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

Shaan Puri

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 has invested in something like **40+** companies, all at very early stages, like **Airbnb**, **Airtable**, **Andrew**, **Retool**, and **Rippling**—companies that we've all heard of now in the tech space. He was an entrepreneur who got acquired by **Twitter** and was one of the first 100 employees there. He was also early at **Google** and has been very early to various waves in technology. He was doing longevity before it was cool, and he was investing in AI before **ChatGPT** came out. We love talking to people like him who are both very brilliant and very accomplished. They seem to be skating where the puck is going; they know what's coming around the corner, and they've proven that in their careers. We talked to him about how he's been such a good investor, what he's looked for, and his approach, which is pretty different from most investors. We discussed his ideas—things he wants to see built and projects he's working on right now. At the end, he left us with some amazing life advice, 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, and I think you have something like **40+ unicorns** in your portfolio. Impressively, at least **20 or 30** of them were very early stage—seed stage, series A, pre-seed, somewhere in there. That's wild! As someone who's invested in, I don't know, **100** companies myself, I look at what you've done and that is prolific. So, first question: there's a block of wood, and I don't really know how to chop into this, so I'm just going to swing one blunt swing here. How the heck are you doing this? Why have you had this success in angel investing?

Elad Gil

Yeah, I mean, I guess it's probably two or three things. Number one, I think I was just lucky. You know, I started investing at a good time when there was a lot to still be done in SaaS and consumer in a variety of areas. Now, obviously, it's also true in AI. Secondly, I tend to take more of a market-first approach than most early-stage people. I focus on the market and product-market fit more than the founders. 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 whom matters a lot. I've seen great people crushed by terrible markets, and I've seen reasonably mediocre people do really well. Lastly, I really try to follow the technology and the changes that are happening in technology. 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 machine learning-related stuff. 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. So, I think sometimes you end up early in some really important areas simply because you're kind of technology-first or market change-first. Were you?

Sam Parr

Just doing your own money at first, or did you have a fund from the get-go?

Elad Gil

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. So I started what?

Sam Parr

Does that mean running out? Like, I guess you initially had wealth from selling your business, and then you just put all of it into private companies. How much do you have left?

Elad Gil

I put a huge amount of my own money into private companies. One of my big regrets is that somebody pinged me on the SpaceX round when it was like a $500,000,000 company. I was really excited about it; I thought it was such an interesting game changer. However, I just didn't have enough money for the minimum check sizes they had.

Shaan Puri

And so, what did you do? Because, you know, I had that early in Silicon Valley where I initially had no money. I was helping friends and I was like, "Man, I can't believe people aren't investing in this." But I myself didn't even look at myself like an investor because I just didn't have a bankroll. Then I realized, "Wait, that's stupid. I gotta think like a founder here and get resourceful and figure out how to get money to invest in these companies."

Elad Gil

So, where did you...?

Shaan Puri

Once you deployed your own capital, where did you go to get the money right away?

Elad Gil

Yeah, you know, I started effectively raising small, sort of what are known as SPVs (Special Purpose Vehicles). Then that morphed into funds, and now I kind of have a **tiramisu cake** of different things, where there are different layers that I can do in terms of personal investments and fund investments. You know, very large things would be a fund plus an SPV. For example, I led Anduril's Series D, or I called out the last two rounds for Applied Intuition. I've also led rounds for all sorts of companies.

Shaan Puri

At this, how many other partners are there at your shop? Basically, are you the guy?

Elad Gil

You know, I've recently hired a few people to help me in different ways. I think fundamentally what I want to do is continue to build things, work on things, and think about technology. I would call it almost like the anti-VC approach and be builder-first. So, there are a lot of side projects that I, or my team, are now working on. For example, Shrian is helping me with a project where we're trying to take the thousand most important books that are out of copyright and translate them into dozens of languages using AI. Then, we plan to create audiobooks from all of them so people can download the great works of history from anywhere in the world in any language. You know, we're doing stuff like that, and it also forces us to really use different AI tools. Let's look at Eleven versus Cartesia versus OpenAI. How do you actually translate a long-form book with high consistency, and how do you QA that?

Sam Parr

Are you doing that because you're thinking, "This could be a business," or are you doing it because you're thinking to yourself, "This is an interesting project, and in doing this, I will discover interesting things?"

Elad Gil

I'm staring because I think it's cool and societally useful. I mean, there are multiple aspects of why to work on something like this. I think it's a little bit less short-term and more about how this seems useful and interesting.

Sam Parr

But were you always that way? Because, like, I just... I'm, I guess I could say I'm financially secure. It took a few years before I just recently started feeling like I want to do blank because it's cool. I don't really care necessarily if it's good for the world. But it seems like you have a little bit of that mindset of, "This is good for the world." Are you wealthy and successful because you always had that attitude, or do you have that attitude now because you have security? Do you know what I mean?

Elad Gil

I've always been that way. So, you know, I started off with degrees in Math and Biology, and I did a PhD in Biology because I thought it was societally useful. You're not going to make money as a PhD in Biology, you know, unless something magic happens. My driver has always been: what is useful societally? I think the one other thing I'd say about it is that it forces you to go deeper than people tend to go on some of these things. They're just kind of, "Oh, this is an interesting investment," or whatever. I think you actually go to that next extra level of depth, using things hands-on and all the rest of it. That, I think, also matters in terms of gaining real intuition for certain things. I don't think you need to be a practitioner of everything to understand the thing that you're a practitioner of.

