Elad Gil
Entrepreneur and Angel Investor. Former Cofounder & CEO of Mixer Labs
Discussion
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Elad Gil
@eladgil
Hi - I'm Elad Gil. I am a serial entrepreneur, investor, and operator. I invested in AirBnB, Gusto, Instacart, Stripe, Square, Pinterest, Wish, Zenefits and other companies. I co-founded both Color Genomics and MixerLabs (acquired by Twitter) and was a VP at Twitter (where I helped scale the company from 100 to 1500 people) and PM at Google (where I incubated the mobile team).
I am also chairman at Color, which uses software to dramatically drop the cost of, and broaden access to, cancer genomics and related preventative health services.
I'm excited to be here - ask me anything!
UPDATE: Thanks to everyone for the great questions and for taking the time out this morning! Signing off now!
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Ryan Hoover
@rrhoover · Founder, Product Hunt
Important question: What's the backstory behind your DBZ avatar? 🤔
Garry Tan
@garrytan · Angel Investor. Previously Partner, YC
When you spend time with CEOs, what do you like to do to help them figure out their calendars? Suddenly folks have to go from the doing (programming, support, sales, marketing) to the care and feeding of the organization. Where are the places that first time founders make mistakes? What do you see happen over and over again?
@garrytan I have a blog post I have been meaning to share on this. I think founder CEOs who have not managed before have enormous difficulty delegating early on when their organization starts to scale. Helpful tactics include:
1. Audit your calendar once a week (maybe Monday AM). Where did you spend time last week where you weren't really needed? Where do you want to spend more time? Does your coming week reflect that prioritization? Related - what are the 3 most important things for the company and is 90% your time going to those 3 items this week?
2. Start sending people as proxies. Do you really need to go to every sales call with the low-level middle manager in the partner organization? Do you really need to attend the engineering meeting about the UI bug? Once you see others can cover for you, it allows you to spend less time on items that don't really merit your attention. It is OK if it is only done 90% as well as you, the perfectionist did it.
3. You do not need to be in every first round interview panel. You can be the last interview for non-executive hires.
4. Strengthen your executive layer. Hiring one great executive will cause a "oh shit" moment where you realize how well things can be done without your direct day-to-day involvement. This is a truly liberating moment for every founder.
Many technical founders tend to over index on attending engineering meetings and never go to any sales or marketing meetings. Eventually they realize they need to be part of the sales process so this is a big shift....
Mike Coutermarsh
@mscccc · Code @ Product Hunt
Hi Elad! Would love to know - What's the risk you've taken so far in your career that scared you the most?
@mscccc Silicon Valley is interesting in that it operates in 5-7 year "relevance" cycles. I.e. the people relevant in one cycle (excluding the Larry Pages of the world) tend to lose relevance in the next cycle. The hard part is to ask how you can stay relevant over the arc of a 20, 30, 40 year career in the Bay Area. Similarly, as people gain wealth they tend to lose hunger and so they slow down and stop trying to be relevant.
As such, people need to take risks every 5-7 years to remain relevant, which means switching industries, trying new roles, or going for something big. This is hard to do.
The biggest leap I made was going from a Ph.D. in biology to joining the tech industry (I also have a math background). Most people told me it was stupid to do this and told me to stay in bio.
Jack Smith
@_jacksmith · Serial Entrepreneur & Startup Adviser
with your role changeup a few months ago that saw you move from ceo to full-time chairman:
1) why did you select the title of "chairman" vs other options? especially given this role can often be not a full-time every day role.
2) does this role change see you free up more time to focus on other projects (I saw someone say they're working on a side-project with you, can't remember who), or are you still working on Color the same number of hours as before?
bonus question if you have time: did you have any reservations about selecting the name Color for Color Genomics, given the high profile implosion of Bill Nguyen's Color startup?
@_jacksmith for (1) there are a wide range of different "chairman roles". To your point it can be anything from full time, super hands on to "shows up to board meetings". In my case I am still at Color every day, but do not have direct line reporting responsibility. So Othman the CEO, me, and the other board members felt that this ongoing engagement with a lack of reporting was best set as "Chairman". It could have been a variety of titles. I am still working at Color every day - with the biggest issue being having a newborn which takes up a ton of time! I think something like 20% of employees at Color have young children.
