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 53 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 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: Market is the singular determinant of startup success, not team
“The singular determinant of startup success is the market. And it's not the strength of the team. And so I think a lot of people talk about how great teams will always figure it out. And I've seen great team after great team in a terrible market just die becau…”
Gil: A prominent Midas List investor tried clawing exit value at Mixer Labs
“The biggest issue we had there is we had a bad investor who, as we were exiting the company, basically tried to claw more value for themselves as part of our exit. And this is sort of a Midas list investor who's very well known now.”
Gil: Data moats do not exist in most industries
“There are very, very few companies that actually have data moats, and so I think that's often a red herring. I think maybe in genomics right now there may be interesting data moats to be formed, but in most industries data moats don't really exist.”
Gil: Data moats rarely succeed as standalone startup assets outside genomics
“Yeah, the most common miracle that's quoted today is a data moat. People say, well, we'll generate tons of data, and then we'll be differentiated, and that, I think in genomics something like that could work, but outside of that, I actually think I've never se…”
Gil: The most successful startups succeed regardless of their investors
“I think that, ah, the most successful companies in 95% of the cases are successful despite their investors. I shouldn't say despite. I should say irregardless.”
Gil: Founders unable to get warm intros will struggle with hiring and sales
“I think the best way is to get an introduction through a founder that I already know, or somebody else that I already know, so that it's in network. I think if you can't find a way to do that, then you're probably not going to find a way to get customers, you'…”
Gil: Pricing power provides capital leverage to drive startup growth
“If you can get away with charging more, then it means that you have a product that people truly want, which means that you can grow faster in part because people truly want your product, and in part because the capital leverage that Mark talks about is actuall…”
Gil: Crypto ideas will fail before succeeding in 10 to 15 years
“And I think the same thing is true in the crypto world where there's still a real lack of infrastructure in crypto. And so there's all sorts of really interesting ideas of how you decentralize different services. And I think many of those things will fail. And…”
Gil: A subset of current crypto projects will become massive like Amazon
“And then in parallel, I think there's things that exist today that are sort of the Amazons of crypto that are gonna be massive in their own right and already exists. You know, maybe it's Bitcoin, maybe it's Ethereum, maybe it's a privacy token like Monero, Zca…”
Gil: An investor tried to block Mixer Labs' 2009 Twitter acquisition
“When my first company Mixer Labs exited to Twitter, so Twitter bought it back in 2009, we actually had an investor who tried to block the exit as a way to negotiate more of the outcome for themselves.”
Gil: Startup founder structured Jawbone exit leaving investors with severe losses
“So one company that I invested in That exited a jawbone, which then of course went bankrupt, ah, so it should have been a sign. They had, ah, five million dollars that was invested in the company collectively. They received, I think, fifteen million or so back…”
Gil: Compounding 20% monthly organic growth on small bases signals PMF
“People tend to discount growth off of small bases, even though the growth is compounding. So if you're growing organically, 20% a month, even if you're going from a hundred to a 120 users, That is a real sign of product market fit that a lot of people tend to …”
Gil: Staying in stealth for three or four years is a terrible sign
“And sometimes they just wait too long where you see these companies that stay in stealth mode for three, four years. And you're like, that's a terrible sign because you're not actually getting real customer feedback potentially.”
