How Silicon Valley’s Most Prolific Investor Picks Unicorns | Elad Gil Interview

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
All right, today we are sitting down with one of the smartest people that's ever been on this podcast. His name is Elad Gil, and he is a prolific angel investor. He's a guy who has invested in something like 40 plus billion dollar companies, all at very early stages, like Airbnb, Airtable, Anduril, Retool, Rippling, companies that we've all heard of down in the tech space. He was an entrepreneur, he got acquired by Twitter, he was one of the first 100 employees at Twitter, he was early at Google, and he's been very early to waves. He was doing longevity before longevity was cool. He was doing AI investing before ChappieGPD came out. So we love talking to people who are like this, that are both very brilliant, very accomplished, and seem to be skating where the puck is going. They sort of know what's coming around the corner, and they've proven that in their career. So we talked to him about how he's been such a good investor, what he's looked for in his approach, and how it's pretty different than most investors. We talked about his ideas, so things he wants to see built, and projects he's working on right now, and then a little bit of life advice at the end, where he left us with kind of an amazing tidbit or a nugget about what's made him such an interesting person. So enjoy this episode with Elad Gil.
The intro for you is basically you're a super angel investor. You've invested in a bunch of companies. I think you have something like 40 plus unicorns in the portfolio and impressively, at least 20 or 30 of them were very early stage. So seed stage, series A, precede, somewhere there. That's wild. As somebody who's invested in, I don't know, 100 companies myself, I look at what you've done there and that is prolific. And so first question, it's like, you know, there's a block of wood and I don't really know how to hack, how to chop into this. I'm just going to swing one blunt swing here. How the heck are you doing this? Why, how have you had this success in angel investing?

**Elad Gil** (1:54)
Yeah, I mean, I guess it's probably two or three things. Number one, I think I was just lucky, you know, so I think I started investing in a good time when there was a lot to still be done in SaaS and consumer in a variety of areas. Now, obviously, that's also true in AI. I think secondly, I tend to take more of a market first approach than most early stage people. I focus on the market and product market more than the founders. And obviously, founders are incredibly important. I started two companies myself, so I hope that founders are incredibly important. But I also think that what you're actually building and which market for who matters a lot. And I've seen great people crushed by terrible markets and I've seen reasonably mediocre people do really well. And then lastly, I think I really try to follow the technology and the changes that are happening in technology. And so I got involved with a lot of generative AI companies quite early, you know, Perplexity and Harvey and things like that. Simply because I was really keen on generative AI and sort of ML related stuff. As I started investing in all those things three years ago before ChatGPT was out and before MidJourney and before these things really became a trend. And so I think sometimes you end up early in some really important areas simply because you're kind of technology first, your market change first.

**Shaan Puri** (3:00)
Were you just doing your own money at first or did you have a fund from the get-go?

**Elad Gil** (3:03)
No, initially I was just investing my own money. And then I ran out pretty fast. You know, I hadn't made that much money at Google and I invested almost all of it. I invested like over 50% of it.
And so I just started running out.

**Shaan Puri** (3:16)
What does that mean running out? Like, I guess you initially had a wealth from selling your business, I guess. And then like you just put all of it into private companies. How much do you have left?

**Elad Gil** (3:26)
I put a huge amount of my own money into private companies. Yeah. So, you know, one of my big regrets is somebody pinged me on the SpaceX round when it was like a $500 million company and I really was excited about it. I thought it was such an interesting game. And I didn't have enough money for the minimum that they had as check sizes.