YouSaid · the spoken record

Elad Gil

lines on the record: 145
first: 2025-05-13
most recent: 2025-05-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“And then you add your family and community, and then you add society. And then eventually you become a sadhu and you go off and you meditate in a cave in the forest or whatever. And different people weigh those different circles differentially. And, you know, a big transition I'm making right now probably is I've been focused a lot on work and family. And the thing I'm increasingly thinking about or what are positive things I can do that are more society level.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I've been noodling on that a lot recently. And I think if I look at the frameworks that exist in certain Eastern philosophies or religions, it's almost like there are these expanding circles that change with time as you go through your life, right? Early on, you're focused more on yourself and your schooling. You kind of add work.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I've been looking around for that for a while. I don't think I've seen anything directly yet, but it may exist and I may just have missed it. But I do think things like that are coming. And you do see some AI security companies emerging, which are basically using AI to deal with phishing threats or other things. You could argue material security is doing that, but those people are working across pen testing in other areas right now as well.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if you think about the type of warfare that happened 100 and 150 years ago, or imagine if some equivalent to the Houdis was constantly shooting at your ships 100 years ago. What do you think their response would have been? Do you think you have said, ah, don't worry about it? Obviously, we've become much more civilized in our approach and very thoughtful about the implications of certain ways that people used to fight battles and all the rest of it. But the way that we deal with problems today is very different from how we used to deal with them.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's true. Then the question is what's a relative firepower of that group of people, and how do you deal with them? And what do you do to retaliate and everything else? I mean, in general, one could argue warfare has gotten dramatically less bloody.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's a few different contracts both in Europe and the US that are moving ahead around autonomous flight and autonomous drones and all the rest of it, autonomous capabilities in general in the air. I think the thing that people have stuck to so far is if there's any sort of decision that is involved with like killing somebody or hurting something, then you need a human operator to actually trigger it. And so that way you're not turning over control to a fully autonomous system, which I think is smart, right? You don't want the thing to do the targeting and go after the target and make all these mistakes, right? You want a human to make that decision.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, in general, defense is inevitably going to move to these highly distributed drug-based systems as a major component of any branch of the military. And it's not just because it's faster, cheaper, et cetera, et cetera, but also there's certain things that you can't do with a human operator inside the cockpit. So, for example, you have a plane. The g-forces that human palleted plane can tolerate is much lower than if you're just a drone and you don't have to worry about people inside the plus one.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and I think in hindsight, maybe I worked in that moment in time, but it no longer seems applicable. And then the other thing that's happened in the defense industry has been massive consolidation over the last 30 years. And so a lot of the growth of these companies came through MA. And so you had fewer and fewer players competing for the same business. And so that also means that it's back to the oligopoly market structure that we talked about earlier.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think at the time, Cost Plus was viewed as the most fair version of it because you're like, oh, just give me your bill of materials, and I know exactly what it costs. And then you'll just get a fixed margin. And so that's more fair.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the government gets 10 times the hardware or the capability set. Andorwell gets 10 times as much margin. If, again, that structure works and everybody basically wins. And so I just thought that business model shift was really important.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have no cost incentive. That's why you have a hundred dollar screw because you make five bucks on the screw that costs $100 instead of using a 10 cent screw, right? And so the cost plus model is extremely valid. You want efficient, fast moving defense industry, right? And they were really focused on trying to create a more traditional hardware margin business where an example would be if Lockheed Martin sold a drone to the government for a million dollars and made 5% cost plus they'd make 50K. If Andorill sold a $100,000 drone with the same capabilities as the government and had a 50% hardware margin, they'd make $50,000.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Third is do you have connectivity slash ability to really focus on faster sales cycle? Fourth is can you raise enough money that you'll last long enough that you can put up with really long timelines to actually get to these big programs on record? And I think Enderal did their fourth program of record in something like three and a half years was remarkably fast. I think it was the fastest programmer record since the Korean War or something, which is super impressive. And then lastly, the way that the business model for the defense industry works is this cost plus. So you basically make, say, 5 to 12 percent on top of whatever your cost to work the product out is. And that includes your labor, that includes every component. And that's why there's a very big incentive in the defense industry to overrun on time.