Advice from investor who backed 40 Unicorns l Elad Gil

Elad Gil 0:00 I'm Elad Gil. 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. So I got laid off in the third round. It was a tu- 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 was 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, or 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, Gusto, Instacart, Stripe, Square, uh, Deel, 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, I was an early investor in companies like Perplexity, Harvey, Character, Mistral, Pika, and others. [upbeat music]

Elad Gil 1:22 Yeah, I moved out, uh, for tech. I got my PhD at MIT. 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 long-term impact on humanity. And so I tend to be very techno-optimistic. I care 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 quickly realized or felt that one, any one individual in the field of biology couldn't 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 moved out to Silicon Valley to work on companies with the hope that I could do something useful, uh, through the context of technology and company formation. Uh, Google in 2004 was growing extremely fast. So when I joined, it was about 1,500 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 so it was very chaotic. And I think in a good way, but also it was quite chaotic. Every six months or so, there'd be a big reorg where they'd change the organizational structure, because it was growing so fast that if you had 1,500 and then 3,000 and then 6,000 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, uh, 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, right? A lot of, uh, managers didn't know what their employees were doing because they had too many employees working for them directly, so they couldn't do enough one-on-ones, right? If you have 100 people working for you, you can't see them that often, uh, 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 then there's professional lessons, and maybe they're the same thing. Um, I think, uh, one big lesson was that networks in Silicon Valley really matter, and small groups of people who are early 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, um, Founders Fund and all these things. You know, Keith Rabois started multiple companies, also became a prominent investor. Max Levchin started a firm. Uh, Elon Musk, of course, went and did so many things, uh, between Tesla and SpaceX and et cetera. Reid Hoffman started LinkedIn. You know, there's a small group of people that were the core of PayPal that did all these things. David Sacks is another person. Um, similarly, the early Google network, um, 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 CEOs of Stripe and Gusto and all sorts of companies came out of Google. And so you similarly see this sort of dis- 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. That was one big takeaway. I think a 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, "Oh, I have this idea for this hundred million dollar market," and they'd say, "Why isn't it a ten billion dollar market?" Like, literally they would say that, you know. They'd always push you on thinking bigger. Um, or, "Why are you happy with a million people using it? Why isn't it 100 million people using it?" And then number two is, um, they pushed very hard on 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, um, coworker suddenly becomes your boss's boss and all these things shift, a lot of people start to worry about themselves. "What about my career and what will happen to me?" But the company's growing and changing so rapidly that there's lots of opportunity, and so that was sort of my third takeaway. I always wanted to start a company. Um, and so going into Google, I thought, "Someday I'll start a company," and I thought that was important to me. Um, at the time, there was no Y Combinator, 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 then 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 Ravikant and Mike Maples and Michael Dearing and a few other folks. But the reality was there just wasn't that much money either. And so it was hard to get information, it was hard to get money, and it was hard to get going. Um, I think today it's actually dramatically easier to start a company. There's a lot more information about how to do it. But that, back then it was harder, and so I went to Google in part because I thought it'd be a great place to transition, meet some people, um, and maybe start something with them. Yeah, we had two products. Uh, we started off with a, with a site focused on location-related information, and then that morphed into an API focused on location information. And, uh, 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, um, developer-first products or product-led growth or all these things that are very common now. Um, there were 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, was kind of a radical concept in those days, and so we were one of the really early people building that. And basically, we built the ability to, for people to sort of, uh, interact with geodata in really rich ways, you know, generate their own custom index and search over it, annotate, uh, location-related data sets and things like that. So initially, when we started the company, uh, 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. And I think in hindsight, we shoulda had more diversity on the team early on in terms of just, um, where people came from, because we, we did things the Google way, which meant we built very big infrastructure from day one [laughs] that worked at enormous scale, but if you don't have many users, it