Shaan Puri

of

Elad Gil

But I just think that in some cases, it can help a lot. It really allows you to hone in on what's important. That's true of many businesses. Usually, most businesses have one or two things that are the fundamental aspects of that business that matter. Everything else is just noise or a checkbox or whatever. I think that where people tend to sometimes start the wrong things as founders or invest in the wrong things as investors is that they get too wrapped up in what are the five things that matter for this business. Usually, there's one, maybe two.

Sam Parr

What’s an example of, like, I’m not sure which industry you care about most, but what’s an example of one of these things where people care about five things, but you’re like, “No, this is the only thing that matters”?

Elad Gil

Well, I mean, I guess early on with Stripe, their one insight was: how do we get every developer using this product? We're not going to worry about mid-market and enterprise. We're not going to worry about other things. How do we get every early-stage technology company that matters on us?

Sam Parr

That sounds great! When you tell that story, I'm like, "Yeah, I'm on board with that." But I own a business now, and it's really hard to come up with that insight.

Elad Gil

I think it's hard, but I believe the flip side is that this is usually the key question. Again, different types of businesses may have that characteristic or not. Sometimes it's two things, or some complex businesses may have more. When I invested in Anduril, there was a very clear understanding of about five things I thought a next-gen defense tech company had to do in order to become a prime, which is one of the really big companies in the market. I thought without those elements, you're just not going to make it. So, sometimes it's more complicated, but I think 90% of the time, it boils down to one area of belief or maybe one thing that you just need to see happen in the business to believe that everything else will fall into place.

Sam Parr

Alright, so when I ran my company, The Hustle, I think we had something like 2,000,000 subscribers. We made money through advertising, but we didn't actually make that much money per person reading the newsletter because advertising, in general, is kind of a crappy business model. I remember sitting down and thinking, "What are all the different ways that I can make money off The Hustle that aren't advertising?" To make sure that you don't make this mistake, Sean, me and the HubSpot team went and looked at a bunch of different ways to monetize your business. We put it all together in a really cool document where we lay it all out along with our research. We call it, very appropriately, "The Business Monetization Playbook." Go to the description of this episode, and you're going to see a link to that Business Monetization Playbook. It's completely free. You just click the link, and you can see it. Now, back to the episode.

Shaan Puri

It's also like... it's hard now but easy later, right? If it's hard to figure out what the one thing is, okay, you take some upfront difficulty to sort of make a bet or to figure that out. But then from there on out, your operating philosophy can be a lot simpler because you now know who you're focused on. You know who you're catering to, and you don't have to have these... like the decision tree becomes very, very simple later if you did the hard thing.

Elad Gil

And it evolves over time, right? The complexity of these businesses often comes later as they become multiproduct and international, and you know, all the rest of it. That's normal. It's just early on, usually there's a key insight that drives it.

Sam Parr

You said you invest in markets. Andrew, when it first started, most people still didn't have any idea about that industry. When you're trying to master a topic like that, what is your process?

Elad Gil

Yeah, with Anduril, you know, the main reason I got interested in defense tech was because the big tech companies were running away from it. Right? Google had shut down Maven, and I was like, "Well, of course we're gonna need national defense." Whether you're a Democrat or Republican, like, of course, you know, you want to protect Western values. There's conflict in the world; there are bad actors.

Sam Parr

But to push back on that, I'd say, "Yeah, but I'm ignorant to the industry," which is why it's easier for me to push back. I would say, "Yeah, but there are like 10 other companies in that space. You know, they've got it covered. How do you...?"

Shaan Puri

Yeah, sure. How do...?

Sam Parr

You learn enough to know that there's an interesting opportunity.

Elad Gil

Yeah, I mean, I guess it's a bunch of stuff. 1. Obviously, you just read what you can. 2. In some cases, you look at market structure and growth rates, and that kind of stuff. 3. Third, you look at technology shifts.

Sam Parr

What I want to break down on that is, what's your resource for the second one?

Elad Gil

We just go and do the work. I mean, you look at what the companies are, and obviously there's analyst reports and market research and all that stuff. But you can also just ask, "Okay, how many players are in the market? Is it consolidating or not? What's the growth rate on it? What is the margin structure and the approach that they're taking as a business?" Right? So, for example, the traditional defense tech companies are what are known as **cost-plus**, which means if you have a $1,000,000 drone, they charge 5%. So they can't make more than 5% margins. They make $50,000 on a drone. Now, Anduril, you can sell 10 better drones for $1,000,000 and make a 50% margin, which is a traditional hardware margin. You make 10 times the margin dollars. So one of the things that people don't appreciate about Anduril as a business is it's a market cap expansion in the defense world because you have a higher margin, higher leverage business. Right? And so you need a different business model, which they've come up with. There's just a bunch of stuff like that, right? When did you...?

Shaan Puri

How early did you invest in this, Andrew? I think you were in like the very first round.

Elad Gil

It was just the founders, yeah.

Shaan Puri

And so, was it you hear Palmer talking about this, then you go research the market? Or had you just independently been curious about this market?

