#2297 Elad Gil backed 40 unicorns. This is next

**Elad Gil** (0:00)
People always say, oh, when's the first billion dollar single person company? That was Minecraft. That was over a decade ago.

**Andrew Warner** (0:05)
You invested in everything from Notion, Opendoor, PagerDuty, Andril, Airbnb.

**Elad Gil** (0:11)
Basically everything's software is AI. It's gonna put the power of building things in the hands of millions of people who couldn't do it before. It's already doing that.

**Andrew Warner** (0:18)
What are you seeing today that's exciting for the future? I got with me Elad Gil, the guy with two first names and an incredible fricking track record. Presented by Zapier, the AI Automation Company. What are some of the big ones in your arsenal?

**Elad Gil** (0:37)
Yeah, let's see. Definitely Android, Airbnb, Coinbase, Instacart, Stripe, Square, a little bit of SpaceX, OpenAI, Perplexity, a couple other things, Cognition.

**Andrew Warner** (0:57)
By the way, we could keep going on and on and on. We could do the whole thing with just us listing this. And when I asked you before we got started, can you give me a moment when you knew you made it? Can you tell people what you said to me?

**Elad Gil** (1:07)
I hadn't felt like I made it yet. So, you know, it's a couple of things. One is, it depends on if I made it, right? Like I feel like I'm at a point in my career where I can finally start doing interesting things because there's enough leverage to do it. But I think fundamentally made it could mean what's the impact you're having on the world.
It could mean, what have you built or done that's important or relevant? It could mean financial success. It could mean familial success. It could mean all sorts of things. And I think part of it is I feel like there's a lot of stuff to do, and there's so much ahead that has to happen. So I definitely don't feel like I've made it from all those perspectives. And then, you know, it's interesting. You look at somebody like Elon Musk, and you're like, what an inspiring figure. And look at all the stuff he's done. And I know founders who are very successful, who look at him and they're like, I've done nothing compared to this guy. I have to keep going. And so I think it's all kind of relative, right? Like a lot of my friends have done extremely well. They've built major companies and...

**Andrew Warner** (2:05)
Because you're surrounded by people who've done so much, you feel like I haven't done enough?

**Elad Gil** (2:09)
Yeah, well, I've always, I've never felt like I've done enough. So I remember I was like 16, and I was having like an existential crisis of like, I'm 16, I haven't done anything yet. What's going on? I've ruined my life, you know? And so I think it's a personality trait partially. And then partially as you see these really cool things that people are doing, and you're like, I want to do more, right? Like Patrick from Stripe started ARCA, Biology Institute, like one of the first new major biology institutions in decades. It's doing really interesting things, right? Or Brian Armstrong started a new anti-aging company, or, you know, so you see what people are doing, you see what Elon Musk is doing, you know? And so it's very inspiring to try and build more for society, do more for people, think big, you know? I think it's important to... So I don't, you know, I don't feel like I can rest and go and whatever.

**Andrew Warner** (2:56)
By the way, speaking of big, was the information right when they said that you're raising two billion dollars?

**Elad Gil** (3:03)
We haven't announced anything on the funds or anything like that.

**Andrew Warner** (3:07)
Okay. And I asked you before, can we please announce some kind of news? And you said, no, Andrew, I got nothing for you.

**Elad Gil** (3:13)
Well, that's not really that interesting. I think there's some things that we're moving toward. Like our hope is to announce our first sort of statue or monument soon. We've been working on a project to do that for like societal beauty, like art and society at large scale. And so there's some stuff getting pretty close there. There's a few things that we funded that haven't announced their rounds yet. So, you know, there'll be things like that. So that, you know, there's a bunch of stuff going on, but I don't think there's anything I can really talk about yet. But I'm happy to chat again if you'll ever have me.

**Andrew Warner** (3:43)
And, you know, I'll have you on every single fricking day. I'll come over to your house with a whiskey. The two of us are going to have such a great time. All right. Here's the thing, though. Everything you do seems so big right now, frankly, not just right now, always, that I'm wondering how people who are at that toy stage can relate to. And I was talking to you before we got started about how Paul Graham said, look to people who are creating toys. That's the future. And we look at people who created these little things that almost seemed like they were features on somebody else's thing. And then they ended up becoming big companies. And I'm wondering where the toys are today that will become that big. What do you think about that?