doesn't matter the scale that you have. Um, the positive of that is it made it very easy for us to do API-related products and things like that because, you know, we designed it in a very modular way from day one. And the initial product that we had was more like a, a website where you could go and interact with location-related information, and then it morphed into the API. And I think the mistake we had with the first product, and all we really did was change how you display the information. Is it programmatic through an API, or is it on a website, right? Um, I think the mistake that we made was we were building for the past in some sense, right? We'd just come out of Google, the SEO world. The second product that we had was more for the modern world or the future. People are moving towards using APIs to integrate against their products. People are moving towards mobile. People are moving towards location services. And so I think a lot of mistakes that people make when they come out of a big company is they build for the era that the company that they're at was built in, versus building for the future. And you always wanna build a year or two into the future in terms of what's coming, because you, you really wanna take advantage of what is known as, like, a why now statement. What has changed that makes your company relevant today where it couldn't necessarily exist before? And so the why now could be technology. The why now could be regulatory. The why now could be something else. So an example of a technology why now is Uber. Before you had the iPhone and effectively free lookups of GPS, it cost a dollar every time you do a GPS lookup from mobile carrier. And so when I was doing mobile at Google, all the carriers, you know, Verizon and, uh, SoftBank and everybody else felt that, um, nobody wanted to use location. And the reason was they charged a dollar per lookup, which meant if you were doing an Uber-style app, the trace would cost you $30, right, just to follow the car to your location. So you couldn't do it. When the iPhone came out, it broke open that hold that the carriers had, uh, which suddenly meant things like Uber could exist. You could push a button on your phone, and a, a stranger in a car would show up, and you'd get in and feel okay with it. And then you'd see the route. Uh, so that was a technology why now. Suddenly you had new mobile services. A regulatory why now may be things like, um, Samsara really grew on the backs of regulation which allowed you to ha- that forced you to have, um, in-cab cameras. If you're driving a truck across the country in the US, uh, you need to be able to monitor the driver. And so it created an opening for their technology, or there may be regulatory shifts, uh, for healthcare or for other things that allow you then to build a company. And so often you wanna kinda ask, what is different now, and therefore why is what I'm doing relevant for today? Maybe the why now for Anduril would be the shift towards drones and machine vision as a new capability, right? It's a technology shift, so suddenly Anduril could exist. So we basically had started, um, building the API-centric product, and we were talking with Twitter as a customer. And, um, one of the folks on the Twitter team, uh, sent me an email, I think it was Ryan Sarver, that basically said, "Why don't you come in for a working session with us where you imagine the constraints of being outside of Twitter removed, and let's brainstorm the product that you could build for Twitter." And it was meant to be a vendor discussion, but we could tell that they were kinda thinking about buying us, because they wanted to incorporate the, the product into their, um, platform and ecosystem. And at the time, Twitter had a massive developer ecosystem. It had just opened up API access for everyone to access tweets and other information, and they thought that we could be an ancillary service that would reside on top of Twitter and would be something every developer could use, right, which was a very compelling vision. Um, so we met with Ryan and started talking through that, and then we met with Ev and other members of the team. At the time, um, Ev Williams was still the CEO of the company. And, um, at the time that we started talking with them, there were about 50 people. And by the time they bought us, which was about three months later, there were 90 people, right? So they, they almost doubled in three months, so they were growing very fast. Basically, uh, we thought about it after they made an offer, and we decided, you know, it'd be a very good home for what we were doing for three reasons. Number one is they had this massive developer ecosystem, so we thought that we could reach more users faster and have more impact. Um, second, we thought it was a great place for our engineers to go, um, because, you know, Twitter was a small team still, and we thought all of them could have really, you know, amazing careers there. Uh, third, we thought financially it was a good outcome, because at the time Twitter was worth a billion dollars, and we, we thought, oh, it's, it's gonna be at least a $10 billion company, and so any purchase price we have is magnified by 10 times. And also we, you know, calculated dilution, all that kinda stuff. And then lastly, we just thought it was very exciting to go to something that was clearly breaking out and working and transforming the world. You know, Twitter was playing a very key role, both in social media, but also things like Arab Spring and other things that were happening in terms of global events, so we thought it was a very important

