#53 - Elad Gil

Elad Gil is a serial entrepreneur, executive, and one of the greatest tech investors of all time, with early stakes in something like 40 billion-plus dollar companies: AirBnB, Anduril, Coinbase, Figma, Flexport, Instacart, Notion, OpenDoor, Pinterest, Square, Stripe… I could really go on. He’s now managing a new billion dollar venture fund, for which he’s the sole investor.

Elad is also the co-founder of 2 companies: Color Genomics, a company providing genetic testing, software and clinical services for large-scale health programs – and before that, Mixer Labs, a company building location infrastructure for mobile devices that was acquired by Twitter. He worked as a VP at Twitter and also started the mobile team at Google.

0:00 - Intro
6:11 - Blank Slates and Decaying Institutions
8:16 - Western Pessimism and Agendas of Abundance vs Scarcity
12:30 - The Long Boom: Is Innovation Speeding Up?
16:26 - Are Startups Founder Limited or Market Limited?
19:26 - EIR Syndrome and Choosing the Right Market
21:41 - What Makes for a Good Investor, Operator and Entrepreneur?
24:05 - Positives and Negatives of Investing and Operating
26:17 - The Brand Value of Individuals vs Institutions
28:05 - Competing with Massive Firms
30:33 - Market-Driven Investing
33:23 - Starting Companies as Surfing Waves
36:09 - Age of Accomplishment and The Deferral of Adulthood
42:15 - What to Say Yes To
44:21 - Defense Tech and Complacency
49:25 - Private Markets and The Future of Venture
52:11 - Discontinuities in AI
53:49 - On Google
55:16 - LLM Oligopoly and Long-Term Scenarios for AI
1:00:41 - AGI and Sleeping 3 Hours a Night
1:03:19 - AI Doomerism
1:06:05 - The Deterioration of Speed
1:09:27 - Bureaucracy and the State of Nuclear
1:12:52 - Generosity and the Culture of Silicon Valley
1:15:19 - What Should More People Be Thinking About?


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