Elad Gil

Then, no, it's back to what I was saying earlier, which is that Google shut down Maven. I was like, "Oh my God, the big tech companies are running away from this. What a wonderful opportunity for a startup!" So, I actually called one of the people at Google that I knew who was working on Google Cloud, which the Maven team was part of at the time. I said, "Hey, did all the people who wanted to do Maven quit in protest?" He was like, "No, no, no. It was all the people who were against Maven who quit. The rest of the people are still here." I thought, "Okay, where do I find somebody who wants to work on this?" So, I just started poking around. I ran into Trey at something, and we started talking. He mentioned he was working on it, and I got super excited about it. I invested in their first round, or they were kind enough to let me invest in their first round, I should say.

Sam Parr

Way more impressive than meeting Palmer. The fact that you came to that, a similar conclusion, and you guys were sniffing around the same stuff independently, that's pretty impressive.

Shaan Puri

Well, yeah, but I'm also the best people I get to interact with. They sort of have the same laid-back approach as you, which is just like, "I don't know, I just kind of do the work." I think I was fortunate... blah blah blah. Then you start to peel back layers and you're like, "Oh, so this thing you called luck was actually you." I read that Maven story too. I didn't think to myself, "Wow, what a wonderful opportunity." I just moved on with my life. So, you know, I don't know if you've read the "4 Levels of Luck" thing, but I think number 2 or 3 is "Luck favors the prepared." The prepared mind, meaning... mhmm... because you know what you're looking for, you can actually spot luck when it presents itself. Whereas the average person might see that same thing and not understand what they're looking at. When you saw that Maven story, you saw the opportunity that, "Wow, if the big technology players are running away from defense, this huge category, that means there's an opportunity for a new technology company in defense." What I find fascinating is peeling that back and actually understanding, like, "Wow, that was incredibly intentional." I get what you're saying that not every one of those rabbit holes you go down leads to an Anduril seed round, but the fact that it ever did is remarkable because that's like a career-making, you know, single investment, even let alone the other 40 that you did. I also want to go back to, like, you said something about, you know, market first. There's that great quote: "When a great entrepreneur meets a bad market, only one of them keeps their reputation—the bad market." So, what's another example from your portfolio that you can think of that drives home this kind of market-first approach? Where the market-first approach led you to do something that worked out?

Elad Gil

You know, I did a lot of crypto investing in like 2017, ish, 2016 through 2018. That was because there was such an obvious sea change from an adoption and technology basis. The AI stuff is another one. All the AI companies I invested in were a little bit like, "Hey, the market's shifting, the technology's shifting." The flip side of it is there are lots of things that I invested in that only in hindsight could I come up with a theme. I invested in Notion, Airtable, and Retool within, I don't know, two years of each other or whatever the time frame was. But at the time, there was no low-code, no-code kind of thesis. It was just, "These are really interesting founders working in interesting areas." In hindsight, there was a market, or at least there was a trend, but at the time it was just like, "These are smart people working on good stuff." So, it's a little bit of that—how do you balance both of those perspectives? Sometimes you're thesis-driven, and sometimes you're just like, "You know what? The thousands of great founders out there working on ideas are going to come up with better ones than I am." So, you know, let's have an open mind on everything.

Sam Parr

I think it was on *The Information* or something like that. They talked about how you had just raised **$1,000,000,000** and that you famously didn't have any employees. Sam Altman has this... or I don't know who said it, but I thought it was Sam Altman, where he said something like, "A 1 or 2 person, $1,000,000,000 company is gonna be a thing now because of AI." But that's kind of what you've already done.

Elad Gil

You know, it already existed before that. Minecraft was like, I don't know, three people when Microsoft bought it.

Sam Parr

But that's sort of like what you're doing. You've got a pretty huge business with 2 or 3, or however many people you have. Up until recently, I think according to these articles, you had like 2 people.

Elad Gil

I mean, I think there's a long history of this kind of stuff. If you look at the world's biggest hedge funds or a lot of later-stage firms, they tend to have that structure. In a traditional investment firm, there's usually one or two people who do most of the good investments. I think, in general, there's this odd collapsing down to a handful of people in many types of endeavors. But the reality is, there have been multiple businesses that have hit enormous scale while being quite small. I think **Minecraft** is really a canonical example of that. However, there's also the need to go big sometimes. Sometimes you want to win the market, and you should hire a ton of people. So, I think the future of two-person companies, at least in the medium term, is very overstated. I believe AI is largely going to be business as usual, and certain types of teams are going to shrink a lot. For example, I'm an investor in a company called **Dekogon**, which is working on the customer success side. I think there'll be enormous leverage to existing customer success representatives, but probably there's an overall shrinkage in that industry. If you look at things like what **Klarna** announced regarding their use of AI in customer success, certain teams will get impacted first versus others through AI. I think the two-person AI company is largely in the future, but there are historical precedents of this happening before AI.

Shaan Puri

Do you measure? I mean, obviously you measure, but I guess like what is the metric that you keep track of for your own investing? So, like, you know, at the top of this, we talked about the number of unicorns. But, you know, you can look at IRR, you can look at your DPI. I did a deep dive on Y Combinator the other day, and... there's like some insane number. I'm going to butcher it because I don't have it right in front of me, but like, Sam, I don't know if you know this, but like the first 10 years of Y Combinator, they basically turned like something like $12,000,000 into like $10,000,000,000 of value. Same for them, from themselves, because they were writing super small checks early on and getting basically like...