Elad Gil 11:49 company. [upbeat music] There's this, um, old framework that John Doerr used to use, uh, in the '90s. He was one of the main investors at Kleiner Perkins at sort of the peak of Kleiner Perkins. And he used to ask founders, "Are you a mercenary or missionary?" And you're supposed to say you're a missionary. You know, you're doing it for some broader philosophical goal or some big mission in life. And, uh, Naval Ravikant I think has a, a better framework, which is early in your career you have to be at least partially mercenary, 'cause otherwise you'll never get anything done. And you have to pivot to the opportunity. You can't be overly philosophical on things. In the middle of your career, you wanna be more missionary. It's finally working. You don't wanna be zero-sum. You wanna help build the community, you wanna do positive things, and you wanna focus on a bigger goal. And then late in your career, you wanna be an artist. You wanna do it for the love of the craft, right? And if you look at the evolution of companies, many early companies, the founders would've sold early, right? Larry and Sergey famously tried to sell Google for a million dollars and couldn't find anybody to buy it, so they kept going. Um, Facebook almost sold for a billion dollars to Yahoo, and Terry Semel at Yahoo tried to renegotiate the deal when Yahoo's stock price dropped, and so then Facebook said no and walked away from it. But they almost bought Facebook for a billion dollars, right? And so if you go through almost every company like that, there's been a moment in time where the founders are willing to sell. And so that's mercenary behavior. That's not missionary behavior, right? And that's fine. And so I think early on, though, you see people who want to accomplish big things. Um, they may be happy with having a small exit early on, but if the thing keeps going, they'll wanna keep going with it, right? And they just grow. And a lot of it has to do with growth potential for, um, for, for young founders. If somebody is older, there's a lot more information about them. You already know what they've built. They already have a reputation with colleagues. It's much easier to vet them. But, you know, I met the Stripe founders probably when they were, if I had to guess, 22 and 20 or something like that. And so there just isn't that much information when you meet somebody at that age, right? They don't have a lot of coworkers. Most of their references are, are, are, are other college students, you know? So it's a little bit harder to know. So imagine in two- 2011 or 2012, you're paying 100 times revenue for Stripe. I think the best companies always look like that. They always look like you're paying too far ahead, and it's too expensive, and why would you do it? And then in hindsight you're like, "Oh my God, what an amazing investment and what a great deal, and it was so cheap." And that was Facebook, right? Facebook, I remember when it raised at 100 million, everybody said that was insane. And then it raised at 500 million from Greylock, and people were saying, "Greylock is so stupid. How could they do this?" And then Yuri Milner invested at $5 billion in common stock, and they're like, "Ugh, that Yuri Milner, he's so dumb. Why is he doing..." You know. And so every round everybody said how stupid this is, and then it turned out to be brilliant. For Yuri Milner in particular, he'd actually been running a social network in Russia before, and he knew how to monetize it. And so when he looked at Facebook's numbers, he said, "Okay, I know, I know how much each user is actually worth, and it's being under-monetized, so I know it's gonna be worth a lot more, so I'm gonna do the investment." Right? He could just run the math. And so sometimes you have inside information where you just understand a business model better than anyone else, and so you know what to do. And in some cases, you have a natural intuition, especially very early, or you understand the market deeply, or you understand the customer deeply, or understand the use case deeply. And sometimes people just get lucky, right? They just invest in something, and it works, and then they're lauded as a genius, you know, for making that investment. But, um, I think the best things always look like that. The hard part, of course, is many people apply the same logic to the things that aren't very good, um, and so they invest in a lot of very bad companies simultaneously at this, at the very high

Elad Gil 15:24 valuations and things like that. The role of the CEO definitely changes rapidly over time. When you're a very small startup, it's very different from when you're running a multi-thousand person organization, right? How you manage and deal with five people is very different, and when you're a very early stage company, it's like an egg. It's very simple, right? You just need to find customers, you need to build something they want, and you need to hire a few people to help you with that. And then you don't die, right? You don't wanna run out of money. A later stage company is like a full-grown chicken or a bird, you know? [laughs] It's very complicated. It has feathers and a beak and legs and everything else. And that's when you get into all sorts of other things where you have to do internationalization, you have to launch multiple products, you have to hire roles you've never hired before, like a GC, a CFO, et cetera. You start buying other companies. People try to buy you. You raise different rounds of financing. So the complexity goes way up late. Despite that, early stage and late stage companies, the role of the CEO has some commonalities. Number one is you