Elad Gil
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About Elad Gil
Elad Gil is an entrepreneur, operating executive, and investor or advisor to private companies such as Airbnb, Coinbase, Checkr, Gusto, Instacart, OpenDoor, Pinterest, Square, Stripe, Wish, and others. He is cofounder and chairman at Color Genomics.
Previously, he was the VP of Corporate Strategy at Twitter, where he also ran various product (Geo, Search) and other operational teams (M&A and Corporate Development). Elad joined Twitter via the acquisition of MixerLabs, a company where he was co-founder and CEO. MixerLabs ran GeoAPI, one of the early developer-centric platform infrastructure products. Elad spent many years at Google, where he started the mobile team and was involved in all aspects of getting that team up and running. He was involved with three acquisitions (including the Android team) and was the original product manager for Google Mobile Maps and other key mobile products.
Prior to Google, Elad had product management and market-seeding roles at a number of Silicon Valley companies. He also worked at McKinsey & Co. Elad received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has degrees in Mathematics and Biology from the University of California, San Diego.
Previously, he was the VP of Corporate Strategy at Twitter, where he also ran various product (Geo, Search) and other operational teams (M&A and Corporate Development). Elad joined Twitter via the acquisition of MixerLabs, a company where he was co-founder and CEO. MixerLabs ran GeoAPI, one of the early developer-centric platform infrastructure products. Elad spent many years at Google, where he started the mobile team and was involved in all aspects of getting that team up and running. He was involved with three acquisitions (including the Android team) and was the original product manager for Google Mobile Maps and other key mobile products.
Prior to Google, Elad had product management and market-seeding roles at a number of Silicon Valley companies. He also worked at McKinsey & Co. Elad received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has degrees in Mathematics and Biology from the University of California, San Diego.
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Blog postAfter two years of hard work the High Growth Handbook is now available for sale on Amazon, Kindle, and Kobo. An Audible book will be live within a week or so. The High Growth Handbook is a labor of love. And by “love” I mean “I love that this was easier than launching a startup. Oy vey startups are hard!”.
The High Growth Handbook is based on my experiences working with companies post product-market fit as they scaled from a handful of engineers, and maybe a business person or designe1 month ago Read more -
Blog postAs a company scales the number of meetings initially grows faster then headcount. With more people comes more coordination. Most companies have bad meeting etiquette, which means an enormous amount of time is wasted. The following steps help increase meeting efficiency:
1. Determine who is necessary in the meeting.
Are there really 20 people needed in the room? Separate the must haves, from the nice to haves, from the politically expedient to be there.
2. Send out2 months ago Read more -
Blog postOne of the biggest shifts of the last 6 months is the degree to which pre-emptive funding rounds have become the new normal in Silicon Valley. While pre-emptive rounds used to be reserved for celebrity or serial entrepreneur founders, they have recently become almost the default for a subset of companies. I have seen multiple seed companies receive pre-emptive series A fundings in the last few months without any specific milestones hit. Similarly, late stage companies like Bird have seen their v2 months ago Read more
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Blog postAs a market driven investor, I am skeptical of 99% of the crypto projects under development today. That said, there are a core set of use cases with massive market sizes that cryptocurrencies currently fill (and in some cases will soon fill)[0]:
1. Store of value (SoV) & investment
A digital store of wealth such as bitcoin can have multiple advantages over traditional ones such as gold ($7 trillion plus asset), USD, art, or land. This includes seizure resistance (a badly a4 months ago Read more -
Blog postA startup CEO recently pinged me about an offer their company had received from a larger, fast growing, breakout company. He did not know how to assess the offer. Here are some of the components a founder should consider when receiving an offer from a breakout company:
Financial considerations.If you have a $100 million offer from a break out company, it is actually worth a lot more. Considerations:
1. Company upside multiplier.
Suppose you had an offer from4 months ago Read more -
Blog postStartups tend to succeed by building a product that is so compelling and differentiated that it causes large number of customers to adopt it over an incumbent. This large customer base becomes a major asset for the company going forward. Products can be cross sold to these customers, and the company's share of time or wallet can expand.