Gil: Loose capital leads founders to delay pivoting or shutting down
“I think it's possible that in today's environment where capital is really loose, people actually wait too long to pivot or to shut down because they can keep raising more money. And I actually think that's a bad thing because it's locking up great people at th…”
Gil: Multi-miracle startups usually fail due to compounding low probabilities
“So I think every startup needs at least one miracle to succeed, because if it was obvious that it was going to work, everybody would already be doing it, and so you wouldn't have an opportunity. So in some sense, startups only have opportunities in markets tha…”
Gil: Technologists are often better CEOs for technical products than business founders
“You know, I think if it's a very technical product it's often better to have the technologist in charge. So say that you had a business person and a technologist, because if it's two technologists, I don't know how to differentiate between, you know who they, …”
Gil: Most investors are fear-driven rather than ambition-driven
“In general, you'll find that most investors are fear driven versus ambition driven. They're kind of scared of missing something versus really excited and believe vigorously in something. And so high conviction investors are actually very valuable in my opinion…”
Gil: Copying Amazon's low-price strategy is often a fallacy
“And I think one of the big fallacies in Silicon Valley is everybody thinks that they're Amazon and they basically say every business model should be Amazon's, which is I'm going to charge as low of a price as possible so I can get as much market share as possi…”
Gil: US EdTech is hard because nobody is willing to pay
“I've never invested in an ed tech company, and again, I think the social impact is massive. I just think it's very hard to succeed, in part because there's nobody who is able or willing to pay in the US for the product.”
Gil: Incumbents will capture most value in Internet of Things
“Internet of Things is a great example where I think most of the interesting things in that market will come from large electronics players who can just integrate it into something and then distribute it versus a new sort of one-off company that's just making a…”
Gil: Best startup entry point is 40-50 employees and $50M-$500M valuation
“In general, if you want to do best from a career perspective, and you didn't join in the very, very early days, the best time to join is when a company is probably on the order of 40, 50 people, and is worth, you know, somewhere between fifty and five hundred …”
Gil: Competing on lower price is usually a bad startup strategy
“The typical thing that founder will do especially if they're a more technical founder, is they'll say, the way I'm gonna win is by making this cheaper than anybody else, which actually tends to be a really bad strategy, unless you're truly just going for scale…”
Gil: IoT startups are bad investments due to lack of revenue recurrence
“So internet of things, for example traditionally have been bad investments for startups, great investments for big companies, because you know, if you have a smart light bulb company, ah, you buy a light bulb once, and especially if it lasts 20 years as an LED…”
Gil: Most angel investors care too little about valuation
“I think most angels actually care too little about valuation. And so often if you actually look at the return, say you do 10 investments, and I'm making up a number just to make it a round number, a 100,000 each, and nine of them go under and one works and tha…”
Gil argues a founder's poor prior performance can be a neutral signal
“I think a great team is a very positive signal. I think a bad team, depending on context, may actually be a neutral signal.”
Gil: Needing to help a portfolio company daily signals fundamental flaws
“I think in general, when you help companies, it comes, it goes, and spikes, versus it's sustained throughout. If you're sustainably having to interfere or help with a company every day, then there's either something wrong with that company or with the founders…”
Gil: Very early co-founder conflict is usually unresolvable
“Well, there, there's two types of, ah, co-founder conflicts, resolvable and unresolvable. Ah, I'd say, If it starts very early, usually it's unresolvable and somebody's gonna have to leave. If it starts late, usually there's a reason and you can fix it.”
Gil: Zuckerberg hiring Sandberg shifted tech away from replacing founder-CEOs
“I think there was a real shift when, ah, Mark Zuckerberg hired Sheryl Sandberg as COO into people saying that founders can keep going. Because what happened in the nineties was Founders were quickly replaced by professional CEOs if they raised any venture capi…”
Gil: High user retention on broken products proves product-market fit
“If your product is broken and people are still using it very actively, or you have high retention on a broken product, that's a clear sign of product market fit. When Twitter was constantly going down in the farewell days, and yet nobody moved off of Twitter, …”
Elad Gil: Treat early startup hiring like filling limited life raft seats
“And I think the way you should think about your startup from a hiring perspective is it's almost like a light, a life raft. You know, your boat is sinking and you're on this little raft and there's five spots. And who are in those five spots? And if the people…”
Gil: Startups should invest early in single-line build environments
“The other thing I've seen some people do, which I think actually helps a lot, is from day one they focus on the velocity of the team, and so they maybe focus on the build environment early, and making it so that anybody can run a full instance of the product w…”
Gil: Pivoting startups should be willing to switch markets entirely
“The one thing I would advocate is being willing to restart completely. Because typically when people pivot, they pivot within the same market versus across markets. And if you're in a bad market, that means you're going to die, because you're just going to go …”
Gil: Deciding on a CEO matters more than picking the right person immediately
“I think the most important thing is to resolve it, even if you get it wrong, because you can always correct the wrong thing, but at least you have somebody in charge. I think a lot of founding teams end up with a lot of fights that then slow down the company d…”
Gil: Diligence investors through founders whose startups faced issues, not successes
“You should diligence them and ask the founders where either things didn't go well or where there was some issue over time or whatever it is. And that's more likely to reveal the truth about an investor than asking in a situation where everything worked.”
