#863: Elad Gil, Consigliere to Empire Builders — How to Spot Billion-Dollar Companies Before Everyone Else, The Misty AI Frontier, How Coke Beat Pepsi, When Consensus Pays, and Much More

**Tim Ferriss** (0:00)
Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferris Show, where it's my job to deconstruct world-class performers to try to tease out how they do what they do. And my guest today is Elad Gil. And I have his official bio in front of me, but let me just say that he is one of the most impressive investors and thinkers I have ever met. He repeatedly identifies the right founders in the right markets before anyone else, and then materially helps them to win. And there are many different examples of this, but before the AI rush, he wrote checks into Perplexity, Harby, Abridged, OpenAI. This was before the broader market really reoriented around LLMs. And that's just the most recent wave. He's done this over and over again, 40-plus unicorns, which is just insane when you think about it.
And once you're lucky, twice you're good, 40-plus times. I don't even know where that places you, but it's certainly elite. So Elad Gil, you can find him on X and All Social at Elad Gil, spelled E-L-A-D-G-I-L, website, eladgil.com is CEO of Gil & Co, a multi-stage investment firm, holding company and operating company, working on the world's most advanced technologies. Elad is a serial entrepreneur, operating executive and investor or advisor to private companies, including AirBnB, Anduril, Coinbase, Figma, Instacart, OpenAI, SpaceX and Stripe. He was previously VP of Corporate Strategy at Twitter and started Mobile at Google. He was the founder and CEO of Mixerlabs and Color. Elad is the author of the bestseller, High Growth Handbook, Scaling Startups from 10 to 10,000 People. I'll leave it at that. Without further ado, please enjoy a very wide-ranging and, I think, very timely, very important conversation with none other than Elad Gil.

**Elad Gil** (1:53)
At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half-mile before my hands start shaking.

**Tim Ferriss** (1:57)
Can I answer your personal question? Elad, nice to see you. Thanks for making the time.

**Elad Gil** (2:18)
Appreciate it. Yeah, as always.

**Tim Ferriss** (2:20)
And I thought we could begin with something we were chatting about or you were explaining before we started recording, which is a new phenomenon of sorts. Could you explain what we were just talking about?

**Elad Gil** (2:33)
Yeah, we were just talking about some of the acquisitions that are happening in the AI world. You know, we saw that XAI just got an option to effectively purchase Cursor, it looks like. Obviously, scale was sort of partially taken by meta. There had been a variety of these sort of deals that had been happening over the last year or two.
And separate from that, we were just talking about, what does that mean for the AI research community and the AI community in general? And I think one of the interesting things that's happened over the last year or so is meta really started aggressively bidding on AI talent, which was a very rational strategy, right? They're going to spend tens of billions of dollars on compute. So it made sense to have a real budget to go after people. And normally what happens in tech is a single company will go public, and a bunch of people from that company will be enriched and then a subset of them will continue to be heads down and working really hard and focus on their original mission, and a subset of people start to get distracted. They may go and work on passion projects for society, they may get involved with politics, they may go start a company, they may just kind of check out and hang out or go to the beach, kind of thing. And what happened recently is because of the meta offers and then all the other major tech companies having to match offers for their best researchers, somewhere between 50 and a few hundred people effectively had an IPO but as a class of people. It wasn't like they were at one company, they were spread across Silicon Valley, but all of their paid packages suddenly went up dramatically and they experienced the equivalent of an IPO. And that's really unusual. It's kind of the personal IPO. And the only time in history I can think of where I've seen it happen before is in crypto, where a bunch of the really early crypto holders or founders suddenly as a class all went effectively public in 2017-ish.
And then again, more recently, this is really interesting. It's kind of under-discussed. It may not have huge long-term implications, but it doesn't mean the subset of people will change what they're focused on, try and do big science projects to help humanity, work on AI for science maybe. Maybe some people will go off and do personal quests or things like that.