High Growth Handbook is a comprehensive playbook for growing startups into global brands. Written by Elad Gil, who has extensive experience working with high-growth tech companies, the book provides crystal-clear guidance on navigating the complex challenges faced by leaders and operators in high-growth startups. It covers essential topics including the role of the CEO, managing a board, recruiting and overseeing an executive team, mergers and acquisitions, initial public offerings, and late-stage funding. The book is informed by interviews with dynamic leaders in Silicon Valley, such as Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, and Aaron Levie.
This ‘lost episode’ of Turpentine VC with investor Elad Gil was recorded at a unique moment in time (September 2022) — before ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity launched. Drawing from his experiences at Google, Elad discusses early ML systems, the open source debate, NVIDIA, labor markets, and AI alignment and shares some behind the scenes anecdotes.
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LINKS:
Attention Is All You Need: https://proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2017/file/3f5ee243547dee91fbd053c1c4a845aa-Paper.pdf
AI Revolution - Transformers and Large Language Models (LLMs): https://blog.eladgil.com/p/ai-revolution-transformers-and-large
Elad’s website: https://eladgil.com/
High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil: https://growth.eladgil.com/ | https://www.amazon.com/High-Growth-Handbook-Elad-Gil/dp/1732265100
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FOLLOW:
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@eriktorenberg
@TurpentineVC
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HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE EPISODE:
- This episode was recorded in 2022, before the launch of ChatGPT, Claude, and other major AI applications that are now common. This interview captured a moment in time when industry leaders were anticipating major breakthroughs in AI.
- Elad explained how AI's definition has evolved from basic automation in the 1980s to sophisticated applications, with Google emerging as the first true "AI-first" company at scale through its search and ad targeting systems.
- The 2017 "Attention is All You Need" paper proved pivotal, with six of its eight authors going on to start companies, creating what Gil compared to a "Xerox PARC moment" where Google developed breakthrough technology but others, particularly OpenAI, commercialized it.
- Elad outlined three main categories of emerging AI companies: platforms and infrastructure providers like OpenAI, AI-first standalone companies, and tech-enabled incumbents adding AI capabilities.
- Initial predictions about AI's impact on labor markets proved incorrect, with AI currently affecting white-collar, repetitive tasks more than blue-collar jobs, and creative and caring fields experiencing more disruption than anticipated.
- The semiconductor industry lacks a massive AI-specific chip company, with NVIDIA's continued success attributed to strong founder leadership, superior software tooling, and advanced interconnect capabilities.
- Elad emphasized the importance of open-source models and predicted the AI platform market would likely consolidate into an oligopoly similar to cloud infrastructure, with a few dominant players rather than a single winner.
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