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

22:21And there's a certain emphasis on reasoning and logic and thinking and discourse and debate that I think was resident in that time. There's an emphasis on mathematics. There's an emphasis on writing. There was an emphasis on trying basic forms of understanding. You know, that's when you had Archimedes and lovers, and that's when you had early interesting mathematics emerge, and that's when you had great philosophical treaties written. So, you know, I think there's a lot of... That's also when you focus a lot on beauty and art. There's a lot of emphasis on the physical and being physically fit and resilient.

22:58So there's a lot of stuff there now. I remember when I lived in SF from 12 to 20, and I think there was a handful of schools that were started for elementary kids. Was Alt School one of them? And was there a Wonder School? Does that ring a bell? Those were more kind of like, hey, we're going to 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. And so, again, I think it's not that, I'm not 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.

23:40I think their line or motto is like, for kids who love math. And they have a very strong emphasis on mathematics in their curriculum. And kids are doing machine learning in like 10th or 11th grade. And I find things like that kind of inspiring where they're like, okay, we're going to take a different lens on it. And our lens is just kids who love math. then let's find out what's the right curriculum for those kids. And 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 XYZ versus something else. And so I just think that's a good example of a really smart approach to schooling.

24:14There's a variety of people who've done these differentiated approaches. What's your plan with this school thing? You're looking for an entrepreneur to spearhead it? What are you looking for? Yeah, I need somebody to spearhead it. I think traditionally there's this directly responsible individual or DRI problem. It's really easy to come up with ideas. And then usually you need help executing them. And so 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.

24:48So it's more just something that I think would be societally useful to do more broadly. And then especially if you can do it as a chain, and 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. And so I think there's a really interesting project to be had there. What other ideas, Sean, did you have listed there? There's one cool one. 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.

25:18You said there's some exciting things that are going on in longevity. 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? 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. And I think I was the first investor in that company, actually. The CEO is this really exceptional PhD in postdoc. I think she did her postdoc at Stanford in biocomputation of aging.

25:48and they now have different drugs and different phases of clinical trials or preclinical work and all that should be in their S1 and in their public financial materials that I would encourage people to go look at. But in general, I think that aging is an area that's been dramatically underinvested in and part of that is because of the structure of big pharma and that industry tends to have very old companies sort of driving the agenda which has its own implications and then obviously it's highly regulated. But also if you just look at, for example, the National Institutes for Aging, which is a very small budget relative to the NCI for cancer or other parts of the NIH, and most of that budget just goes to Alzheimer's.

26:29And so actual fundamental research into aging is quite sparse. We know that aging is a developmental program that can be perturbed, right? I actually worked on that for my PhD. I worked at the intersection of aging, longevity, and excuse me, longevity, cancer, and insulin. There's certain evolutionarily conserved pathways that if you tweak them, you end up with organisms that'll live a lot longer, right? You can knock out a gene and see elegans that lives two, three times longer, for example, as a healthy adult. And we know that there's drugs that do that in mice, etc. Genes that do that in mice, which means you can do drugs.

26:59I 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. And can you explain in layman's term what you just said? You said there's like, we know that aging is a... Every time he talks, he'll say like a sentence and there's like five things that I'm like, wait, what? Yeah, five tabs need to open in my browser. Okay, C. elegans, they're living 2x longer. You said that aging is a something-driven thing. It's just a developmental program. So basically, there's a few different theories of aging. One of the theories of aging is you just accumulate a bunch of damage over time and systems break because of that damage.

27:34Mechanical damage type of thing. It's just mechanical damage. You get hit by sunlight and UV and whatever. And then there's another view of aging, which is it's more almost like a developmental program that's regulated by signals in your body just as when you go from a baby to a child to an adult or whatever, that's just a developmental program. And if you look at different organisms, different organisms will have different clocks for aging. And so why can turtles live so long or why do certain animals die so young? And you're like, it's just a developmental program. They have a set lifespan that's genetically defined.

28:10And why would that be the case? Why would we have an off button? There's all these theories, and who knows? I mean, I don't know.

28:22There's theories, but I don't know which theory is right. And the other piece of information that we have is that we know that there's certain drugs that will extend lifespan in multiple organisms. You take a drug, or you give a drug to something and it lives longer. Repamycin would be an example wherein mice will live 10 % to 30 % longer based on actually their sex, right? So female mice, I think, will live longer than male mice on rapamycin. And then there's knockouts that you can do in genes. And if you knock out a gene, certain organisms will live a lot longer. And that means that you can develop a drug for it, right?