Gil: Thoughtful fundraising should take months, not a single week
“In general, I think you hear the news about these fundraisers that happen in a week, and you think every fundraise is going to take a week, but if you're actually being thoughtful on your side as well, it should take a couple months because otherwise you're no…”
Gil: Repeat founders excluding prior investors signals a red flag
“So say that somebody exits their company for a billion dollars, and then they start another company, and in no rounds do they take their prior investors. That's usually a sign. And so I would call up that person.”
Gil: Tech startups tend to heavily underprice their products
“Especially technology-driven companies tend to really underprice their product under the belief that if they price it really low, it'll get them more market share more rapidly, and therefore they'll win the market, when in reality they've never run the experim…”
Gil: Didi will become a company worth over $100 billion
“I think they own 15 to 20% of Didi, which in and of itself is gonna be a hundred billion dollar plus company, so I actually think that worked out really well for them.”
Gil: A systemic tech collapse is inevitable and will trigger massive changes
“And it's inevitable that at some point that'll happen again. And I think that will cause an enormous sea change in terms of how people do things.”
Gil: New executives should issue personal working-style guides to colleagues
“And so I thought that was just a brilliant onboarding tool that perhaps any executive joining a high growth company or any manager joining a high growth company should issue so that people just understand this is the fastest, best way to interact with me and j…”
Gil: Facebook used email scrapers and European name ads to acquire users
“So with Facebook, that was email scrapers, and it was, you know, they were literally running ads against people's names in Europe to try and acquire European users, for example.”
Gil: Google spent hundreds of millions yearly on Firefox and Adobe distribution
“And so examples where people were very aggressive about distribution with things like Google, where they were spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year on things like Firefox, having Google prominently displayed on its homepage. They literally paid for, …”
Gil: Great organizations must excel at either hiring well or firing well
“There's an old saying that people either hire well or fire well, and you, if you at least do one of those, then you can build a really good organization. You know, fundamentally, most companies are kind of bad at both, and that really ends up biting them, beca…”
Gil: Early Google required eight interviews and hired well, but fired poorly
“Google was an example of a company that hired extremely well. They had, I think it was a minimum for a while of eight interviews per person, literally. And if you didn't do all eight, you wouldn't be able to get in kind of thing. And they were terrible at firi…”
Gil: Early Facebook was mediocre at hiring but excelled at firing quickly
“Other companies like Facebook were known as not as good at hiring early on, although they'd gotten much better over time, but in the very early days they were known as not great at hiring, but they were very good at actually letting people go if they didn't wo…”
Gil says pitch decks without a working product rarely lead to success
“Some of the worst investments I've made
We're two really smart people with a PowerPoint deck, and I was like,
oh my gosh, their vision, and they're so articulate, and they're so smart, and it never tends to work.”
Gil says passing on Lyft's $90M Series C was a major mistake
“One of the biggest mistakes I made from a passing perspective is I passed on Lyft for their Series C, which was a ninety million dollar valuation, and I think they're now in the, like, nine billion dollar raise range, so I missed a hundred X, or maybe post-dil…”