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

“Yeah, yeah. Basically, if you think about it as a smart intern. You know, often with your intern, you say, okay, go do this thing, but why don't you double check these three things about it? And as the models get more and more capable, there'll be less like an intern and more like a junior employee, and then there'll be like a senior employee, and then there'll be like a manager, and they'll kind of, you know, as the models get better and better and the capabilities get stronger, you'll see all these other things emerge.”
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 think a lot of people, and I'm by no means these people whose jobs is called prompt engineering, and that's all they do. I think fundamentally a lot of it just comes down to what are you specifically asking and can you create enough specificity? And sometimes you can actually add checks into the system where you say, go back and double check this just to make sure that you didn't omit something because there are enough errors sometimes depending on which model you're using and for what use case and everything else that if you put in simple safeguards of, hey, generate a table of X, Y, Z as output, but then go back and double check that these two things are true, I think has helped me clean up a lot of things that would normally have been errors.”
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 use it a lot. I use it for everything from, I'll go to a conference and I'll dump the names of the attendees in and ask who should I chat with based on these criteria? And could you pull background on them? You know, obviously a lot of people use it for coding right now or coding related tasks. I use it for a lot of what are known as regexes, regular expressions. If I want to pull something out. Certain types of data, I'll do that sometimes. So there's all sorts of different uses for 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
“And you have to go to the computer and load up the website and book it for it. It's the same thing for AI. So right now we have AIs that are very capable at understanding language, synthesizing it, manipulating it, but they don't have this remembrance of all the steps that they've taken and will take. And so you need to overlay that is another system on top of it. And you see this a lot in the way your brain works, right? You have different parts of your brain that are involved with vision and understanding it. You have different parts of your brain for language. You have different parts of your brain for empathy, right? You have mirror neurons that help you empathize with somebody or relate to them. So your brain is a bunch of modules strung together to be able to do all sorts of complex tasks, be they cognitive or physical.”
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
“ChatGPT in its current form, or at least in the simplest form, Is effectively interrogating a mix of a logic engine and a knowledge corpus, right? It's like a thing that will look at what it knows and based on that, provide you with some output. That's a little bit different from asking somebody to take an action. And that's similar. If I was talking to you and I said, hey, where's a nice place to go? And you didn't say, oh, you should go to Cabo or you should go to wherever, right? That's different from me saying, hey, could you get me 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
“Second, I do this, third I do this, and then Yeah, great question. So, a lot of the people working on agents have basically built what you're describing, which is something that will take a complex task, break it down into a series of steps, store those steps, and then go back to them as you get output. So you're actually chaining a model. You're picking it over and over with the output of the prior step and asking it now to do the next step. So one approach to that is you literally break it up into 10 pieces. If it's a simple problem and you're just like, write me a limerick with XYZ characteristics, then the model can just do that in a single sort of call to the model. But if you're trying to do something really complex, book me a flight or find me and book me a flight to Mexico. It's like, okay, first I need to find the flight. And so that means I need to go to this website and then I need to interact with the website and pull the data. Then I need to analyze that information. And then I have to figure out what fits with your trip. I go through the booking steps and then I get the confirmation. It really depends on what you're asking the model to do.”
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
“Focus soon is coding because you can push code and you can see if it runs and you can see what errors are thrown. And there's more stuff you can do in domains where you have a clear output you're shooting for and that you can test against 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
“People that have played before. Yeah, that's called self play. And as long as you have enough rules, you can do it. You need a utility function you're working against, right? And so in the context of a game, it's winning the game. And there's very specific rules of the game. You know when to flip over the go piece. You know what winning means, right? And so it's easy to train against that because you have a function to select against. This game you did well, this game you did badly, here's positive feedback or negative feedback to the model. They're starting to do that more and more. So if you look at the way people are thinking about models now and scaling them, there's three or four components to it. One is ongoing data scale. Second is the training cluster. People always talk about all the money they're spending on GPUs. The third is reasoning modules. And that's the new stuff from OpenAI in terms of 01 and 03 and all these things. There's other forms of like time of inference related optimizations and how do you do them and some aspects eventually of this self-play and some of the places where that may really come into”
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 kind of the same thing. You kind of need to figure out what's the data set you're using, what kind of model and model architecture you're using, because different architectures seem to work better or worse for certain types of problems as well. The protein folding ones have three or four different types of models that often get mixed in, at least traditionally. A lot of them have moved to these transformer backbones, but then they're augmented by other things. So it's a little bit of like, do you have enough and the right data? Do you have the right model approach? And then can you just keep scaling 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
“It still gets published because it's a hut field. That happens a lot. If you looked during COVID, like there were so many papers that in hindsight were awful papers, but they got rushed out because of COVID. And unless somebody goes back and actually redoes the experiment and then publishes it, they redeed it and it didn't work, which nobody does because nobody's going to publish it for you. How do you know that it's not reproducible? And so that's part of the challenge in biology. And so the biology problem isn't can an AI model do better? I'm sure it could. The biology problem is how do you create the data set that actually is clean enough and has high enough fidelity that you can train a model that then goes and cleans everything else up, right? And it's doable, like all these things are very doable. You just have to go and do it and it's a lot of work. If you look at things like math and physics and other things like that, people are just starting to train models against that now. So I do think we'll, in the coming year, see some really interesting breakthroughs 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
“As an AI system, right? That somebody threw out half their data to publish a paper. And so there's other issues around how science is done right now, or you just rush it and you have the wrong controls.”