28:56That's how the drug industry works. You can do a drug that mimics a gene knockout or a gene upregulation, and you end up with the same effect. And so we know that you can make things live much longer. And there is very little being done in people around that. And so the question is why, right? And imagine if you had another 30 or 40 or 50 healthy years. 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? There's some other commercial disincentive for it? Yeah, it's three things. It's not funded enough for all sorts of reasons. Second is from a regulatory framework perspective.

29:33Until very recently, the FDA did not have a good definition of what it means to build an aging drug, right? Because in general, this is sort of point three. In the broader medical world, aging is not considered a disease. It's considered a natural state. And so why would you develop a drug against a natural state? And so there's a company called Loyal, which is doing aging in dogs. And they actually defined a series of endpoints. Is that Kevin Rose? Is that the thing Kevin Rose invested in? I think he talked to us about it. I don't know. That's my favorite longevity company. It's like, yeah, forget the humans.

30:08Let's say I'm all about it. Let's save the dogs. I think it's both going to have an easier regulatory pathway, but also 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. I don't know. I'm not an investor. I think the founder is quite good. I just haven't been involved there. 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 there in the public domain now about them that is worth looking up.

30:45You 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 going to do in the next 10 or 15 years or something like that. What the nerds do on the weekends? I hope not, because then there's going to be a lot of veganism, which sounds awful. 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 think will be a little bit more popular in two, three, four, five years?

31:19Yeah, 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. And so far, there isn't anything in the market that would really map to that. A lot of it honestly is like, do you exercise? Do you sleep? Do you eat well? There's reasonably good data around rapamycin that people should work with their doctor on and sort of figure out if it... But you're not. No, I 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 impact. Some people, for example, in the aging community will take a certain subclass of statins for heart disease and neuro, and then they'll take...

31:58I think a subset was taking some baby aspirin, similarly for heart disease. So there's some people who've done some things that, again, And you should talk to your doctor about it 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.

32:18All right, let's take a quick break because I got to tell you a story. Let me tell you the first time I tried to run payroll for my team. I was using a traditional bank and you know the type. It's got a janky interface. It's built like a 2002 tax form and it was open only during business hours. And I hit send and it froze. They flagged the transaction. They locked my account. They put me on hold for 45 minutes. and then they told me I got to visit my local branch. And that was the day I started looking for a new banking solution. After asking a few founders what they were using, I found out about Mercury.

32:44And so now my payroll is two clicks. I can wire money, I can pay invoices, I can reimburse the team, all from one clean dashboard. That's why I use it for all of my companies. And so do 200 ,000 other startup founders. And so if you're looking to level up your banking, head to mercury.com and apply in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N8, and Evolve Bank and Trust members FDIC.

33:10When 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. Yeah, I'm just going straight to hardcore gene therapy. So I'm just gonna, no, I'm just kidding. I'm gonna CRISPR my genome. But are you kidding? I mean, it sounds pretty cool. I am kidding, yeah. 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's like three or four aspects of it that matter.

33:42And 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? Like there's all this other stuff that, can you hit enough cells for it to matter? There's all this other stuff that traditionally have been the real issues of gene therapy that aren't being addressed as effectively as sort of the CRISPR-Casso. You've been interested in longevity earlier than I would say this current wave of interest. I think not only did you study it in school, I saw on your site you said you personally identified a gene that's involved in the lifespan.

34:20You funded your own clinical trial at Stanford. It didn't work, but you're like, it's okay. I'm happy to try again. I'm curious, what do you think of Brian Johnson and what he's doing? you know I've never met him I haven't looked deeply into what he's doing so 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 like I just haven't looked into it I'm surprised how come you haven't looked into it that seems like it's right up your alley I've been busy in terms of just focusing on like hardcore biopharma for this stuff right like drug development that can benefit society at large that's what I vote so it's just a different area of focus, right?

34:59What I want to know is, are there any ideas on there that are just cool, but not necessarily a world-changing, serious thing? Do you ever think... His monuments thing. Can you talk about the monuments thing? I think that's dope. So one thing, again, I need somebody to come work with me on this, and I'd happily fund it, is if you look at every society at sort of its peak, they would build large-scale monuments towards progress. And so 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.

35:39It was an ode to technology and an ode to steelmaking because steel was like modern tech. And it was very controversial at the time. People thought it was ugly and all this stuff. A lot of bridges were built in America at that period. With Andrew Carnegie, they were built with that idea of like, let's prove. So like the Eads Bridge in St. Louis, it was the same thing where they would do these they would build these amazing bridges and then they would do like all these funny things like they would get an elephant to walk across it to prove yeah yeah to prove that it works it's strong you know what I mean but yeah but so like these like flexes like exist societal flex 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 like where have they gone why aren't we doing those anymore the Vegas sphere that's the last one no seriously the sphere actually I think I think that's a real example of large-scale societal beauty, right?

