A Conversation with Elad Gil
Okay, the ACS on. We're good. Good morning, everyone. I am very happy to have my friend A lot Gil here. You saw some of you, or all of you, if you looked online, a talk yesterday about how to get meetings with investors and raise money. If you would be so lucky as to get a meeting with this investor, and even more lucky to raise money from him, that would be a really good thing for your company. A lot is sort of an epic investor; he's had an epic career investing. But he's much more than that. He's not only a fantastic investor who's bested a lot of YC companies—like it seems like all the successful ones—and someday you have to figure out, you have to tell me how you figured out how to do that. Maybe we can talk about that today.
But he's also a startup founder. He's worked at Google and Twitter, and he is increasingly known as an author. Claims it's not his career, but he is an author of "High Growth Handbook," which is a very cool book. I recommend you all read it, but not maybe right while you're starting your startup. Maybe as your startup gets going, because a lot of the topics in there will be relevant for you—hopefully in the future. So maybe you can start off the conversation by telling us a little bit about, you know, how you got from where you started to where you are today. What's your journey to becoming an epic investor, a startup founder, and, I guess, a company whisperer?
Sure. So first of all, thanks for having me here, and I'm really excited to be here for Startup School. So you know, I moved out here right after graduate school and, you know, I moved out—I didn't know anybody. Many of my friends decided to stay on the East Coast, and so I was sort of starting fresh when I first came out here. I had terrible market timing in that I moved out here right as the entire internet bubble was collapsing.
So I went into an environment where, a year after I got here, most people were getting laid off, and most people were sort of desperately looking for jobs. And so somebody who was a vice president of management was suddenly trying to get any product manager job that could get at any level at any company. It was a very odd environment, and it was a very tough one to plug into. And this is before things like YC existed. There was no online content about starting companies. There was no content about basically doing anything.
What you had to do is really sort of hand-to-hand combat in terms of networking, meeting people. I basically talked my way into a job by offering to work for free at a startup. That was my entree; it was basically unpaid labor on behalf of a company as a way to get my foot in the door and get into technology. So that was basically my starting point—that's sort of a good lesson for how, even in today's world where there are many more resources, how you have to really pound the pavement. It takes elbow grease to get started a lot of times, right?
Yeah, absolutely. I think what happened is, after... So I got a PhD in biology, so it's completely irrelevant to software and technology, but I wanted to go into software technology. At the time, it was completely irrelevant to software and technology—relevant, but it changed later, right? It's changed. So basically, my first software startup job allowed me then to be a software person, and that was the thing that allowed me to do a transition. I actually moved out here to join a telecom equipment startup as a product manager. So I worked on hardware, and I had to leave that company. Then I made my way into working for free at a software company, and then I was selling a software product.
That's what sort of led to me then eventually ending up at Google and other places. So you ended up at Google, but let's talk a little bit about, because you ended up working at Google and Twitter. But you started companies in between, and in the end, sort of transitioned into becoming an investor. How did that all happen?
Yeah, so I joined Google in 2004 and effectively started the mobile team there. So I helped buy Android and pulled together their...