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number one is you needed a why now moment for the technology. What is shifting in technology that the incompass can't just tack it on, right? Because the way the defense industry works is there's a handful of players called Primes who sell directly to the DOD. And then they subcontract out everything else, right? And if you're not a prime and you don't have a direct relationship, then you're not in a bad spot in terms of being able to really win big programs and survive as a company or succeed. So, number one is what is a technology why now that creates an opening for Andrew, it was initially a machine vision and drones, which were new things. Two is, are you going to build a broad enough product portfolio that you can become a prime? Which they did from day one.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Badly shapes Yeah, so Andero happened in a unique moment in time where Google had just shut down Maven and Defense had suddenly become very unpopular in Silicon Valley and people were making arguments that ethically you shouldn't support the defense industry and all this stuff that I thought was pretty ridiculous because if you cared about Western values and you wanted to defend them, of course you needed defense tech. So I started looking around to see who's building interesting things in defense because if the big companies won't do it, then what a great opportunity for a startup, right? It seemed like A good moment in time. And it felt like there were four or five things that you needed in order to build a next gen defense tech company because there were a bunch of defense tech companies that just never worked or hit small scale.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He said, you know what? I finally feel like my ass is on the line. And that's why I'm working so hard, and that's why I'm so, you know. Now, in general, I think that the true giant outside success archetype is somebody who can't tolerate that. They're always on and they can't help it. But there are examples where the context of the organization and the context of your situation”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But there's two reasons for that. One is I think product market fit Trump's the founder of Fidelity. You could be kind of crappy, but if you hit the right thing, you can do really well. But the other piece of it is it's contextual. Like somebody who's kind of lazy and not great in one environment may actually be much better when they have responsible and they need to drive everything. As an example of that, there was somebody I worked with at Twitter who was a very nice person but never really seen that effective to me was always kind of hanging out drinking coffee chatting. And then a few years later I met up with him and he was running a very successful startup and I said what happened? I mean I said it nicer than that, right? Yeah, it's so interesting. You built this great company.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you get a positive reference check on someone, then it's positive. If you get a negative reference check on a founder, it's usually neutral. Unless people are saying they're ethically bad or there's some issue with them or whatever.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or an equal co founder. And if you look at the biggest successes in the startup world over time, they were either solo founders or very unequal founders. And there's counter examples of that, of course, but that was Amazon, right? Jeff Bezos was the only founder. Microsoft, it was unequal. And eventually the other founder left. You kind of go through the list and there aren't that many where there was true equality. But it's now kind of this myth that you should be equal with your defunder. And I think there's negative aspects to doing that. A second thing is it's a little bit counterintuitive is reference checks on founders”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so it's a super cluster. And you see that going the other way for fintech, a lot of the value of FinTech was split between New York and the Bay Area. So, one aspect of it is these things are actually more extreme than you'd think for certain areas. And space and defense is roughly all, or was California, Southern California until SpaceX moved some of its operations. The counterintuitive thing is more tactical things You know, there's a few things that people say a lot in Silicon Valley that just aren't correct. So if you look, for example, there's this thing that you should always have a co-founder.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's very concentrated, right? That's why when I see venture capitalists build these global firms with branches everywhere, you're like, why? From a research application perspective, unless you're just trying to have a specific footprint for reasons. And if you look at AI, it's like 80 to 90 percent of the market cap is all in the Bay Area.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I mean, I'll give you one that challenges, and then I'll give you one that I think is consistent. I'll start with a consistent one, which is back to clusters. We take all of market cap of companies worth a billion dollars or more that are private. And every quarter or two, we basically look at geographically where they based, right? And traditionally, the US has been about half of that globally. The barrier has been about half of that. So 25% of all private technology wealth creation happens in one place, right? In one city. If you add in New York and LA, then you're at like 40% of the world. And LA is mainly SpaceX and Android.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Crap about that. Yeah, and so that's the question. And so Part of the question is what is the importance of each person relevant to an organization or field? And then are they properly recognized or awarded relative to those contributions? And if not, why not? And if so, then great. And so I think there's a separate question, right? Of rewards effectively. And rewards could be status. It could be money. It could be influence. It could be whatever it is.