need to set the direction for the company. Uh, number two is you need to, uh, allocate resources and make sure you don't run out of money. So what should you build? What should you focus on? Who should be doing what? Number three is you're almost like the chief psychologist of the company early on because a lot of people come to you with their problems, with their feelings, with what's going on. [laughs] You know, it's management issues, and you don't yet have a line of managers to handle that for you. And so a lot of it is just like, what direction do we go in? How do we allocate resources? How do we make sure that we're bringing on the best talent and allocating it properly? And then how do we make sure everybody's sort of happy and aligned? And then lastly, it's about managing your own energy as a manager or as an executive, right? And so being the CEO of a startup is very stressful, and so you also have to make sure that you're pacing yourself in the right way. I think there's a lot of conventional wisdom that's wrong. Uh, one is that you need a co-founder. If you look at some of the biggest companies, they had either one founder or unequal founding partnerships. That's Microsoft, that's Amazon. That's a lot of the biggest companies in the world. Not all, but many. Apple was an equal, like all these things. Um, two is that you need a good idea to start a company. Uh, some of the biggest companies are people who did it accidentally or if we just wanted to go start something, and they kept trying different things until they found something that worked. And so I think some companies are very motivated by a specific viewpoint or ambition, but s- in some cases it's just a little bit more random, and I think you should just go start something if you wanna start something. Um, third is you need to learn things before starting a company. And if you look at the biggest companies in the world, they were started by very young people, and so they didn't know that much, right? [laughs] If you're a college dropout, it's not like you have 30 years of experience or something. And so I, I believe much more in life while I'm doing than life on learning. Everybody always talks about life on learning. I think you learn more by doing than just by, like, learning or talking about something. So I think those are some of the things that, you know, I believe that not everybody does necessarily. I think really you should think about capitalizing your company as what does a company actually need to succeed, or what do we need to build what we need, versus I just am gonna go raise money. And there's a number of companies that I'll meet every time I'll just say, "Why, why are you even fundraising? Right? You're profitable. It's working. Like, just keep growing. Like, why would you ever do that [laughs] to yourself?" And there's com- some companies have done that, like Zapier or others, and if you look at the history of technology, um, a lot of companies bootstrapped, right? Microsoft bootstrapped. They raised one round right before they went public because they wanted to add somebody to their board from the investor, but they didn't need the money, just wanted to make it count. Uh, Dell bootstrapped, again, up until a pre-IPO round, so he didn't raise money ever, and that was the '70s and '80s. And the '90s, and there's other examples, in the '90s, uh, Yahoo raised money, but it never touched it. eBay raised money, but it never touched it. So a lot of the big successes actually were very capital efficient. And then you go into the 2000s, Instagram was very, very lean. They didn't need a lot of the money that they raised. Midjourney is completely bootstrapped. So I think every generation has had bootstrap companies. Now, there's lots and lots of companies where capital helps accelerate what they're doing dramatically, and raising money helps accelerate you. And that's really what fundraising should be. If you can raise money and use that to win a market faster, better, bigger, whatever, you should do it, right? That's kinda like Parker Conrad at Rippling, like amazing entrepreneur, amazing execution, and he's raised against, "I'm gonna go win the market," right? And I think both styles can work, but it only works for certain types of businesses. If your customers are unwilling to pay you early, or alternatively, if you have to invest heavily in sales and product, you're gonna need to raise more money. If what you're doing is something that you can charge for early and charge for a lot and get high leverage on, then you may be able to bootstrap. And so it really depends. You know, it's a mix of different types of companies. In Silicon Valley, people bootstrap too little. Outside of Silicon Valley, they raise money too little. And so there's too many bootstrap companies that could be much bigger in the rest of the country or the rest of the world, and they never raise money, and the ambitions never grow. And then in Silicon Valley, there's lots of things that'd be great bootstrap companies that maybe are good cashflow, but are never gonna be giant companies, and they raise too much venture capital and die. You know, often once people hit a certain scale, they either hire a COO or they hire two or three people who collectively play the role of what a COO does. And honestly, there's no clear definition of a COO. In some companies, that person could be running sales and marketing. In some companies, that person could be running product. In some companies, that could be running support and operations, as it's a very amorphous term that could mean whatever the founder doesn't wanna do. Um, or it could mean