing the really hard thing? Just go do the dumb, easy thi…”
Gil: Marquee companies like Stripe and SpaceX may stay forever private
“There may be a subset of companies that are forever private, because they can afford to be. That may be Stripe, that may be SpaceX, that may be some other companies.”
Gil: 90% of people in the AI wave are in doomed companies
“Definitionally, most startups are going to fail. And this wave is going to be just like every other one. And the place where every founder and investor think they are is in the right companies, right? And the reality is most people aren't, right? 90% of people…”
Gil: OpenAI and Anthropic valuations are reasonable relative to growth rates
“I, my sense is that for many of these foundation lab companies, if you just do a revenue multiple and you look at the growth rate, it's actually pretty reasonable. That's true of OpenAI, that's true of Anthropic.”
Gil: Jared Kushner's Affinity and Gil Capital co-led Brain Co's $30M round
“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”
Gil: Our COVID data scraping prompted White House and UK government calls
“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…”
Gil: Following your passion is usually bad advice that leads you astray
“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…”
Gil: US has built no large-scale monuments since Mount Rushmore
“I think the last time we built a large scale monument was Mount Rushmore, which was initiated in the twenties and was built up until the early forties. And then since that time, we really haven't done anything, societally, at least in the U.S.”
Gil: Gil Capital has led multiple funding rounds of $500M+
“So I think we've now led a few rounds that are a half billion plus each.”
Gil: No investor can out-ideate thousands of founders acting as distributed search
“You could think of them as a distributed search function, right? You have thousands of people exploring all the space of entrepreneurship. And so how can any one person or small group of people come up with better ideas and thousands of people in a distributed…”
Gil: 90% of perceived startup competitor conflicts never materialize
“I think that there's a number of circumstances where people think something's, I'd say, 90% of the time founders think that they're going to compete and they don't. They tend to grow in very different directions, especially if it's two early stage companies.”
Gil: More people die yearly from solar installs than nuclear accidents
“And if you compare that to stats of people dying, installing solar by falling off of roofs, more people per year die from solar installs.”
Gil: AI training data centers will concentrate in US and Gulf
“So all the training will probably go to places that have the cheapest, densest energy, and then a proper fiber optic cable in for the data transfer. And so that's probably parts of the US. That's probably the Gulf, like the Gulf.”
Gil: Top founders are not autistic and actually read people well
“People are kind of on this weird mimetic thing about autism. They're not autistic. You know, they read people very well, whether they care about how the person's feeling in the moment may matter less or more, but they can read people very well and they know ho…”
Gil names Eric Wu and Clemens to Brain Co's founding executive team
“Eric Wu came in as sort of a founder and chairman. And then Dan Ashton, who, you know, and Marcia and others came on as sort of the initial founding team. And we kind of just were off into the races from then. And Clemens recently joined as CEO of the company.”
Gil: Costco and Home Depot adopt HR software faster than most startups
“So for example, if you're selling HR software, I think it's Costco and Home Depot and a few others are great at adopting new benefits, new HR software, et cetera, which you wouldn't expect, right? These are big you know, impressive enterprises, but they often …”
Gil: Brain Co avoided incubator control model to preserve employee equity
“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…”
Gil: First-time founders mistakenly project their comfort with chaos onto employees
“As a founder, for example, you project the way that you act onto employees if you haven't managed before, and founders are perfectly fine with chaos and uncertainty and risk, and, but most people aren't. Most of your employees want a stable direction. They wan…”
Gil: Winning builds company culture, not kombucha or motivational speeches
“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 …”
Gil: Aiming to eventually build a Statue of Liberty-scale monument
“The smaller scale of what we want to do is probably 15 to 20 feet tall, which is kind of the scale of the Atlas in front of Rockefeller Center which I think is a beautiful work. And then the hope is to eventually do something, at least one that's, you know, so…”
Gil: Public monuments must be central, unlike Jeff Bezos's isolated clock
“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 …”
Gil: Jack Dorsey cleared him to invest in Stripe despite executive pushback
“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…”
Gil has never sold a Stripe share and plans long-term hold
“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.”
Gil: Payments scale moats lower backend interchange fees to fuel growth
“If you're a payments company, the more scale you have, the cheaper your interchange fee is on the backend, which means you can charge less, which means you can get more scale. And so you have the cycle, right?”
Gil: Salesforce's ecosystem creates defensibility by forcing rivals to replicate third-party apps
“Salesforce is a good example. Everybody's built an app on top of Salesforce. Everybody's selling those apps are integrated in a deep way that helps create defensibility because if you're trying to build a Salesforce competitor, you may also have to build all t…”
Gil: Pharma distribution is locked up by dominant players via 3-7 year contracts
“So for example, in the medical distribution world McKesson and that sort of world, all the pharma distribution people end up in these like three to seven year contracts. So the entire industry is effectively locked up between a handful of players because they …”
Gil: B2B Startups Typically Take 3 to 7 Years to Reach Enterprise Deals
“If you look at a startup's lifecycle normally that's doing B to B, you tend to start off with smaller businesses you're selling to, and then you realize that's a tough market, and you go mid-market, and you spend a couple years in mid-market, and then eventual…”
Gil: Developing public monument projects across 4-5 US cities
“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…”