36:28Well, you know what another example that sounds silly is the Blue Angels. And I was having this debate with someone the other day about how much money the American government funds air shows. And I was like, that's totally worth it. Because whenever you go to one of these things, you definitely feel a sense of patriotism. And you're like, this is awesome. Like, this is like, I'm in awe of this. And same way with going to the moon. in the 60s and 70s, we spent a significant amount of money on this. A lot more than you could argue that we've spent on longevity, which is actually a shame. But there is a history in America of doing things just because.

37:08Just to flex or just to celebrate. We used to, but what was the last thing that we did? It's been decades, right? It's been decades. And I actually find it to be quite saddening. And that's actually sort of what you said is, 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 1870, post-Civil War, up to 1960s or so, right around when JFK passed, where there was this series in America where we did a bunch of interesting experiments where you could just say it was just because.

37:46You know what I mean? And I really appreciate that. Yeah, and part of that is going to be regulation and then part of that is this odd postmodern cynical thinking, right? There's a very strong anti-progress movement in the US. 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 to the view with the Golden Gate Bridge in Alcatraz and there was a giant statue that's kind of an ode to the future. Why don't you have that? How much do these things even cost?

38:23You know, 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 on a ratio basis. Let's walk through an example. What's one that you fantasized about? You're like, okay, what if we did this? That would be cool. I would be inspired by it. Yeah, there was actually an island for sale in the Bay that ended up selling, I can't remember how much, between$20 million or something, just recently. Was that up by Stockton? No, it was in the Bay. It was actually in the water. It was like a little island.

38:59It was on the market for a while. I actually looked at it a couple times in terms of thinking, maybe this is an anchor thing. But I just think it's going to be so hard to do anything in the Bay Area. It's hard enough to construct a public toilet. Are they really going to let you build a beautiful monument on any reasonable time frame? but there's lots of other metro areas that are much more amenable to this and there's a global version of this and there's a US 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 and 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 and electrical and all the extra stuff that goes into it Often these things are kind of like hollow shells.

39:48And what would it be of, what's our equivalent of the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower to demonstrate their steel prowess? What do you think would be the modern equivalent that would have some meaning? I think there's lots of stuff you can do. I actually think 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. And what do they want? What do they view as inspiring? and what do they want to drive their children's optimism forward, right? This is in some sense an ode to progress, but more importantly, it's a way to encourage the future.

40:26How do you encourage inspiration in young people, right? How do you get people jazzed about the future and technology and optimism and doing things and building things and moving society forward? And I think part of this lack of ongoing societal beauty and ongoing great works is a reflection of cynicism that to your point came in in the 60s and 70s and has really kind of spoiled the well. Well, yeah, I mean, that's one of my favorite areas to read about. Basically, like in the mid 60s, Malcolm X, JFK, RFK, there was a series of assassinations and like one can argue that that was like the death of innocents in America.

41:05And so it's like kind of like an interesting period to read about. Maybe. I mean, you look at all the stuff that happened in history before that some pretty awful stuff happened roughly every couple decades. World War II was not a happy time. World War I was not a happy time. The Civil War was not. There's a lot of shit that's gone down. No doubt about that. Maybe the boomers self-internalized things in a different way because they were self-absorbed as a generation. Maybe for them it was a big moment. It just seems like there was just a shift. There was some mindset shift. Maybe that is what it was attributed to.

41:38I don't know what it's attributed to. Have you ever... I don't know if you guys... Sean, you definitely have. Maybe you have, actually. Sean, driving a Duke, do you guys ever remember seeing all these crosses on the side of the highway in the South? I bet Ari has. But there was this guy who was... When he was old, and he had saved up roughly$3 or$4 million. And he spent all of that money building crosses on the side of the highway. Now, regardless if you dig Christianity or not, it doesn't matter. but I always thought it was so interesting that this guy dedicated that money to that. You guys don't remember seeing this.

42:14It was like a big deal in the South. You'd be driving to the South and every 50 or 100 miles, you would just see this huge cross and that's all you saw. Or you would see these billboards that says Jesus saves. Do you remember those? Yeah, I've seen those. I never understood what that is. Dude, and it has a phone number that you could call and I would call that phone number every once in a while just to see what would happen and at this point, a lot of it goes to a dead phone number but it was basically, a lot of it came down to this one man who had saved roughly$3 million and he spent it on that.

42:41And then other churches started following it and started doing it. And I always thought it was really interesting, the idea of just spending money just for this cause. And 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? I don't know. I mean, I think it'd be good to try and get the first thing up and running and then do it as a joint effort with lots of people. Because again, the hope is you actually feed the needs of local places. Another example where I think there's this sort of craftsmanship applied, there's a park in Oslo where somebody spent, I don't know, a decade, two decades, building statues in this one park.