something more specific. It really depends on the company and the context. Um, but it's, it's an important role because often it's one of the main lieutenants for the CEO and somebody who's really helping them day to day. So I don't think you need a co-founder, and I think conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley is you should find one, and I think that's bad advice. Um, I think you can... It's very good to work with a co-founder, but it's not necessary. You can also have a founding team. You can hire people. You can do all sorts of things, right? And so you don't need a co-founder. If you do decide to get a co-founder, which again, I think is helpful, but I don't think it's necessary, um, you wanna look for somebody optimally who has complementary skills to you and can play a different role, because a lotta co-founder conflicts are driven by two people wanting the same role and fighting about it, or two people wanting decision-making and fighting about it. And sometimes you see co-founder relationships where the people make decisions together and it works great, but many times you have reversion to the mean, right? You don't make great decisions 'cause you're compromising all the time. And usually the greatest companies are the vision of one person driving everybody towards that vision. Sometimes it's two, but usually it's one, and that's because it's very hard for two people to jointly have the right vision, right? You, you start compromising too much. Um, so you want clarity of role. You want clarity of action. Uh, you want clear decision-making if you can get it. Um, and you want optimally at least one person who can build, hopefully both, and at least one person who's good at selling. And selling means convincing customers to use you, convincing employees to join you, convincing investors to fund you, et cetera. It's all, all forms of selling. And even if you're working very hard, you're finding the right outlets for yourself. Very early-stage company, you often don't have a

Elad Gil 21:56 board. So if you're three or four people, there's no point in having a board really. Um, I mean, you could do one, but it's a little bit superfluous because the complexity of what you're doing is low, and really you're just focused on shipping, and there's other ways to have governance, roots or governance if you want over the company. Um, I mean, really the role of the CEO as we discussed is to set the direction of the company, allocate resources, find talent, bring it on board, promote it, whatever, direct it the right way, and not run out of money or resources, et cetera, right? And the most important thing that a board does at an early-stage company is decide who's the CEO. And sometimes the board can decide that, and sometimes it doesn't have the power to do that. But if you have a five-person company or a 10-person company, um, the board will obviously help with hiring. It'll help with direction. It'll help with customers. It'll, it'll try to help with all those areas. But ultimately, the CEO and their team is on the line to do everything, right? And the board can help out, but the, the CEO and the executive team or the founding team is the most important group. Um, later in the life of the company, what the board does transitions a lot because boards become more about compliance, and there's compensation committees, and there's an audit committee for financials, and there's all these different committees as you move towards going public. And so the nature of the board shifts pretty dramatically from just one person who's likely an investor to a lot of people, most of whom are independents and not involved with the company or weren't early investors in the company. So there's a big transition in board and board structure over time. A lot of founders really misuse their board, um, and they view the board as their boss, and so they're scared to talk about certain issues or other topics. And I think really what you wanna do is both make use of your board in terms of closing candidates, finding candidates, finding customers, back-channel the customers, understanding who on your team is talented or not. So sometimes boards help a lot with talent assessment. Uh, sometimes boards help with overall strategy or direction of the company. Um, sometimes they help with ideas around M&A or new directions. And you kinda wanna take advantage of the board for that. And so very early on, usually your board member's very involved and you try and give them those tasks. "Help me find somebody of X type to hire," or, "Help me close these three people." Uh, again, later in the life of the company, that shifts more and more, although the board members may still be involved with closing executive or, or, or sort of key candidates or involved with some of these other things that I mentioned, big partnerships or other things. I think the biggest thing people worry about is the board firing them. I think fundamentally, private company boards used to have a lot more leverage. And so up until about 10 years ago, after your series A or maybe your series B, lose board control for most companies, and then the CEO was, um, more easy to fire. Today, that's harder to do because of the way boards are set up early now, where often the founders control more of the board seats, and so it's harder and harder to, um, fire founders. The really thing is, though, that if you look at the most public founder, um, step-downs or removals of the last 10 years, it was often people who actually controlled their company but decided to step down because of board pressure. That was Travis at Uber. Um, that was WeWork. Like, a