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, seriously though, right? Like there's going to be a handful of people that are best at every single thing. But there's not a ton of time.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Schools of yoga, the lineage really matters. Like all these things the lineage really matters. And so what you find is that in any field there's a handful of people who drive that field, and a handful, again, could be in the tens or maybe hundreds. And that's true in tech. There was probably early on 20, 30, whatever, maybe 100 at most AI researchers who were driving much of the progress. There's a bunch of ancillary people, but there's a core group. That's true in areas of biology. That's true in finance. And eventually most of these people end up meeting each other, right, in different forms, and some become friends and some become rivals and some become both. But it's surprising how small these groups are. And a friend of mine and I were joking that we must be in a simulation because we keep running into the same people over the 10 or 20 year arc who keep doing the big things.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The people who end up being very successful afterwards are all come from one of those, or mainly all come from those same labs. You actually see this for startups, right? My team went back and we looked at where do all the startup founders come out of school-wise. And three schools dominate by far in terms of big outside outcomes. Stanford is number one by far, and then MIT in Harvard. And then there's a big step down, and there's a bunch of schools that have some successes, Berkeley and Duke and a few others. And then there's kind of everything else, right? And so there are these very strong rules of lineage of people as well, right? Oddly enough, you see this in religious movements, the lineage really matters.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we were talking about clusters, right? So those geographic clusters, like, hey, all of tech is happening in one area, and honestly, all of AI is happening in a few blocks if you were to aggregate it all up. So there are these very strong cluster effects at the regional level. And then as we mentioned, there's groups of people who keep running into each other who are kind of the motive force for everything. And if you look at almost every field. There is at most a few dozen, and maybe for very big fields, a few hundred people who are roughly driving almost everything. You look at cancer research, and there's probably 20 or 30 labs that are the most important labs where all the breakthroughs come out of. And not just that, the lineage of those labs, the people they came from was in common.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're talking about fitness, you know, they lift a weight and they're like, I'm going to get on my phone now. That's what I feel like has basically happened. So I think the reality is if you look at what must did at Twitter where they cut 80% or whatever it was, I wouldn't be surprised if you could do things that are pretty close to that at a lot of the big tech companies.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are certain organizations that you knew people weren't working very hard at before things went remote, right? Some of the big tech companies before COVID. You'd go in and it'd be pretty empty until like 11, and then people would roll in for lunch, and then they'd leave at like 2. And so one argument I make sometimes is that big tech is effectively a big experiment in UBI, universal basic income for people who went to good schools, right? You're literally just giving money to people for not doing very much in some cases.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And each CEO needs to come and make a judgment call about how important that is, how much does that impact how they can participate in global talent? Because that's often the question or concern. So, there's a set of trade-offs”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're definitely going to have remote parts of your workforce, right? Parts of your sales team are remote, although really they should be at the customer site. Remote should mean customer site. Or home office, or something, right? It shouldn't mean truly remote. And you always, even 10 years ago or whatever, would make exceptions. You'd say, well, this person is really exceptional and I know them well and they're moving to Colorado and we'll keep this person because we know that they're as productive or more productive than anybody else on the team, even if they're not going to be in the office every day. Later stage companies, there's this really big question of like how much of your team do you want to be remote? How many days a week? And then is enforcing a lack of remote policy just also enforcing that you're prioritizing people who care about the company more than they care about other things?”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you're like, who are these people? Like, we're just talking about should you do a riff, and like 30 people just joined, is this a good idea? It was a very, and it probably still is, very innovative, very smart culture, very process-driven, you know, very just excellent at saying, okay, if we're going to be remote. Let's put in place every single control to make that work. So they're very smart about that. I have not seen many other companies do anything close to that. And so I think. For very early companies, the best companies I know are almost 100% in person. And there's some counter examples of that in Crypto has some nuances on that, which is a little bit different. But for a standard AI tech, SaaS, et cetera, that's generally the rule. As a company gets later,”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so when I backed them, it was like four people or something. I can't remember four or five people. They were fully remote. They stayed remote forever. And they built a ton of processes in to actually make that work. And they were brilliant about it. And they actually have all this published on their website where you can go and you can read hundreds of pages about everything they've done to enable remote work, everything from like how they thought about salary bands based on location on through to processes and all the rest. And it was a very quirky, it may still be culture where I'd be talking to the CEO and he'd say, oh, this conversation is really interesting. And he dropped the link to our Zoom into a giant group chat and random people just start popping in while we're talking.