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
“Focus your attention. Yeah, I think there's almost like three different things that are mixed in here. One is just fraud. You fudged an image, you're reusing it or whatever. I think AI is wonderful for that. And I actually think, and I'm happy to, if anybody who's listening to this wants to get sponsored, or maybe we should do a competition or something, to basically build fraud detectors using AI or plagiarism detectors. You could do it for liberal arts as well as sciences, right? Yeah. And I bet you'd uncover a ton of stuff. Separate from that, there's people publishing things that are just bad. And the question is, is it bad because they ignored other data? Do they throw out data points? How would 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
“So, you have a big data problem. Half the data is false. It's incorrect, right? And this is actually something that Amgen published a couple years ago where they showed this because they weren't able to reproduce cancer findings in their lab because they're trying to develop a drug. And they're like, wait a minute, this thing we thought could turn into a drug isn't real. And so there's this really big replication issue in certain sciences.”
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 think it's a really good question. I mean, AI is already having some interesting advancements in biology, right? The Nobel Prize this past year in biology went to Demis and a few other people who built predictive models using AI about how proteins will fold. And so I think it's already being recognized as something that's impacting the field at the point where it gets enobled. The hard part with certain aspects of biology, and protein folding is a good counterexample where you actually have very good data. You had tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of crystal structures. You had solved structures for all these proteins, and you could use that to train the model. If you look at it, about half or more than half of all biology research and top journals is not reproducible.”
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
“It's already surpassed us on many things, right? Like just even look at how people play Go Now and the patterns they learned off of AI, which can beat any person to go. I mean, gaming is a really good example of that where every wave of gaming advancements, where you pitted AI against people, people said, well, fine, they beat people at checkers, but they'll never beat them at chess. And then they beat him at chess and say, well, fine chess, but they'll never beat him at Go. And they beat him at Go. And they're like, well, what about complex games where there's bluffing? They'll never beat him at poker. And then Noam Brown had his poker paper. And they say, well, okay, poker, well, they'll never beat him at things like diplomacy where you're manipulating people against each other. And then, you know, a Facebook team solved diplomacy, right? And so gaming is a really great example where you have superhuman performance against every game now.”
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, from an education system perspective, a healthcare system perspective, it's a massive change. So, in the short run, I'm really worried that people are going to constrain it and strangle it and prevent it from happening because I think it's really important for humanity. In the long run, there's always these questions of at what point do you actually consider something sentient versus not? Is it a new life form? Is there a species competition? There's those sorts of questions, right, in the very long run. Without robots, you could say, well, you just unplug the data center. Who cares? It doesn't matter. If you do have robots and other things, then it gets a little bit harder maybe.”
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 if you actually look through history and you look at how Alexander the Great was tutored by Aristotle and all these things, there's a lot of kind of prior examples of people actively doing that on purpose for their kids if they can afford it. This AI revolution is a great example of something that could basically provide that for every child around the world, as long as they have access to any device, which is most people at this point, right? Globally.”
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 think that I have opposing fears. In the short run, I worry that there's the real chance to kind of strangle the Golden Goose, right? I do think AI and this wave of AI is the single biggest potential motivator for versions of global advancements in health and education and all the things that really matter fundamentally. And there's some really great papers from the 80s that basically show that one-on-one tutoring, for example, will increase performance by one or two standard deviations, right? You get dramatically better if you have a one-on-one tutor for something.”