Sam Parr

7%

Shaan Puri

7%. But even diluted down, like the Airbnbs, the drop boxes, just the top five companies, let's say they net own like 2% of these when they go public. I mean, they basically had a 320x on their money in that first decade. Now, a lot of people think that they've sort of lost their touch or that the batch sizes are too big or the valuations are too high. Actually, their hit rate has gone up even as the batch size has increased. It's pretty wild. Hila, do you have a metric that you look at that you're kind of proud of? What's the main metric for you in terms of the actual money in and money out?

Elad Gil

You know, the most important thing to me, and obviously, I want to be a fiduciary for other people's money. A lot of my own money is in the funds I invest, etc. So, obviously, there's a financial return aspect of it. But to me, the most important things are probably twofold: 1. Making sure that founders view me as a useful and positive resource. 2. Being involved with the most important technologies and technology companies in the world. I think that's how you drive societal impact. So, I view technology as a lever on the world, right?

Sam Parr

I'm not an angel investor, but you're such a hard person to compete against because you're... well, it's very strange that you're an investor. You don't seem like you're money motivated, you know what I mean? That's a really challenging person to compete against because that's the type of person who wins in a lot of situations. It's the one who's not actually caring about the money but who's caring about the mission versus the mercenary type of vibe. Do you know what I mean?

Elad Gil

Yeah, I know what you mean. I think Naval has a great framework on this because, you know, John Doar used to ask, "Are you a missionary or a mercenary?" to the founders in the nineties. Of course, you had to say, "I'm a missionary." How could you possibly say you're a mercenary? Naval's framework is like, well, of course, early in your career, you're at least partially a mercenary. Otherwise, you're never going to find the opportunity and go win it. Then, later in your life, you're a missionary. You're not zero-sum; you're trying to do things for the greater good. Once you've made it in your career, you should become an artist. You should be doing it for the love of the craft. Now, for each person, there's a different mix of that over time. I think, for me, the motivator is very much technology as a lever on the world. That's why I was trying to do biology; that's why I did tech. It's like, how do you do the important things in the world? If you're working on the most important problems in the world with the best people, then probably you end up with a good financial return because you're in the middle of the stuff that matters. But that doesn't have to be the motivating goal. That's why sometimes, I don't know if you've ever sat at a dinner with all VCs. It's really boring because you're surrounded by at least a subset of people who are very money-driven. I'll give you an example: one time, I was sitting at a friend's wedding dinner, and I just happened to get seated at a table where a lot of the other people were his board, which meant a lot of investors. I sat next to somebody from a firm, and I said, "Hey, what are you interested in these days?" He said, "Crypto." I said, "Oh great! We can talk about distributed consensus, trustless systems, and censorship-resistant products and all this stuff." I said, "That's great! What are you excited about in crypto?" He looked me in the eyes and said, "You can make a fucking lot of money at it." I was like, I thought he was joking, right? I started laughing, "Oh my god, that's so funny!" No, seriously, he said, "No, that's it. That's not a really interesting conversation."

Shaan Puri

Well, one of the things I liked is that on your website, you published some ideas that you're interested in or working on right now, or you want people to come help you pull off. I'd love if we could rip through a couple of these. Let's start with one that caught my eye. You said, "I want to do a new chain of K through 12 schools inspired by ancient Greece." What's that all about?

Elad Gil

Yeah, I mean, I think fundamentally, anybody who has kids realizes that there may be certain aspects of the education system that are emphasized and deemphasized. It feels like there are four or five things that are really useful for kids to learn. I think it would be great to try and help establish something that could be used broadly across cities or regions across the country. This would really focus on some of those basic aspects of learning.

Shaan Puri

What do the ancient Greeks do? What do the ancient Greeks have to do with this?

Elad Gil

It's just used as an example, really. What you need to find is the framework that you're going to use to apply so that you have some compass and consistency. There's a certain emphasis on reasoning, logic, thinking, discourse, and debate that I think was resident in that time. There's an emphasis on mathematics, writing, and trying basic forms of understanding. You know, that's when you had Archimedes and others, and that's when early interesting mathematics emerged. That's also when you had great philosophical treatises written. So, I think there's a lot of emphasis on beauty and art. There's a lot of focus on the physical and being physically fit and resilient. So, there's a lot of stuff there.

Sam Parr

I remember when I lived in San Francisco from age 12 to 20. I think there was a handful of schools that were started for elementary kids. Was Alt School one of them? And was there a Wonderschool? Does that ring a bell?

Elad Gil

Those were more kind of like, "Hey, we're gonna use technology," etc. I don't think there's any need for technology. I think you just need a couple of good teachers and a reasonable curriculum. So again, I think it's not that I'm trying to reinvent the school system. I just think you could go back to certain types of basics. It's interesting, there's a school in San Francisco called Proof School, which I think is fascinating. I think their line or motto is "for kids who love math." They have a very strong emphasis on mathematics in their curriculum. Kids are doing machine learning in like 10th or 11th grade. I find things like that kind of inspiring, where they're like, "Okay, we're gonna take a different lens on it, and our lens is just kids who love math. Let's find out what's the right curriculum for those kids." Maybe some of the early literature classes emphasize sci-fi because those are the types of books they like. And maybe the history we focus on is X, Y, Z versus something else. I just think that's a good example of a really smart approach to schooling. There's a variety of people who've done these differentiated approaches.