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a great point. I think it's interesting. If a company is really young and still very innovative, I think a lot of remote work tends to be quite bad in terms of the success of the company. Now, that doesn't mean it won't succeed. It just makes it much harder. And a company I backed, I don't know how long ago now, 14 years or something like that was GitLab, which is done quite well. It's a public company now, et cetera. And they were one of the very first remote first companies.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you want to work in a specific area and be top of your game in that area, you should move to the cluster for whatever that is. So, if you want to go into movies, you should go to Hollywood. If you want to go into tech, you should go to Silicon Valley. If you want to, you know, et cetera. And the whole, hey, you can succeed at anything from anywhere is kind of true, but it's very rare. And why make it harder for yourself?”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been a lot of talk now about these IOI or gold medalist communities where people do math or coding competitions or other things. Scott, this year of cognition is a great example of that where he knows a lot of founders in Silicon Valley. And one of the reasons they all know each other is through these competitions. And as a way to aggregate people growing up all over the country or all over the world who never would have connected and then they connect through these competitions. And so that's become a funnel for a subset of people. The move towards the internet, I think, has actually created a very different environment where you can find more like-minded people than you ever could before, right? Because before, how would you find people? And how would you even know to go to Silicon Valley?”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like a lot of folks who end up doing really big, interesting things just somehow meet or aggregate towards these other people, and they all tell each other about each other and they hang out together and all the rest. And so I do think there's sort of self-attraction of these groups of people. Now, the internet has helped create online versions of that.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's a few things, and I think different people approach your processes in different ways. And this is back to the best people somehow tend to aggregate, or maybe best is the wrong word. There's a bunch of people with common characteristics, a subset of whom become very successful, that somehow repeatedly keep meeting each other quite young in the same geography. And again, it's happened throughout history And so, A, there's clearly some attraction between these people to talking to each other and hanging out with each other and learning from each other. And sometimes you meet somebody and you're like, wow, I just learned a ton off of this person in like 30 minutes. And this was a great conversation versus, okay, yeah, that was nice to meet that person. They're nice or whatever, you know.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so I do think there are people who uniquely synthesize information in the world and come to specific conclusions. And those conclusions are often right, but people don't know how they got there. You're bringing it back to clusters. All this stuff about information and how to think about it and how to interpret it, it's all about being in a cluster.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you have the tooling to do it? Do you need a data scientist? Is all the algorithmic trading stuff? All the information is out there, but can you actually make use of it? There's do you have the right filter on it? Do you pick up or glean certain insights or make intuitive leaps that other people don't? There's all the different, it's sort of like when people talk about Richard Feynman, the physicist, and they said with other physicists who won Nobel Prizes, they're like, oh yeah, I could understand how that person got there. Is this chain of logical steps and maybe I could have done that? They're like, with Feynman, he just did these leaps and nobody knew how he did it.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's other types of information that early access to helps impact how you think about the world. And sometimes that could just be a one-on-one conversation or sometimes, again, they could be doing things out in the open. So, for example, all the different things that Peter Teal talked about in its sites on like 10 years ago ended up being true. Not all, but a lot of them, right?”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's two types of information. There's information that's hidden. And there's information that, so I'll give you an example, right? When I started investing in generative AI, all these early foundation model things, et cetera, basically nobody was doing it. And it was all out in the open. GPT-3 just dropped. It was clearly a big step function from two. If it just extrapolated that, you knew really, really interesting things were going to happen. People were using it internally in different ways at these companies. And so it was in plain sight that GPT-3 existed out there, but very few people recognized that it was that important. And so the question is why the information was out there.