It’s always a pleasure to jam with Elad Gil, a serial entrepreneur and a startup investor. As an early leader at Google, Elad helped build the initial mobile team, before founding MixerLabs, which was acquired by Twitter. Later, he co-founded Color Health, a genetic testing company specializing in cancer detection. Over the past decade, he's backed nearly 40+ companies valued north of $1B each, including Airbnb, Coinbase, Figma, Instacart, and Stripe. He's also invested in Harvey, Mistral, Perplexity, Pika, and other leading AI startups.

Elad is also author of the High Growth Handbook and is excited to be working on his next book focused on how to scale during the zero to one phase of a startup’s journey.

We covered:

Optimizing for market need and optionality
Recipes for long career arcs
Getting more leverage on time
Investing outside of AI
Value in getting the theme right

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Timestamps:

(0:00) Intro

(0:50) Shamelessness mindset

(4:16) Optimizing for market need

(5:55) Cultivating optionality

(8:29) Characteristics of people with long career arcs

(9:54) What to optimize for early in a career

(22:20) Different phases of your life

(25:20) Aspiring to do things that are useful

(26:33) Pivot points in careers

(31:16) Becoming great investors

(33:28) Getting more leverage on time

(36:57) Investing outside of AI

(40:58) Getting the theme right means more

(47:01) Elad’s new book

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New Year, New MindSet – Time for a Manifesto