Shaan Puri

What's your plan with this school thing? Are you looking for kind of an entrepreneur to spearhead it? What are you looking for?

Elad Gil

Yeah, I need somebody to spearhead it. I think, you know, traditionally there's this concept of a Directly Responsible Individual (DRI) for a problem. It's really easy to come up with ideas, but usually, you need help executing them. So, you know, it's something that I'd be happy to sponsor, but I really would need to find somebody who can drive that sort of thing day to day. My kids are very happy in the schools that they're currently in, so it's more just something that I think would be societally useful to do more broadly. Especially if you can do it as a chain, then you end up with some sort of consistency and the ability to bring it to different populations that may not have access to this sort of schooling and other things. I think there's a really interesting project to be had there. What?

Sam Parr

Other ideas, Sean? Did he have any listed there?

Shaan Puri

There's one cool thing. You said you, I think, got a PhD in biology, and you talked about longevity. You've looked into a lot of longevity, you funded clinical trials, and you said something that I was curious about. You mentioned a company called BioAge and how they have a new drug for muscle. Okay, you have my attention. What is the new drug for muscle, and generally, what's exciting to you about that space?

Elad Gil

Yeah, I mean, BioAge is a company that just went public and is in their quiet period. So, there probably isn't a ton I should say about them. I was an early investor there and a board observer. I think I was the first investor in that company, actually. The CEO is this really exceptional PhD and postdoc. I think she did her postdoc at Stanford in biocomputation of aging. They now have different drugs in different phases of clinical trials or preclinical work, and all that should be in their S-1 and in their public financial materials, which I would encourage people to go look at. In general, I think that aging is an area that's been dramatically under-invested in. Part of that is because of the structure of big pharma. That industry tends to have very old companies driving the agenda, which has its own implications. It's also highly regulated. If you just look at, for example, the National Institutes for Aging, it has a very small budget relative to the NCI for cancer or other parts of the NIH. Most of that budget just goes to Alzheimer's, so actual fundamental research into aging is quite sparse. We know that aging is a developmental program that can be perturbed. I actually worked on that for my PhD. I worked at the intersection of aging, longevity, and... excuse me, longevity, cancer, and insulin. There are certain evolutionarily conserved pathways that, if you tweak them, you end up with organisms that live a lot longer. For example, you can knock out a gene in C. elegans that allows it to live 2 to 3 times longer as a healthy adult. We also know that there are drugs that do that in mice, etc. There are genes that do that in mice, which means you can develop drugs.

Shaan Puri

I like how you're saying "we know," as if me or Sam know anything. We don't know this. You smart PhD people know this. Can you explain in layman's terms what you just said? You said there's like... we know that every day is...

Sam Parr

He'll say like a sentence, and there are like five things, and I'm like, "Wait, what?"

Shaan Puri

Yeah, five tabs need to be open in my browser. It's okay. C. elegans are living 2x longer. You said that aging is something driven.

Elad Gil

This is a developmental program. Basically, there are a few different theories of aging. One of the theories is that you just accumulate a bunch of damage over time, and systems break because of that damage. It's mechanical damage; you get hit by sunlight, UV, and whatever. Then there's another view of aging, which is more like a developmental program that's regulated by signals in your body. Just as you know, when you go from a baby to a child to an adult, that's a developmental program. If you look at different organisms, they will have different clocks for aging. So, why can turtles live so long? Or why do certain animals die so young? It's just a developmental program; they have a set lifespan that's genetically defined.

Shaan Puri

And why would that be the case? Like, why would we have an off button?

Elad Gil

Every theory has its own merits, and who knows? I mean, I don't know. There are theories, but I don't know which one is right. The other piece of information that we have is that we know certain drugs can extend lifespan in multiple organisms. For example, if you take a drug or give a drug to something, it can live longer. **Rapamycin** would be an example where, in mice, they can live 10 to 30% longer based on their sex. Female mice, I think, will live longer than male mice on rapamycin. There are also gene knockouts that you can do. If you knock out a gene in certain organisms, they will live a lot longer. This means that you can develop a drug for it, right? That's how the drug industry works. You can create a drug that mimics a gene knockout or a gene upregulation, and you end up with the same effect. So, we know that you can make things live much longer, and there is very little being done in people around that. The question is, why? Imagine if you had another 30, 40, or even 50 healthy years.

Shaan Puri

And when you say, "The question is why?" what's the answer? Is it that it's not funded enough? It's not safe enough? Are there some other commercial disincentives for it? Yeah, it's three things.

Elad Gil

It's not funded enough for all sorts of reasons. Second, from a regulatory framework perspective, until very recently, the FDA did not have a good definition of what it means to build an aging drug. In general, in the broader medical world, aging is not considered a disease; it's considered a natural state. So, why would you develop a drug against a natural state? There's a company called Loyal, which is doing aging in dogs, and they actually defined a series of endpoints.

Sam Parr

Is it Kevin Rowe? Is that the thing Kevin Rowe invested in? I think he talked to us about it. Oh no.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, that's like my favorite longevity companies. Forget the humans; let's save the dogs! I think it's both going to have an easier regulatory pathway and be good for society. My dog living longer? I support nothing more than that. What have they found? Is that working? I haven't kept up with the actual science of the company.