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 I'm going to basically rent time off of this unit of cognition. On the digital side, it really is this shift from your selling tools to your selling, effectively white-collar work. On the robotic side, you'll probably have some form of robot minutes or something. You'll probably end up with some either human form robots or other things that we'll be doing different forms of work on your behalf. And potentially you buy these things or maybe you rent them. It'll be interesting to see what business models emerge around 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
“I think the thing that people misunderstand about artificial intelligence is that People are kind of viewing it as what you're selling as a cool tool to help you with productivity or whatever it is. I think in a couple years we'll start thinking about it as we're selling units of cognition. We're selling bits of person time or person equivalent to do stuff for us. I'm going to effectively hire 20-bot programmers to write code for me to build an app. Or I'm going to hire an AI accountant”
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 think AI is dramatically underhyped because most enterprises have not done anything in it. And that's where all the money is, all the changes, all the impact is, all the jobs, everything, right? It's a big 80-20 rule of the economy. And that's coming, right? And that hasn't even hit yet.”
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 think it's going to be an ongoing wave of kind of everything. There's still a lot to build, but I think we'll see more and more application level companies. We'll see fewer what are known as foundation model companies, the people building the open AIs or anthropics or some of the Google core technologies, or X.AI. There will be specialized versions of that, right? That's all the language stuff, right? It understands what you say and it can interpret it and it can generate text for you and do all these things, right? That's all these LLMs, large language models. There's going to be the same thing done for physics and material science. We've already seen it happening in biology, right? So at that layer, there's a bunch of stuff. There's the infrastructure. What is the equivalent of cloud services? And then there's the apps on top. And then in the apps, you have B2B, and then you have consumer. I think we're going to see a lot of innovation across the stack, but I think this next wave is a mix of B2B and consumer. And then I think the wave after that is very large at enterprise adoption.”
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
“Sharing music files before anyone else. And so they knew what was coming. They had a glimpse into the future. It's the old saying the future is here is just not equally distributed. For AI, we had the same thing. We had these researchers who could tangibly feel what was coming. And so, the first wave of AI companies was researchers. The second wave was infrastructure people who were not closest. And in this current wave, we're now at the application people, the people who are building applications on top of the core technology.”
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 that is the thing that spawned this whole wave of AI right now that we're experiencing. And so it's a new technology basis. We took a step function and we're doing new stuff that you can do before on the old technologies. That whole wave led to this really interesting set of companies. And the first people in that wave were the researchers because they were closest to it. And they could see firsthand what was actually happening in the technology and the market, how they were using it, you know, the engineers at OpenAI used to go into the weights to query stuff, which then eventually in some form is ChatGPT, right? They were doing it before it existed. There was also Minna at Google, which was basically an internal form of almost like ChatGPT. So they kind of saw the future and they went to try and substantiate it. And you could argue that the same thing happened in the internet wave in the 90s. All the people working at the National Supercomputer Centers, like Mark Andreessen and others, saw the future before anyone else. They're using email before anyone else. They were browsing the internet before anyone else. They were using FTP and file downloads.”
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 felt the shift. You went from these kind of plain vanilla Me Too almost LARPers to these incredibly driven mission-oriented, hyper-smart, very technical people who wanted to do something really big. And you felt it. It was a dramatic shift. And if you look at it, there's basically been three or four waves of talent coming through the AI ecosystem. And I should say gen AI, because we had this whole wave, we had 10 years, 15 years of other types of deep learning, right? We had recursive neural networks and convolutional neural networks and GANs and all these things. And that technology basis fundamentally has different capabilities than this new wave. And so there was this paper in 2017 that came out of Google called The Transformer Architecture.”
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
“With a lot of the generative AI companies, maybe three ish years ago, maybe three and a half years ago. So before ChatGPT came out and before mid-journey and all these things kind of took off. And the people starting those companies were uniquely good.”
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
“It's actually a very interesting question of what proportion of founders these days are actually people who normally wouldn't fit in, right? So the sort of founder archetype of before it was rebellious people or people who could never work for anybody else or whatever. And then as tech has grown dramatically in market cap and influence and everything else, it's inevitable that the type of people who want to come out here and do things is shifted. And then the perception of risk in startups has dropped a lot. And so I actually think the founder mix has shifted quite a bit. Like there isn't as much quirkiness in tech. And during COVID, it was awful. It was very unquirky because at that point, you know, there was a zero interest rate environment. Money was abundant everywhere. And the nature of people who joined or who showed up shifted. And so I think we had two or three years with an average founder just wasn't that great, right? On a relative basis to history. And then as the AI wave was happening, I started getting involved.”