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the thing that people continue to underappreciate is kind of like the old Charlie Mungerism, the thing he continues to underappreciate is the power of incentives. The thing I continue to underappreciate is the power of compounding. And you see that in investing in financial markets, but you also see that in people's careers and impact. And the people who are successful early have a platform upon which they can build over time in a massive way. They have the financial wherewithal to take risks or fund new things. And importantly, they're in the flow of information. You start to meet all the most interesting people thinking the most interesting things, and you can synthesize all that in this sort of pool of ideas and thoughts and people.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The two fellows and the funds and Palantir and Facebook and all this stuff. The commonality that stands out to me across all those people is they tend to be pretty polymathic. So they have a wide range of interests. They tend to be driven by a mix of stuff, not just money. So, of course, money is important and all the rest, but I think for a subset of people, it's interestingness, for a subset of impact, for a subset of power, for a set, whatever it is, but there's usually a blend and for each person there's a different spike across that. And the other, I think, commonality is almost all of them had some form of success early”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One could argue Sam Altman has sort of maintained that over a very long arc between YC and the early things he was involved with on the investing side and then of course now OpenAI and other areas. Patrick is obviously doing that between Stripe and ARC and other areas. And there's people with longer arcs in that, right? Mark Andreessen invented the browser and then there was one of the key people behind that and then started multiple companies including Netscape, which was a giant of the internet and then started one of the most important venture firms in the world. And so that's a great example of a very, very strong arc over time, or Elon Musk is a very strong arc over time, right? From Zip2 to PayPal to all the stuff he's done now. So the question is, what are those people having common? Peter Thiel, right? Think of all the stuff he's done across politics.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because they're doing something interesting or important. And so there's this interesting question that I've been toying with, which is, are there characteristics to people who stay relevant over a very long arcs of time? People are constantly doing interesting things.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a great question because there's lots of different ways to define success. Success could mean I have a million Instagram followers. It depends on your own version of success. Societally, one of the big versions of success is a big financial outcome. One could argue a bigger version of that is like a happy family. There's lots of versions of success. Relevance means that you're somehow impacting things that are important to the world and people seek you out because of that. Or alternatively, you're just impacting things, right? But usually people end up seeking you out because of that for a specific thing. And the amazing thing is that there's lots and lots of people who've been successful who are no longer relevant. You just look at the list of even the billionaires or whatever metric you want to use and how many of those people actually sought out.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You become more mission centric, and then over time you just do it for the love of whatever the thing you're doing. And those are the people that I see that become happy over time.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want to make it, you're hungry, you don't have any money, you need to survive, you're driven because of that in part. And then in the middle phase of your career or life, you're more of a missionary if you're not a zero-sum person. You suddenly can have a broader purpose. You can do other things. You can engage. And then he's like, late in your life, you're an artist. You do it for the love of the craft, right? I much prefer that framework of the people that I see who do the most interesting big things over time fall into that ladder category where always there is some mercenary piece. Of course, you want to have money to survive and all this stuff. And then that morphs into your”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And of course, the question that you were expected to say is I'm a missionary, right? I'm doing it because it's the right work to do and all this. And Naval's framework is like, when you're young, of course you're at least half, if not more, mercenary.”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What do you do then? Well, it's not just never enough. It's just what do you do? What fulfills you? You can already buy everything you could ever buy. Like what fulfills you? And you also see versions of this where you see people who make it and then they don't know what to do with themselves. I think I mentioned this earlier. There's one guy I know who's incredibly successful and he spends all his time buying domain names. You're like, well, is that fulfilling or, you know, it's almost like what's your meaning or purpose? I feel like the people who end up doing these other things have some broader meaning or purpose driver even very early on. And obviously people want to win and all the rest. There's this really good framework from Navarra Ravican. And so in the 90s, John Doro was one of the giants, so the legends of investing used to ask founders, are you a missionary or mercenary?”
2025-05-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Elad Gil: How to Spot a Billion-Dollar Startup Before the Rest of the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source