#863: Elad Gil, Consigliere to Empire Builders — How to Spot Billion-Dollar Companies Before Everyone Else, The Misty AI Frontier, How Coke Beat Pepsi, When Consensus Pays, and Much More

23:07One is if the underlying model gets better, does your product or service get dramatically better for your customers in a way that they still want to keep using you? Second, how deep and broad are you going from a product perspective? Are you building out multiple products? Are they all integrated in a cohesive whole? Is it really being built directly into the processes in a company in a way that it's hard to pull out? You know, often the issue for companies in adoption of AI isn't how good is the AI, it's how much do I have to change the workflows and the ways that my people do things? in order to adopt it.

23:38It's about change management usually. It's not about technology. And so if you've been able to embed yourself enough into workflows and how people do business and how they work and how everything else kind of ties together, that tends to be quite durable. Are you capturing and storing and using proprietary data? Sometimes it's useful. I think data modes in general are overstated, but I think sometimes it can be actually quite useful and that's usually the system of record view of the world. So, you know, there's a handful of criteria around like, will this thing be long-term defensible or not?

24:06And the application level, that's often one potential lens on it.

24:36Tim Ferriss:seems to be, again, from a mostly layperson perspective, i.e. me, that the labs probably can build what they are currently selling without too much trouble. Do they aim to be acquired by a lab, in which case there's sort of a build versus buy decision for the lab itself? Are they aiming for one of not the open AIs or anthropics, but maybe somebody who's trying to get more skin in the game like Amazon or fill in the blank. What are the exit options? I think there's a lot of exit options. And the thing that's crazy right now is if you go back 10 or 15 years, the biggest market cap in the world was like 300 billion.

25:19The biggest tech market cap was, I don't know, 200-ish or something. I think the biggest one at the time was Exxon or somebody, right, like 15 years ago. And over the last 10 or 15 years, what happens is we suddenly ended up with these multi-trillion dollar market caps, which everybody thought was nuts at the time, but things will probably only get bigger. There'll probably be more aggregation versus less into the biggest winners. And there's more and more companies who have these market caps between, say, 100 billion and a few trillion in a way that's just unprecedented. And that means there's enormous buying power because 1 % of 3 trillion is 30 billion, right?

25:54So you can do 1 % and pay$30 billion for something, which is insane, right? That's really unprecedented. And that means that these really big acquisitions can happen.

26:03Tim Ferriss:For the companies that I'm imagining, again, I don't want to name names, that may seem to have a limited lifespan. When I'm in these small group threads with friends of mine who are oftentimes, not always, but I'm in a bunch of them. And when they're tech investors, very successful tech investors, and I'm like, okay, these five companies, you've got 10 ships. How would you allocate your 10 ships, right? There are certain companies that can consistently get zero, even though they're reasonably well-known. Why would one of the labs buy one of those? Depends on what it is. And it may be a lab. It may be one of the big tech incumbents in Apple, Amazon, Google's kind of the things.

26:42There's Oracle, there's Samsung, there's Tesla, there's SpaceX now in the market doing things that, there's a bunch of different buyers of different types. There's Snowflake and Databricks, there's Stripe, Coinbase if you're doing financial service. There's just a ton of companies that actually are quite large. That's kind of the point. And so often you end up selling to one of four things, right? You can sell to one of the big labs or hyperscalers or giant tech companies. You can sell to somebody who cares a lot about your vertical. So for example, a Thomson Reuters, if you're doing legal or accounting or things that are kind of related to that.

27:14I think actually one thing that doesn't happen enough is merger of competitors, particularly private companies where you can do that. because ultimately, if your primary vector is winning and you're neck and neck with somebody and you're competing on every deal and you're destroying pricing for each other, like maybe it's better to just merge, right? That actually was X.com and PayPal in the 90s, right? Elon Musk, Peter K.O. were running different companies and they merged because they said, we're people doing this, why fight?

27:39Tim Ferriss:Yeah, or Uber, Lyft way back in the day, right? That might not have been a merger, it might have been an acquisition. Yeah, and the rumor is that that almost happened and then, you know, the Uber side walked away from it. but all the money that Uber spent on fighting Lyft for all those years maybe would have been better spent just buying them. Maybe not, right? I don't know the exact math. But often it actually does make sense to say, you know what, we'll just stop fighting it out and we'll just combine and just go win. You know, because if the primary purpose is to win the market, you're already fighting all these big incumbents that already exist anyhow.