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 to kind of force finding customers. And so because you're in this batch structure and you're meeting with your batch every week and you hear what everybody else is doing, you feel peer pressure to do it, but also it kind of shapes how you think about the world, what's important, what to work on. And so I think it's almost like a brainwashing program, right? Beyond everything else they do, which is great. It sets a timeline you have to hit and it brainwashes you to think a certain way.”
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
“Why is YC still relevant today? I think they've just done a great job of building sort of brand and longevity. Gary, who's taken over, is fantastic, and so I think he brings a lot of that. Let's go back to First Principles and really implement why see the way that we think it can really succeed for the future. And I think they do a really good job of two things. One is plugging people in, as mentioned, particularly your SaaS company, you want to have a bunch of customers instantly. Your batchmates will help you with that. But also, it teaches people to ship fast.”
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, why Combinator is a great example of taking out of network people at least that was the initial part of the premise, not the full premise, right? Like people like Sam Altman or others who were very early in YC came out of Stanford, which was part of the main hub. But a lot of other people came out of universities that just weren't on the radar for people who tended to back things in Silicon Valley. And so, you know, the early Reddit founders went to East Coast Universities. The Airbnb founders, two of them were out of RISDI. The Rhode Island Institute of Design. And so YC early on was very good at taking very talented people who weren't part of the core networks in Silicon Valley and basically inserting them into those networks and helping them succeed.”
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
“It's easier to raise money. There's people who've already done it before who can help you scale once the thing is working. That's the common complaint I hear in Europe for people to start companies there is we can't find the executives who know how to scale what we're doing. And so I do think there are these other sort of ancillary things that people talk about. The service providers, the lawyers who know how to set up startups, or the accountants who know how to do tax and accounting for startups. Those things sound trivial, but they 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
“Remote work is generally not great for innovation unless you're truly in an online collaborative environment. And the funny thing is that when people talk about tech, they would always talk about how tech is the first thing that could go remote because you can write code from anywhere and you can contribute from anywhere. But that's true of every industry, right? You look at Hollywood. You could make a movie from anywhere. Like you film it offsite anyhow or on-site in different places. You could write a script from anywhere. You could edit a musical score from anywhere. You could edit the film from anywhere. You could write the script from anywhere. So why is everything clustered in Hollywood? Nobody would ever tell you, oh, don't go to Hollywood, go to Boise, and you could work in the movie industry or finance. You could raise money from anywhere, come up with your trading strategy from anywhere, everything in finance is in a handful of locations. And so tech is the same way. And it's because there's that aggregation of people. There's the people helping each other, sharing ideas, trading things informally, learning new distribution methods that kind of spread, learning new AI techniques that spread. There's money around it that funds it specifically.”
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
“Calls on the founder of Stripe about this. And he mentioned that when he was 18 and he showed up in Silicon Valley as a nobody, completely unknown 18-year-old, nobody's heard of him. And during that six-month period that he was first here, he said he met all these people who are now giants of Silicon Valley. And it was this weird self-aggregation of people kind of finding and meeting each other and talking about what each other's working on. And somehow this keeps happening. And this happens through time. And then right now in Silicon Valley, it's happening in very specific areas. It's happening. All the AI researchers all knew each other from before. They were in the common set of labs. They had common lineages. All the best AI founders, which is different from the researchers, have their own cluster. And all the SaaS people have their own cluster. And so it's this really interesting, almost self-aggregation effect of talent finding each other and then helping each other over time. And it's just fascinating how that works.”
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 then ended up with Shockley, semiconductor and Fairchild Semiconductor in the early semiconductor companies 50s, 60s, and that kind of established Silicon Valley as a hub. And as things moved from microprocessors to computers to software, people just kept stuff propagating across those waves from within the industry. So one big thing is you have a geographic cluster. And you have that for every single industry. You look at wineries and they're clustered in a handful of places because of geography. You look at the energy industry that's in a handful of cities. Finance is in New York and Hong Kong and London. So every single industry has clusters, Hollywood and Bollywood and Lagos in Nigeria for the main hubs for movie making in different regions. So in Silicon Valley, obviously we created this tech cult cluster. But then even within the tech cluster, there are these small pockets of people that I mentioned earlier that somehow find each other in self-aggregate. It's funny. I was talking to Patrick.”