At a meta level, titles are really an exercise in pragmatism. For example the title "Business Product Manager" was created at Google by Susan Wojciki (who now runs YouTube) as Larry Page was unwilling to hire non-technical PMs (i.e. people without a CS degree). So Susan suggested "BUSINESS product manager" so she could hire talented people that were not considered technical enough into a product role at Google. BTW, some of the people hired as "BPMs" included Gokul Rajaram, who was an IIT CS undergrad and had an MS in CS as well. So "Technical" at Google is all relative.
Jack Smith
@_jacksmith · Serial Entrepreneur & Startup Adviser
@eladgil Wow, that's awesome that 20% of the team have young kids. Congrats on your newborn!
Thanks a lot for the clarity around your thought process. I think that this could actually be a great move to allow you to work on special projects; many times in companies founders or VPs (or whoever) will often try to "empire build" and stack as many people reporting to them as possible. there's actually huge benefits probably to having zero reports and being able to be nimble.
Stephen M. Levinson
@stephenmarklevi · Design @Vimeo @Cameo
@eladgil Business and fiction
@stephenmarklevi
A few good business books include:
1. Andy Grove's High Output Management https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015VA...
2. Peter Thiel's Zero To One:
https://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-...
3. Obviously Ben Horowitz's book and Reid Hoffmans books are great too.
4. On management, I like the books "Managing Humans" and "First Break All the Rules"
Dhruv Garg
@drgarg
@eladgil @stephenmarklevi you can see some fiction recommendations on http://parrotread.com/eladgil
Ayrton De Craene
@ayrton · Code @ Product Hunt
What characteristics do great founders share?
@ayrton I think founders who go the distance tend to have the following traits:
1. Persistence. Keep going even when things get tough (which happens at every company)
2. Adaptability. Things will change. Frequently.
3. Clear communication. Ability to communicate and sell to employees, customers, etc.
4. Fast learners. Pick things up quickly. Know how to go collect information and learn from others.
5. A nose for a good market, or luck. A great team doesn't matter if the market sucks.
Ben Tossell
@bentossell · Community Lead, Product Hunt
What do you believe that few agree with you on?
COSTAS ANDRIOPOULOS
@candriopoulos · https://medium.com/strictly-curious
Hello Elad, thank you for taking our questions. Where do you look for emerging trends (e.g. sources, events, websites, etc.) and how do you pick ventures in nascent industries?
@candriopoulos A few quick thoughts of the top of my head:
1. What products would my company use? What is broken in how my company tries to operate that software can fix? This led to investments in Stripe, Optimizely, MailGun, PagerDuty, Zenefits, Gusto - there are all products I knew would help productivity at my own startup.
2. What are small signs of big traction? E.g. when a yoga blogger I followed starting using Twitter aggressively a few years ago, it felt like the company was about to really crossover.
3. What industries are transformative and what value chain underlies it? E.g. I think the most underinvested area in ML right now is the semiconductor layer with everyone using NVIDIA GPUs. If you take a step back and ask what is the full stack for an industry, interesting opportunities emerge.
4. I read a lot and constantly across diverse sources.
Picking companies is a whole other story. For me it is market/product first and foremost, and then team, and then would I like to spend time with the team (life is short)
COSTAS ANDRIOPOULOS
@candriopoulos · https://medium.com/strictly-curious
@eladgil Thank you Elad for your sharing your invaluable insights!
Jacqueline von Tesmar
@jacqvon · Community, Product Hunt ✌️😻
What do you look for most when making investment decisions? Is it the founder, the team, the idea, initial traction?
@jacqvon It is impossible to argue with sustainable high margin traction, so if that exists, that trumps everything[1]. The hard part is investing in the absence of traction.
At the very early stages for me it is foremost product/market. I think I differ with a lot of angels on this. E.g. what product are you building and what market are you actually in? Most angels focus on team first and foremost, but many great teams lose to a terrible market. (Marc Andreessen has great blogs on this).
After market, team really matters. It is important note the team that gets to product/market fit may not be the same team that can scale the company - these are very different skill sets (i.e. 0 to 1 versus 1 to 1000). Also, you need to only work with 100% ethical people.
Lastly, would I want to spend time with the team? I have had founders literally call me at 10pm on Saturday asking to meet. Would I want to pick up their call? Life is too short to work with jerks.
NOTES
[1] Although I would not invest in something with lots of traction if the team was unethical