Elad Gil

Yeah, I've been... I don't know. I'm not an investor. I think the founder is quite good; I just haven't been involved there. You know, as I mentioned, one of the main things I've been involved with in that area is a company called BioAge, which again just went public. There’s all sorts of information in the public domain now about them that is worth looking up.

Sam Parr

You know, what was that crazy quote? It was like, "What Silicon Valley nerdy people are doing for fun, that's like what everyone else is gonna do in the next 10 or 15 years" or something like that.

Shaan Puri

Nerds do on the weekend.

Elad Gil

I hope not, because then there's going to be a lot of veganism, which sounds awful.

Sam Parr

Well, that's what I was going to ask you, which is like, you kind of fit that stereotype. You have a lot of resources and you're in the know with a lot of interesting new things. Are you taking any interesting pharmaceuticals? Are you doing Metformin? What do you think is interesting right now that you believe will be a little bit more popular in 2, 3, 4, or 5 years?

Elad Gil

Yeah, the honest answer is I don't know. I've tried to stay away from taking anything chronically unless I think it would have a huge impact. So far, there isn't anything in the market that would really map to that. You know, a lot of it honestly is like, do you exercise? Do you sleep? Do you eat well? You know, there's reasonably good data on rapamycin that people should work with their doctor on and sort of figure out if it's right for them.

Sam Parr

But you're not.

Elad Gil

No, you haven't done anything there. So again, I've tried to ask, "Let me wait until there's something that I feel is big enough to impact some people." For example, in the aging community, some will take a certain subclass of statins for heart disease and neuro issues. Then, they'll take, I think, a subset that was taking some baby aspirin, similarly for heart disease. So, there are some people who've done some things that, again, you should talk to your doctor about if you want to consider stuff like that. I haven't done anything like that because I just don't want to take things every day.

Shaan Puri

When Sam says that quote about, you know, what the nerds are doing on the weekends and what they're tinkering with in their spare time is what we'll all be doing, you know, 10 years from now.

Elad Gil

Yeah, I'm just going straight to hardcore gene therapy. So, I'm just gonna... No, I'm just kidding! I'm going to CRISPR my genome.

Sam Parr

But are you kidding? I mean, it sounds pretty cool.

Elad Gil

Kidding! Yeah, I think a lot of that stuff feels very premature to me. There are some people doing self-experimentation like that in the public domain. I just don't know that some of those things will work. It's kind of interesting because I feel like when people talk about gene delivery, there are like 3 or 4 aspects of it that matter. Everybody focuses now on sort of the CRISPR side of it, which is: can you modify a gene in a cell versus can you target it to the right cells? Will your immune system target those cells and turn it off? There's all this other stuff, like can you hit enough cells for it to matter? There are all these other issues that traditionally have been the real problems of gene therapy that aren't being addressed as effectively as sort of the CRISPR-Cas9 approach.

Shaan Puri

You’ve been interested in longevity earlier than I would say this current wave of interest. I think you not only studied it in school, but I saw on your site that you personally identified a gene involved in lifespan. You funded your own clinical trial at Stanford. It didn’t work, but you’re like, “It’s okay, I’ll try. I’m happy to try again.” I’m curious, what do you think of Brian Johnson and what he’s doing?

Elad Gil

You know, I've never met him. I haven't looked deeply into what he's doing. I think it's great that people are raising awareness for this kind of stuff, but I don't have any specific insight or opinion. I just haven't looked into it.

Shaan Puri

I'm surprised. How come you haven't looked into it?

Elad Gil

That seems like it's right up your alley. I've been busy focusing on hardcore biopharma for this stuff, right? Like drug development that can benefit society at large. That's what I thought. So, it's just a different area of focus, right?

Sam Parr

What I want to know is, are there any ideas on there that are just cool but not necessarily like a world-changing, serious thing? Like, do you have any?

Shaan Puri

You think his monuments thing... Can you talk about the monuments thing? I think that's dope.

Elad Gil

Oh, so one thing again: I need somebody to come work with me on this, and I'd happily fund it. If you look at every society at its peak, they would build large-scale monuments towards progress. It's like the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Honestly, I don't know if you know the origins of the Eiffel Tower, but it was built in the late 1800s for a World Fair in Paris to show off French steelmaking prowess. It was an ode to technology and an ode to steelmaking because steel was like modern tech. It was very controversial at the time; people thought it was ugly and all this stuff, right?

Sam Parr

A lot of bridges were built in America at that time, you know, with Andrew Carnegie. They were built with the idea of, "Let's prove something." For example, the Eads Bridge in Saint Louis was the same thing. They would build these amazing bridges and then do all these funny things, like getting an elephant to walk across it to prove their strength.

Elad Gil

Yeah, to prove that it works strong.

Sam Parr

You know what I mean? But yeah, so like these flexes exist. So there's...

Elad Gil

There's a flex side of it and there's an inspirational side of it. Like, where are the large-scale inspiring pieces of beauty and art in society anymore? Where have they gone? Why aren't we doing those anymore?

Shaan Puri

Sphere, that's the last one.

Elad Gil

No, seriously. The sphere, I think it's amazing. I think that's a real example of large-scale societal beauty, right?

Sam Parr

Well, you know what? Another example that sounds silly is the Blue Angels. I was having this debate with someone the other day about how much money the American government funds airshows. I was like, "That's totally worth it!" Because whenever you go to one of these things, you definitely feel a sense of patriotism. You're like, "This is awesome!" I'm in awe of this. In the same way, going to the moon in the sixties and seventies, we spent a significant amount of money on this—much more than you could argue we've spent on longevity, which is actually a shame. But there is a history in America of doing things just because, you know, just to flex or just to celebrate.