lot of these people actually had board control, but then they got convinced or, you know, kind of, um, pressured to leave. And for some of those things, it was probably a big mistake, right? Like, um, Uber under Travis may have done exceptionally well. You know, he's very good. Undoubtedly, Dara is very good as well. It's just a different type of operator, right? And so I think that, um, people sometimes misunderstand the board dynamics. The reality though is if somebody controls your board, they can fire you, and it does change the dy- the dynamic and the relationship and everything else, and sometimes that's a healthy thing, and sometimes that's a very negative thing, and it really depends on the board member. And some board members are very useful and helpful and really focused on the good of the company, and in other cases, uh, some board members may have their own motivations and conflicts, right? A board member's supposed to watch out for all shareholders, but sometimes if you're an investor board member representing preferred stock, you'll push very hard for what you perceive as the interests of the investors, but those may be very negative for the company long term, but they may be very good for you short term. There's this misalignment of incentives. There's this principle agent problem that crops up, not just in boards, but in every aspect of running a company, right? You may have an executive who cares more about their own career than about your company. That's another incentive misalignment, right? They may act in ways that's good for them, but bad for you as a company. That's true of board members as well. And so, um, you have to be very careful about who you choose as your investor board members because of that dynamic. I mean, there's easy ways to, to check, right? You just call people that worked with them before, and you do back channel. You just ask, "Hey, what happened when things weren't going well on my board, on, in the company? How did that board member act? How were they the most helpful? Where were they distracting or negative for the company? What is the biggest disagreement you had with them, and why, and how did you resolve it?" Right? And so you kinda wanna ask those questions to try and understand, um,

Elad Gil 26:23 whether somebody would be a good board member or not. [gentle music] And by the way, Moore's Law, as you know, is not an actual law, right? Moore just extrapolated and said, "Well, if we keep going at this rate, it'll double every 18 months," or whatever it is. But there's no physical basis for it. But then it became self-reinforcing. People said, "Well, if we call it a law, then it must be true, so we're gonna build against it." But there's no reason that it worked that way, that it should've worked that way. It just did because they said it would, right? It was self-fulfilling. And a lot of Silicon Valley is self-fulfilling that way. The reason that Silicon Valley ends up working is, number one, it a- attracts extremely ambitious people who wanna work on technology. If you're somebody from any country in the world, this is the thing that you care about most in your life, you may end up moving here, and you're more likely to move here than almost anywhere else. Uh, number two is there's a pay-it-forward sort of mentality where people try to help each other. And early on in your career, everybody's kinda in it together 'cause multiple people are starting startups. They're often not competitive, and people just help each other, right? So there's this sort of group effect or cohort effect. Uh, third, there's a lot of know-how and knowledge of how to build companies, how to think about consumer versus B2B products, et cetera, and so that knowledge base really matters. And being local and s- ingrained in the knowledge base matters a lot, right? 'Cause then you meet people, and you learn more rapidly. Uh, and then lastly, because of that critical mass, this is where most of the interesting technologies come out of. And so you end up riding the curve early, and that means you have more chances of success. So I think for all those reasons, Silicon Valley is probably the best place in the world still to build technology companies. Obviously, there's great hubs around the world in different cities, uh, but Silicon Valley still remains the most important one by far. I generally think technology is a very positive force for the world. I think it's helped to lift, um, hundreds of millions or billions of people out of poverty or out of despair. And I don't mean technology just as a software. I mean agricultural technology where we have food abundance or transportation technology so you can get on a train and go across the country, right? And so technology means all those things. And if you go back 100 years, high tech was the automotive industry, right? Or if you go back 150 years or 130 years, um, high tech was electricity and developing electrification. And so I think people forget that technology means these broader things that we now take for granted, right? When you push a light switch and the light goes on, you don't think that it's technology, but it is. Technology is a very broad force that's really helped people societally in all sorts of ways. Uh, food and famine, healthcare, childhood vaccines, like, all these things are technologies. And so I think technology's an incredibly important part of human progress. So the important thing for me is to be part of contributing to that technology world and working with the most important technologies and therefore the most important technology companies in the world over time. [gentle music]