Since focusing on product is what caused initial success, founders of breakout companies often think product development is their primary competency4 months ago Read more -
Blog postWhen I was at Google, it grew 10X from 1500 or 2000 people when I joined to 15,000+ people when I left 3.5 years later. My startup MixerLabs was acquired when Twitter was ~90 people, and I left Twitter 2.5 years later at 1000+ employees. 90% of the people at Twitter had not been with the company just 2.5 years earlier, and Google added 13,000 people in a little over 3 years.
If your company is in hypergrowth, you will be doubling the team every 6-12 months on average. At that pace yo5 months ago Read more -
Blog postThe most interesting thing about the billion dollar Telegram TON token pre-sale is the degree to which venture capitalists with little prior crypto exposure invested[0,1]. TON is the starting gun for venture capital, and new LP capital (endowments, pension funds etc.) flooding into the crypto markets.
In order to invest in TON venture capitalists had to:Agree as a partnership that investing in tokens made sense.Go back to their limited partners and convince them that investing6 months ago Read more -
Blog postEarly on as CEO of a technology startup you will need to do 100 tasks that are not existential to the company, but still important that you get done. Tasks may include:Finance and accounting (setting up payroll, 409(a), finding a part-time accountant etc.), Office setup (finding office space, decorating it, getting furniture) Ongoing tasks like ordering food and lunch, team outings and the likeAdditionally, there may be items where you need help as CEO or someone to help manage certain6 months ago Read more
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Blog postTwo long term "big prizes" in the cryptocurrency world are (i) the primary store of value token and (ii) a payments token. Programable money has the potential of a multi-trillion dollar market cap, unlike most every other crypto market or use case[1]. The top contender to date for digital value store is bitcoin[2]. Bitcoin has a number of network effects due to its early market position and adoption. However, bitcoin has also suffered from split ecosystem governance[3], slow7 months ago Read more
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Blog postOne force people underestimate are network effects. Network effects allowed Twitter survive its fail-whale period when the site was constantly down. Facebook destroyed international competition, and Airbnb and Microsoft all succeeded due to network effects. Open source examples like Ethernet survive to this day due to network effects.
In the crypto world, Bitcoin is perceived as slow to change, clunky technologically, and as having bad governance. While all these8 months ago Read more -
Blog postThe cryptocurrency world faces a tragedy of the commons and free rider issue: there is little ongoing economic incentive to contribute to an existing, major crypto project versus to launch your own token [1]. Some projects are helping to rectify this by thinking about developer bounties for work done, a venture fund, and other incentive mechanisms. However, the corporate structures and token distributions used by many other crypto projects today tend to exacerbate a lack of ongoing incentiv10 months ago Read more
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Blog postTwitter is a product that is used and loved by hundreds of millions of users. The core product has needed the same basic features for the last 7 or 8 years. Here are the things I think Twitter should build. In this post, I stay away from areas I no longer understand for Twitter (e.g. zero rated Twitter / developing world products) or big picture ideas (e.g. how to remake the timeline). Even simple changes could go a long way for the product.
1. Tweet structure.
Long form conte11 months ago Read more -
Blog postAfter the crypto run up of 2013, every major bank decided it needed to do something about cryptocurrencies and blockchain. The way many banks responded to this disruptive technology was:
Step 1. Set up a special internal "blockchain group".
These groups were supposed to explore how banks could make use of blockchain. The cryptocurrencies themselves were largely viewed as speculative and the "interesting parts" were blockchains and distributed ledgers as1 year ago Read more -
Blog postOne of the big myths in Silicon Valley is that co-founders should be equal. However, if you look at the most successful tech startups of the last 50 years, almost all of them had a dominant co-founder for most of the life of the company. This includes[1]:Amazon. Jeff Bezos.Apple. Steve Jobs famously split equity unequally versus Wozniak. Facebook. While Zuck had multiple co-founders, the website used to be called "A Mark Zuckerberg production" and he had multiple times the eq1 year ago Read more
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Blog postAs the founder of a high growth successful startup, you may feel like you are constantly failing. You are not alone in this. Most startup founders I know feel like they are screwing up on a weekly or monthly basis, even if their business is growing well[1].
