Name: Advice from investor who backed 40 Unicorns l Elad Gil
Uploaded: 2025-02-02T00:32:27.000Z
Duration: 29 min 9 s
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I've spent the last 20 years in Silicon Valley where I've worked as a operator running different companies, starting companies, and as an investor.

And I first ran a company that had about 120 people, it grew to 150, and then it shrank to 13 people in five rounds of layoffs.

It was a telecom equipment company that was backed by Sequoia and Matrix.

After that, I ended up joining Google and then left to start my first company, which is a data infrastructure company, which Twitter bought back in 2009.

At the time that Twitter bought my company, Twitter was about 90 people, and I helped scale it to 1,500 people over two and a half years.

I started off running different product areas like Search, which again was very AI-centric, with Geo, and then moved over to effectively become a company fixer.

As an investor, I've backed about 40 companies worth a billion dollars or more each, 30-something at the seed or Series A.

So that's things like Airbnb, Airtable, Coinbase, Figma, Besto, Instacart, Stripe, Square, Dior, Rippling, Notion, and others.

And then I also started investing in generative AI quite early, in part because I'd been doing AI and machine learning for so long.

And so I was an early investor in companies like Perplexity, Hardy, Character, Mistral, Pica, and others.

Before that, I'd studied mathematics and biology.

I moved out to Silicon Valley because I thought it was the best way to potentially have a about doing things that are useful.

And so the reason I got a PhD, for example, was I thought initially that I'd be an academic and I'd really be focused on human disease and computational understanding of disease and other things like that.

I couldn't realize or felt that any one individual in the field of biology can have that big of an impact.

I'd already done a background in mathematics for undergrad and had already done some CS-related things.

And so I moved out to Silicon Valley to work on companies with the hope that I could do something useful through the context of technology and company formation.

Google in 2004 was growing extremely fast.

So when I joined, there was about 1500 or so people.

It grew to 15,000 or so over three years, three and a half years.

And so the company was doubling every, I don't know, six to 12 months.

And so they added 13,000 people in three years, which is amazing.

And I think in a good way, but also it's quite chaotic.

Every six months or so, there'd be a big reorg where they change the organizational structure because it was growing so fast that if you had 1500 and then 3000 and then 6000 and then 12,000 people, it was a different organization every year.

And so that needed a different org structure.

And so suddenly the person that was working for you became your boss's boss and they'd switch divisions and things would change so rapidly.

And when I joined, Larry Page had just gotten rid of all the middle managers.

And so every director of engineering had somewhere between 50 and 100 people working for them, which meant that there was a big gray market for talent.

A lot of managers didn't know what their employees were doing because they had too many employees working for them directly.

If you have a hundred people working for you, you can't see them that often individually.

And so a lot of people lost track of who was working for them, which meant there was an enormous gray market for talent.

And so one of the ways I helped start up a lot of the mobile efforts is I convinced people to work on mobile when their managers didn't know about it.

And so that was how a lot of the early mobile team got running.

I think there's sort of personal lessons and there's professional lessons and maybe they're the same thing.

I think one big lesson was that networks in Silicon Valley really matter and small groups of people who are really at different companies go on to achieve amazing things together.

And so the famous example of that may be PayPal.

Peter Thiel started Palantir and Founders Fund and all these things.

Keith Rupp always started multiple companies as well as became a prominent investor.

Elon Musk, of course, went and did so many things between Tesla and SpaceX and et cetera.

There's a small group of people that were at the core of PayPal that did all these things.

Similarly, the early Google network both went off to start a lot of different companies, Pinterest and Instagram and a variety of other things like that, but they also ended up as very prominent operators in Silicon Valley.

So a lot of the COOs in Silicon Valley for the next generation of companies came out of Google.

That's Sheryl Sandberg, the CEO of Facebook, Dennis Woodside, the CEO of Dropbox, the COOs of Stripe and Gusto and all sorts of companies came out of Google.

And so you similarly see this sort of dispersion of talent, but everybody knew each other.

And so it created a lot of collaboration across companies because of that.

And so number one is just these small pockets of people who work together repeatedly really matter.

I think the second takeaway was really the power of ambition.

The main reason Larry Page or Sergey Brin would get upset with you or Eric Schmidt, they kind of ran the company together, would get upset with you is either number one, you weren't thinking big enough.

You'd go into a product review and you'd say, I have this idea for this hundred million dollar market.

And they'd say, why is it in a $10 billion market?

Like literally they would say that, you know, they'd always push you on thinking bigger.

Or why are you happy with a million people using it?

Why isn't it a hundred million people using it?

And then number two is they pushed very hard on the innovation and what makes the thing that you're working on very special or different.

It really forced some very clear product thinking and some very big thinking and ambitious thinking.

And then the third is when you're an employee at a hyper-growth startup or a company, things will generally work out and you shouldn't worry too much about yourself.

And if your boss suddenly, if your coworker suddenly becomes your boss's boss, then all these things shift.

A lot of people start to worry about themselves.

What about my career and what will happen to me?

That the company's growing and changing so rapidly that there's lots of opportunity.

And something that was sort of my third takeaway.

And so going into Google, I thought someday I'll start a company.

And so you couldn't just apply and show up and get money and start working on things.

And there weren't a lot of online resources.

And so it was really hard to actually find information about how to start a company.

And that there weren't very many angel funds, operators with side funds, operators investing.

The venture ecosystem was very constrained.

And so there was a small number of firms that you could raise money from.

And then there were some people pioneering, you know, angel funds or what were then called super angels.

So that was Naval Robicont and Mike Maples and Michael Deering and a few other folks.

But the reality was there just wasn't that much money either.

It was hard to get money and it was hard to get going.

I think today it's actually dramatically easier to start a company and there's a lot more information about how to do it.

So I went to Google in part because I thought it'd be a great place to transition, meet some people and maybe start something with them.

We started off with a site focused on location related information.

And then that morphed into an API focused on location information.

And we ended up eventually building one of the really early developer centric products.

So at the time there wasn't a lot happening in terms of developer first products or product like growth or all these things that are very common now.

There are very few API centric products like Stripe or things like that.

The only one I think that really existed and was taking off when we started was Twilio.

And so building like a product as an API was kind of a radical concept in those days.

And so we were one of the really early people building that.

And basically we for people to sort of interact with geodata in really rich ways, generate their own custom index and search over it, annotate location related data sets and things like that.

So initially when we started the company, it was a team of ex-Google people, seven or eight employees.

We had all of them had worked at Google except for one person or something, or maybe two people.

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Advice from investor who backed 40 Unicorns l Elad Gil

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