Elad Gil

But what was the last thing like that that we did? It's been decades, right?

Sam Parr

It's been decades, and I actually find that.

Shaan Puri

To be.

Sam Parr

Quite saddening. And that's actually sort of what you said. Once you get to a point where you're financially secure on a human basis, on a human level, you do things for artistic reasons because it makes your soul feel good. I do wish we did that a little bit more as a country. But there was a period between like 1870, right post-Civil War, up to like the 1960s or so, right around when JFK passed. During that time, there was this series in America where we did a bunch of interesting experiments. You could just say it was just because, you know what I mean? I really appreciate that.

Elad Gil

Yeah, and part of that is going to be regulation. Then part of that is this odd postmodern cynical thinking. There's a very strong anti-progress movement in the U.S. You know, basically the idea is you buy land and you construct giant monuments that are inspiring. I don't know, I mean, it's pretty simple-minded. But imagine if you walked out in San Francisco and you looked across, you know, to the view with the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz, and there was a giant statue that's kind of an ode to the future. Dude, do you have that? How much?

Shaan Puri

Do these things even cost?

Elad Gil

You know, the land... it depends on where you do it and it depends on the regulatory framework. The land in major metros tends to be the more expensive part of it, actually, versus the construction.

Sam Parr

Ratio basis.

Shaan Puri

Let's walk through an example. What's one that you fantasize about? You're like, "Okay, what if we did this? That would be cool." I would be...

Elad Gil

Inspired by an island for sale in the bay that ended up selling, I can't remember how much. I remember it was around $9 or something just recently.

Sam Parr

Was that up by Stockton?

Elad Gil

No, it was in the bay. It was actually in the water. There's like a little island, and you know, it was on the market for a while. I actually looked at it a couple of times, thinking maybe this is a thing, maybe this is an anchor thing. But I just think it's going to be so hard to do anything in the Bay Area, right? I mean, it's hard enough to construct a public toilet. Are they really going to let you build a beautiful monument in any reasonable time frame? There are lots of other metro areas that are much more amenable to this. There's a global version of this and a U.S. version. But often, in major metros, it's the land, and then the construction actually isn't that bad. Because really, what you're building is a big statue. In some cases, you're building out a base or foundation under it that may be part of a building. Maybe you want to build an elevator up if you have a big view or vista. But you're not building a large commercial property with all the plumbing, electrical, and you know, all the extra stuff that goes into it. Often, these things are kind of like hollow shells.

Shaan Puri

It'd be like, you know, what's our equivalent of the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower? That's like, you know, just to demonstrate their steel prowess. What do you think would be the modern equivalent that would have some meaning?

Elad Gil

I think there's lots of stuff you can do. I actually think, you know, one of the things that the intention around **Monumental**—which is what we're calling the project—is to also solicit ideas from people who live in locales. What do they want? What do they view as inspiring? What do they want to drive their children's optimism forward? This is, in some sense, an ode to progress. But more importantly, it's a way to encourage the future. How do you encourage inspiration in young people? How do you get people jazzed about the future in technology, optimism, and doing things—building things and moving society forward? I think part of this lack of ongoing societal beauty and ongoing great works is a reflection of cynicism that came in during the sixties and seventies and has really kind of spoiled the well.

Sam Parr

I well, yeah, I mean that's one of my favorite eras to read about. Basically, like in the mid-sixties, Malcolm X, JFK, RFK... there's a series of assassinations. One can argue that that was like the death of innocence in America. It's kind of interesting to read about.

Elad Gil

Maybe... I mean, you look at all the stuff that happened in history before that. Some pretty awful stuff happened roughly every couple of decades, right? I mean, World War II was not a happy time. World War I was not a happy time. The Civil War was not... you know, there's a lot of shit that's going down, no doubt about that. Maybe the Boomers self-internalized things in a different way because they were self-absorbed as a generation. So maybe for them, it was a big moment, but...

Sam Parr

It just seems like there was a shift... there was some mindset shift, and maybe that is what it was attributed to. I don't know what it's attributed to. Have you ever... I don't know if you guys—Sean, you definitely... well, maybe you have actually—Sean, driving to Duke. Do you guys ever remember seeing all these crosses on the side of the highway in the South? I bet Ari has. But like, you know, there was this guy who was old and he had saved up roughly $3 or $4 million. He spent all of that money building crosses on the side of the highway. Now, regardless if you like Christianity or not, it doesn't matter. But I always thought it was so interesting that this guy dedicated that money to that. If you guys don't remember seeing this, it was like a big deal in the South. You'd be driving through the South and every 50 or 100 miles, you would just see this huge cross. That's all you saw. You know, or you would see these billboards that say, "Jesus saves." Do you remember those?

Shaan Puri

Yes, I saved those. I never understood what that is.

Sam Parr

Dude, it has a phone number that you could call. I would call that phone number every once in a while just to see what would happen. A lot of it goes off to a dead phone number, but it was basically a lot of it came down to this one man who had saved roughly $3,000,000 and he spent it on that. Then other churches started following it and doing the same. I always thought it was really interesting, the idea of just spending money for this cause. Your logical brain is like, "That's silly," but then your heart is like, "Oh, that's actually kind of an interesting idea." How much of your own money would you spend on doing this monument project?