Feeling of failure tend to come from:
1. You are constantly learning and doing new things.
For many startup founders, your CEO job may be your first time managing people, hiring and firing across various functions, ra1 year ago Read more -
Blog postJust as Netscape's IPO marked the real kick off for the Internet era, 2017 will be the starting gun for broad involvement of venture, hedge funds, and eventually average consumers in cryptocurrencies and related protocols and assets.
The recent run up in cryptocurrency valuations has caused a sudden and profound renewal of interest by entrepreneurs and investors in crypto[1]. In December 2013 there was a similar spike of interest in Bitcoin. As the time, there was a 11 year ago Read more -
Blog postA common mistake that founders make when raising a venture round is to anchor high and ask for too much money, at too high a valuation, with the hope the VC will bid them down. This is a common failure mode that prevents people from raising money successfully when they otherwise could. Asking for too much money is driven by misunderstanding the nature of a fundraise negotiation. When fundraising, you are trying to create an auction dynamic - not a 1:1 negotiation.
In a traditional n2 years ago Read more -
Blog postOne way to assess whether a startup idea is in a good market is to ask what are the market capitalizations of the biggest companies in that sector. For example in consumer internet, Google ($560 billion) and Facebook ($370 billion), and in enterprise software Microsoft ($460 billion), and Oracle, ($167 billion) are all large, high margin businesses.
Market caps in a pre-existing industry[1] tend to be proxies for the potential of the idea you are working on. Ther2 years ago Read more -
Blog postA common mistake founders make is to try to meet VCs to "build relationships" a month or two before going out for a series A or series B fundraise[1] . I explain why this is a mistake below. If you do not have strong VCs relationships and plan to fundraise in 2-3 months, wait to talk to VCs until you go out to raise. Do not do a separate "get to know you" tour. If you plan to go fundraise in 12 months, you can start to build select VC relationships early with a handful o2 years ago Read more
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Blog postAs the founder of a company, you will likely play many roles across the life of the company. The core tenet of being a founder is that you should do whatever it takes to make your company successful.
Although my title at Color for the last ~4 years was CEO, at different times I played the role of recruiter, supply chain lead, product manager, office manager, and head of sales. Similarly, my 3 other co-founders played a variety of roles across engineering, design, PR, genetics, and o2 years ago Read more -
Blog postArtificial intelligence is going to have a massive impact on multiple business verticals over time. The displacement of both blue collar and white collar work by machine learning is going to cause major societal displacements in the next 10-20 years[0].
While there is a lot of discussion in the popular press about general purpose AI (aka AGI - which is defined as a machine that can perform any intellectual task a person can), much less emphasis has been placed on near-term spec2 years ago Read more -
Blog postThe first half of 2016 saw an initial set of acquisitions that will only accelerate in the next 12-18 months. From now through the end of 2017, we will see an increased wave of large M&A sweeping through the technology industry. This will be following in late 2017 through 2018 with a wave of IPOs.
The driver for the 2016-2017 M&A cycle is a few fold:1. Valuations have been coming down, and raising money has gotten harder.Companies can no longer rely on new investors comi2 years ago Read more -
Blog postOne sign that technology markets often exhibit at the tail end of a cycle is a fast diversification of the types of startups getting funded. For example, following the core internet boom of the late 90s (Google, Yahoo!, eBay, PayPal), in early 2000 and 2001 there was a sudden diversification and investment into P2P and mobile (before mobile was ready) and then in 2002-2003 people started looking at CleanTech, Nanotech etc - industries that obviously all eventually failed from an entrepreneurial2 years ago Read more
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Blog postThere are three interrelated, but often independent traits that are valuable in any employee (and, in your personal life as well[1]): (i) experience, (ii) instincts, and (iii) maturity. I think all three can be gained with time, but two of them may never come for some people. When hiring managers and executives, I would weigh instincts and maturity higher for non-specialist roles, and experience higher for a specialist role (e.g. leading a data center build out).
Experience.
T3 years ago Read more
Books By Elad Gil
High Growth Handbook
Jul 17, 2018
by
Elad Gil
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Available for download now.
$15.40$1540
$20.00
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