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
“A famous literary school in the early 20th century in London that was, I think it was like Virginia Wolfe and John Maynard Keyes and Ian Forster and all these people all kind of aggregated and became friends and started supporting each other. Or you look at the Italian Renaissance similarly in Florence you had this aggregation of all these great talents all in a timely manner coincident with each other or fauvism or Italian futurism or impressionism Paris in the late 1800s. And so that repeatedly happens for everything. And similarly, that's happened for tech, and even within tech, we've had these successive waves, right? Really, the founding story of”
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 really fascinating because if you look at almost every major movement throughout history, and that could be a literary movement, it could be an artistic movement. It could be a finance movement, economic schools of thought. It's almost always a group of young people aggregating in a specific city who all somehow find each other and all start collaborating and working together towards some common set of goals that reflect 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
“That was Cheryl Sandberg in the early days of Facebook, who eventually came out as a hire and helped scale it. Zuck was really the sort of mixture of the product visionary, the salesperson, et cetera.”
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 think it really depends on the discipline or the area. For tech, I think it's very different than if you're looking in other areas. For an early tech team, I almost use 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 are 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 of Apple devices, et cetera, was just considered legendary. And then as a thing starts working, you eventually need somebody like Tim Cook who can help scale the company. And so you could argue.”
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 think it's genuine. I think it's almost the opposite. You feel the purity of it. You're like, oh my gosh, there's a unique aesthetic element here. And that probably reflects some unique way of viewing the world or thinking about products or thinking about people and their usage.”
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 I just thought it was so intriguing and so cool. And I've only seen two people like that before that I had to invest. And it was just this immense consistency. It was very weird. And you see that like you go to his house and it's like, it feels like him. You know, everything, the company feels like him. Everything feels like him. It's fascinating. He's done an amazing job with 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
“And then for a certain B2B products, it could be rate of growth and adoption. It could be metrics people call like NDR and a dollar retention or other things like that. Honestly, if you're investing before the thing even exists in the market, then you have to really dig into how much do I believe there's a need here, right? Or how much is our customer need? So I invested in rippling and other related companies before there was anything built under the premise that this is something that a lot of people want. And Notion is the same thing. Actually, Notion was a rare example where I did it as a person investment. I met Ivan, who's the CEO over there. And everything about him was so aesthetically cohesive in a very odd way, the way he dressed his hairstyle, the color scheme of his clothes, the color scheme of the app and the pitch deck. The only other person I've seen that with is Jack Dorsey, who started Square on Twitter. And there was this odd, almost pure embodiment of aesthetic.”
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 a lot of signals you can look at, and I think it's kind of varied by type of business. Is it a consumer business versus enterprise versus whatever for things like consumer businesses, you're just looking at organic growth rate and retention or people using it a lot? Are they living in it every day, that sort of thing, that would be early Facebook, right? The usage metrics were insane.”
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, all three of those are very different examples to your point. I invested in Airbnb when it was probably around eight people. Stripe was probably around the same size. And then Coinbase only got involved with much later when it was a billion dollar plus company. And even then I thought there was enormous upside on it, which luckily has turned out to be the case. I think really the way I think about investing in general is that there's two dimensions that really matter. The first dimension is what people call product market fit, or is there a strong demand for whatever it is you're building? And then secondarily, I look at the team. And I think most early stage people flip it. They look at the team first and how good as a founder. And obviously, I've started two companies myself. I think the founder side is incredibly important and the talent side is incredibly important. But I've seen amazing people get crushed by terrible markets and I've seen reasonably mediocre teams do extremely well in what are very good markets. And so in general, I first asked, do I think there's a real need here? How's it differentiated? What's different about it? And then I dig into like, are these people exceptional? How will they grow?”
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 a big question. I think in a couple years we'll start thinking about it as we're selling units of cognition. AI is dramatically under hyped because most enterprises have not done anything in it and that's where all the money is, all the changes, all the impact is, all the jobs, everything. The people that I know who have been very successful or driven solely by money end up miserable because they have money and then what? It's just what do you do? What fulfills you?”
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
“AI is the only market where the more I learn, the less I know, and in every other market, the more I learn the more I know, the more I'm able to predict things. And I can't predict anything anymore.”
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