43:23It was an artist who went in and you go in and it's all this consistent series of statues from one person, one artist who spent a big chunk of his life making them. I think he made something like 200 sculptures over a few decades. There's other forms of this in terms of people trying to contribute works. The question is, again, why aren't we doing it? What happened? What happened to us societally to stop doing all this really inspiring, amazing stuff? I think the good news is it only takes one. 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.

44:03And 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. That's our moon mission, right? It's like, wow, this guy just poured his entire talent and net worth into these like super high risk, low probability, useful for society, hard but awesome projects. And he pulled it off and that changed the wiring in every founder's brain. It doesn't even matter what you're doing. You might be doing some boring insurance company, but that example still lives in your brain.

44:37And I think that's pretty powerful. You're a pretty serious person. You take life serious. You see problems and you're like, I want to solve them. What do you do just for shits and giggles? Just to unwind. Before you have kids, there's all sorts of things you do that the time goes away for once you have them. But I used to do, I don't know what to call it, intensive travel. So I'd go to India for two months and do yoga for two months there with a guy who learned from a guy in a cave kind of thing. Or just different forms of very immersive travel was one thing I used to do a lot of. If somebody today had the freedom to do that, what would be your, what's Gil's guide to that intensive travel?

45:18What would you tell, what was really transformative for you or what was your approach to that? Yeah, I think it's basically spend at least a month in one city and decide to learn something there. And 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, or maybe you want to, you know, in my case, it was go to India and do this very intensive yoga experience. Or maybe, you know, and especially if it's part of a community that you join, you get really immersed in interesting ways and not just the topic, but also the people around it and the local people, right?

45:54Because 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. And he said it was like the best month he'd spent. He went down to Brazil and enrolled in some classes down there and he just spent a month doing it. And so I personally think it's super interesting and 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, 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.

46:31That's check the box, right? Okay, there's the Leaning Tower Pisa check. We saw it. It's like you stop for 10 minutes and then you run to the next thing. That's very different from, hey, I'm just going to sit in one place for a month or two. That's awesome. Yeah, I've had great experiences doing that. We used to go to Buenos Aires for basically four to five weeks, live in one city, live like a local. And everywhere I would go, I would do two things. I would play basketball because that was like something I grew up doing. So 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.

47:03But also I would go, if I ever traveled with my brother-in-law, he loves jujitsu. And I'll never go with him to a jujitsu class here in the States. But jujitsu has this like really intense camaraderie and openness and inclusiveness. If you go to, so we went to jujitsu gyms in Spain and you immediately feel like you're one of the people and you're learning from them and they have actually different techniques And again, we don't even speak the language, but man, it's like an incredible fast way to bond or get more out of experience. I actually feel like the jiu-jitsu community is one of the most vibrant ones right now along those lines.

47:35And to your point, it's basically you go anywhere in the world and you 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. And everybody was kind of in the same, they had the same vibe and they were part of the same kind of crew. Like you were instantly adopted. and my sense is that Jiu Jitsu community today is a good example of that where you just, you show up, you're instantly part of it, they pull you in, everybody has a common thing to talk about, everybody has common interests in a really positive way even though it's a very diverse group around the world.

48:06Right. And there aren't that many communities like that and I think there's almost these interesting questions of like how do these form and why do they persist and all the rest. But this is back to my point on doing quote unquote a hobby or learning something that it's actually plugging into a community like that I think is important. I love that. I think of all the things we talked about today, that was the most useful. Surprisingly, right? 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? I guess they could find me on Twitter.

48:35I'm at Aladgil. And then just hope more people go and build interesting things. I think there's a lot to do. We appreciate you. Great. Yeah, thanks so much for the time. All right, well, take care.

48:52want to. I put my all in it like my days off on the road. Let's travel. Never looking back.

49:02Hey, let's take a quick break because there's a quote that I love. I want to read you. It's that we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. And, you know, as an entrepreneur, if you're using a bank that was built in the nineties, you're operating like you're in the nineties. And trust me, I've been there clunky portals, random holds on your money,$50 wire fees, and then being told, please visit your local branch. Well, that's why I switched to a different type of banking solution, Mercury. It turns your financial chores into a smooth workflow. You can do wires, invoices, cards, reimbursements, two clicks, and I'm done.

49:32If you're already using Mercury, respect. If you're still using one of the old big banks, I got questions for you. So go visit Mercury.com and give it a test drive. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, column N8, and Evolve Bank and Trust members, FDIC.