Elad Gil

I don't know. I mean, I think it'd be good to try and get the first thing up and running and then, you know, do it as a joint effort with lots of people. Because again, the hope is you actually feed the needs of local places. You know, another example where I think there's this sort of craftsmanship applied is a park in Oslo. Someone spent, I don't know, what's a decade, two decades building statues in this one park. There's an artist who went in and he just... and you go in and it's all this consistent series of statues from one person, right? One artist who spent a big chunk of his life making them.

Shaan Puri

I

Elad Gil

Think he made something like 200 sculptures over a few decades, right? And so, there are other forms of this in terms of people trying to contribute works. The question is, why aren't we doing it? What happened? What happened to us societally to stop doing all this really inspiring, amazing stuff?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, well, I think the good news is it only takes one, right? Like, I think Elon showed that when he started doing projects that none of the other entrepreneurs really wanted to do and no investors really wanted to fund. Then it created this wave and it just kind of sparked inspiration where now a bunch of people do that, right? Like, I think the closest thing we have to that is, like, Tesla and SpaceX, to be honest.

Elad Gil

mhmm

Shaan Puri

Of these, like, that's our moon mission, right? It's like, wow, this guy just poured his entire talent and net worth into these super high-risk, low-probability, you know, useful for society, hard but awesome projects. And he pulled it off. You know, that changed the wiring in every...

Elad Gil

**Founder's Brain**

Shaan Puri

You know, it doesn't even matter what you're doing. You might be working for some boring insurance company, but that example still lives in your brain, right? I think that's pretty powerful.

Sam Parr

You're a pretty serious person. You take life seriously. You see problems and you're like, "I want to solve them." What do you do just for shits and giggles? Like, just to unwind?

Elad Gil

Before you have kids, there are all sorts of things you do that the time goes away for once you have them. You know, I used to do what I would call **intensive travel**. I would go to India for two months and do yoga there with a guy who learned from a guy in a cave, kind of thing. Just different forms of very immersive travel was one thing I used to do a lot of.

Shaan Puri

If somebody today had the freedom to do that, what skills would guide them to that intensive travel? What would you tell them? What was really transformative for you, or what is your approach to that?

Elad Gil

Yeah, I think it's basically about spending at least a month in one city and deciding to learn something there. So, you know, maybe you want to go learn how to draw, or maybe you want to go to France and learn to make pastries. In my case, it was going to India to do this very intensive yoga experience. Especially if it's part of a community that you join, you get really immersed in interesting ways—not just the topic, but also the people around it and the local people. Right? Because then you're really forced to be part of something. There's actually a person I know who's about to start a company, and I convinced him to go do this because he had an extra month or two. He said it was like the best month he'd spent. He went down to Brazil and enrolled in some classes there, and he just spent a month doing it. I personally think it's super interesting. How often in your life can you actually get a chance to do things like that? But also, it is a different form of travel than, "Hey, I'm going to..." You know, I went on a Chinese tour group of Italy once, and on these Chinese tour groups, they try to see as many cities as possible in as short a time as possible. That's just checking the box, right? "Oh, okay, there's the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Check! We saw it." It's like you stop for 10 minutes and then you run to the next thing. You know, that's very different from, "Hey, I'm just going to sit in one place for a month or two."

Shaan Puri

That's awesome! Yeah, I've had great experiences doing that. We used to go to Buenos Aires for, you know, basically 4 to 5 weeks. I would live in one city and live like a local. Everywhere I would go, I would do two things. I would play basketball because that was something I grew up doing. It was like a native fluency I had. Even if I couldn't speak the language, I could always kind of make my way in there. Also, if I ever traveled with my brother-in-law, he loves jiu-jitsu. I'll never go with him to a jiu-jitsu class here in the States, but jiu-jitsu has this really intense camaraderie, openness, and inclusiveness. We went to jiu-jitsu gyms in Spain, and you immediately feel like you're one of the people. You're learning from them, and they have different techniques. Again, you don't even speak the language, but man, it's an incredible and fast way to bond or get more out of the way.

Elad Gil

The jiu-jitsu community is one of the most vibrant ones right now. Along those lines, to your point, you can basically go anywhere in the world and plug in. That's how this type of yoga I used to do was; it was the same thing. You just show up, and you knew how it worked. Everybody was kind of in the same vibe and part of the same crew. You were instantly adopted. My sense is that the jiu-jitsu community today is a good example of that. You just show up, and you're instantly part of it. They pull you in. Everybody has a common thing to talk about and common interests in a really positive way, even though it's a very diverse group around the world. There aren't that many communities like that, and I think there are interesting questions about how these communities form and why they persist. This brings me back to my point about doing, quote, "a hobby" or learning something. Plugging into a community like that is actually important.

Shaan Puri

I love that! I think of all the things we talked about today, that was the most useful, surprisingly. I wanted to learn about investing from you, but I got a totally different golden nugget out of this. Where should people find you if they want more?

Elad Gil

I guess they could find me on Twitter. You know, I'm @aladgill. I just hope more people go and build interesting things. I think there's a lot to do.

Sam Parr

We appreciate you.

Elad Gil

Great! Yeah, thanks so much for the time.

Shaan Puri

Alright, well, take care.