#87 - Elad Gil

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Applications for the winter 2019 YC Batch are now open. You can learn more at ycombinator.com/apply. Today's episode is with Elad Gil. Elad is an entrepreneur, operator, and investor. He co-founded Color Genomics and Mixer Labs, worked at Google and Twitter, and has invested in companies including Airbnb, Coinbase, and Stripe. He just released the High Growth Handbook, which is a guide to scaling startups published by Stripe Press. The book contains tactical advice on key issues for post-product market fit companies, such as the role of the CEO, hiring executives, late stage fundraising, M&A, and other topics. It also includes interviews with people in tech, including YC's own Sam Altman. You can find the book on Amazon, and I'll link it up in the description. All right, here we go.
The first question I wanted to ask you, the book is called High Growth Handbook, not the High Growth Handbook, but just High Growth Handbook.
Given that so few companies ever make it to high growth, you know, thousands of employees, why should an average entrepreneur read this book?

**Elad Gil** (1:07)
Yeah, I think the book contains some more universal principles. So things like, how do you go about hiring people, and what should you look for when you hire people, including executives? How do you, you know, if somebody's trying to buy your company, you may actually want to read the section on M&A, because it'll basically reveal how the company that's trying to buy you is actually thinking about it.
There's also product management best practices in there, and how do you think about product management? So I do think that there's a variety of other sections. There's also a section on PR, comms and marketing. So, you know, what's the difference between those different disciplines, and how should you think about them? So I do think that there are areas of the book that touch upon things that are universal, but ultimately it was geared for either employees who are going through high growth, or executives or founders who are going through high growth, and in part simply because there wasn't any information out there, in my opinion, that was really pulled together or codified around that.

**Craig Cannon** (1:59)
Yeah, and what inspired you to shift this into a book rather than your own personal blog site, SEO targeted content? Sure, yeah.

**Elad Gil** (2:08)
I originally was thinking of doing it as a website, and John Collison, one of the co-founders of Stripe, saw the content and got excited about it and thought it would be really relevant to both other founders who are working on high growth, but also sort of the broader community of developers and company builders that Stripe serves. And so that led to the genesis of Stripe publishing it.

**Craig Cannon** (2:30)
Okay, gotcha. I have a question about, before even page one, maybe it is counted as a page, the dedication. I was just curious what you meant.
So the first line is, to my lovely wife, Jennifer, and suddenly of suddenly everything is possible again. What does that mean?

**Elad Gil** (2:49)
There's a great book from Jonathan Safran Foer called, I think it's called Eating Animals.
And it's about, it's sort of a mixed book, but it talks a little bit about his own son. And he says that when he had a kid, somebody sent him a card that said, suddenly everything is possible again, about his son. And really what that means is when you look at your child, you realize that every possibility is suddenly ahead of them.
And there's a reinvention of life through that child. In other words, they could go and become an Olympic skater. They could become the next Mark Zuckerberg or they could have a terrible life. But really all the possibilities in the world, in some sense, are available to them. And so that's really what that means.

**Craig Cannon** (3:31)
And do you take it to heart for you as well?

**Elad Gil** (3:35)
I'm too old for that. So I think the next generation is, everything is possible for them.
Barring some breakthrough and anti-aging or something. I think my path is reasonably clear.

**Craig Cannon** (3:46)
All right, fine. So with all of these interviews, I know they were edited and kind of, they're transcribed and then edited.
Were there any large arguments you got into when you're doing the interviews before you compiled them for the book?

**Elad Gil** (4:01)
There's no arguments. And the interviews are actually very close to the actual conversation. So the editing was very light and it was more for clarity or to rearrange a section. So it went together better, but there weren't big chunks taken out unless it was a side conversation that was unrelated to the interview.