28:08So why make it even harder?

28:10Tim Ferriss:As you know, we talk about this a lot, but we'll talk about you with your investing hat on. But before you even put that let's call it full-time investing hat on. You had a lot in your background that may or may not have helped you. And I'm curious, if you look at your biology background, the math background, do you think any of those things or other elements materially contributed to how you think about investing that has given you an advantage in, I suppose there are different stages to winning deals, but sometimes they're not crowded. But let's just talk about the selection process. The math stuff helped me, I think, in two ways.

28:53One is it's helped me with certain aspects of technical or algorithmic CS and understanding it. And sometimes it's useful in the context of how certain things work in AI or things like that, or just fluency of numbers and data and I don't know what to call it, nerd language or something. And I did the math degree, honestly, just for fun. And I think that's actually the thing that was helpful. I only did an undergrad degree in math, so I didn't go that far with it. But I did the very sort of abstract pure math stuff. And I think that was a good forcing function of how to really think logically step-by-step about things.

29:24Because, you know, roughly the way that at least I learned how to do proofs was you do the logical sequence, but then sometimes you do these intuitive leaps and then go back and try and prove it to yourself or flesh out the reasoning behind that intuitive leap. And I think sometimes investing is a little bit like that. When did you first have the inkling that you could be good at investing?

29:48Tim Ferriss:And that could be investing writ large, it could be maybe within the context of our conversations, startups and angel investing. When did you first kind of go, huh, yeah, maybe I could be good at this? Was there a moment or a deal or anything like that, that comes to mind? uh not really i'm really hard on myself so you know even now i second guess myself a lot somebody was telling me that the two people that always beat themselves up the most in hindsight is me and this one other person who's another well-known founder slash investor and so i think you know i don't think there's a single moment where i'm like wow this makes sense for me to do i think it just kind of organically kept going because i was getting into some very strong companies.

30:31And then that allowed me to sort of continue what I'm doing. Yeah. I wish I hadn't done that like that.

30:38Tim Ferriss:God damn it. You need to revise your Genesis story like every good founder. Yeah. Ever since I was seven, I've been thinking about investing in technology. Right. So getting into those deals, what allowed you to get into those deals, right? Because some people have an informational advantage and they put themselves in a position to have an informational advantage, right? And I think that had I not, don't want this to be a leading question, but it's like, had I not moved to Silicon Valley when I did, like 2000, and then subsequently stayed there, moved to San Francisco specifically, like nothing that I was able to do in angel investing would have been possible.

31:15Tim Ferriss:But there's more to your story because a lot of people move there with hopes of startup riches in whatever capacity, not saying that that's why you moved there. But what was it that allowed you to get into those deals? There are certain things that come to mind based on our prior conversations, but I'll just leave it at that. Why were you able to get into or select those deals? I think that's what happened early and what happens now. And I think those two things are different. I think to your point, the single most important thing for anybody wanting to break into any industry is go to the headquarters or cluster of that industry, like move to wherever that thing is.

31:56And all the advice that you can do anything from anywhere and everything's remote is all BS. And you see that for every industry, not just tech. You know, if you wanted to get into the movie business, people wouldn't say, you know, hey, you can write a film script from anywhere. You can digitally score from anywhere. You can edit it from anywhere. You can film it anywhere. Like, go to Dallas. They'd say, go to Hollywood. And if you want to do something in finance and you're like, well, you could raise money from anywhere and come up with trading strategies and a hedge fund strategy from anywhere and you could do it from anywhere.

32:24You know, people wouldn't say, hey, go to, you know, whatever. Seattle, they'd be like, go to New York or go to XYZ Financial Center. So the same is true for tech. Shreya and my team has been performing this sort of unicorn analysis of where is all the private market cap aggregating for technology. And traditionally, about half of it's been the U.S., and then half of that has been the Bay Area. But with AI, 91 % of private technology market cap is the Bay Area. 91 % of the entire global set of AI market cap is all in one, you know, earn by 10 area. So if you want to do stuff in AI, you should probably be in the Bay Area.

33:00Probably the secondary place is New York, and then after that, it drops off a cliff, right? And really, it's the Bay Area. If you want to do defense tech, you probably should be in, you know, Southern California, close to where SpaceX and Anderlar and sort of Irvine, Orange County, et cetera, or El Segundo. There's a lot of startups there. If you want to do fintech and crypto, maybe it's New York. But the reality is these are very strong clusters. So to your point, number one, is I was just in the right location. I was in the right networks. And I default was, you know, I was running a startup myself.

33:30I was at Google for many years, and then I left to start a company. And people just started coming to me for advice. And the way I ended up investing in Airbnb is I was helping them when there were eight people or something raise their Series A. And I introduced them to a bunch of people and helped with some of the strategy there in very light ways, right? They would have done it without me. And they said, hey, at the end of it, do you want to invest a little bit? I said, great, that sounds wonderful. So it's very organic. Or the way I invested in Stripe is I'd sold a sort of infrastructure early API company to Twitter.

33:58and when Twitter was, say, 90 people or so. And I sent an email to Patrick, the CEO of Stripe, just saying, hey, I've heard great things about you and I really like what Stripe is doing and I would use it for my own startup and I sold this API company myself. Do you want to just talk about this stuff? And so he went on a couple walks and then a week or two later, he texts me and he's like, hey, we're doing a run. Do you want to invest? So the first few things that I did were very organic where the founders were like, oh, I want you on board. I didn't think, oh, I should be an investor and I'm going to chase things.

34:24I just really like talking to smart people and I liked working on certain business problems and I love technology and his translation. And so it was very like, I was just a nerd and I met other nerds and we hit it off.

34:37Tim Ferriss:It just struck me that I'm sure people have heard or I'm sure you've heard this before, but if you want money, ask for advice. And if you want advice, ask for money. It just struck me that it kind of goes the other way around too. It's like, if you offer a bunch of advice, oftentimes you get to give money. And if you try to give money, you might get solicited for advice. Yeah, that's a good point. When did you write the High Growth Handbook? When was that published? It's a while ago now. It's probably like seven-ish years ago, something like that. Seven years ago. All right. We're going to come back to that in a minute.

35:10Tim Ferriss:You were in the right place, geographically speaking, right? You were in the center of the switchboard. And like you said, some of these initial kind of standout investments came about very organically. and what I'd be curious to hear because you also said yourself not too long ago there's what I did then there's what I did now there's also what you did in between right along the way and I'm wondering for instance if you would still stand by this this is from that first round interview I was mentioning as a general rule when I make investments it's market first and the strength of the team second and there's more to it but would you still agree with that?

35:4890 % yes every once in a while you meet somebody exceptional and you just back them or something maybe so early. Like when I, I led the first round of perplexity, like the very, very first round. And the way that came about was Arvin, the CEO, just, I think he like pinged me on LinkedIn, literally. And this was when nobody was doing anything in AI and he was like an open AI engineer or researcher. And he's like, hey, I'm at open AI, which nobody cares about at the time. And I'm thinking of doing something in AI and I heard that you're talking about this stuff and nobody else is talking about it.

36:17And can we meet up? And so we just started meeting every two weeks and brainstorming. And then that led to like investing in that. And that was kind of a people first thing where he was just so good. And every time we talk, he'd show up a week later with the thing that we discussed built. Like who does that?

36:31Tim Ferriss:Yeah, yeah, that's a good sign. So good. Or, you know, the way I ended up investing in Anduril was, you know, Google shuts down Maven, which was their sort of defense project. And so I think, well, if the incumbents aren't going to do it, what a great place for startups to play. Because there's been a long history of the, you know, Silicon Valley and the defense industry. That's HP and that's a lot of the, you know, early brands. And so I was just looking for something. There's somebody to work on this area and it was very unpopular at the time. And I ran into, I think it was Trey Stevens, who's one of the co-founders of Anderil, who's also a founder's fund, at some lunch or something else, again, right city to be in.

37:10And he said, oh, I'm working on this new defense thing. And I said, amazing, let's talk about it. Sometimes it's just looking for these things, too, in a market. And sometimes it's people. So Anderil was looking for a market and then finding amazing people. Perplexity was kind of in between where it was like I was looking at everything in AI because I thought it was going to be incredibly important, but not very many people were. and then I just ran across an exceptional individual. And that's when I funded OpenAI. That's when I funded Harvey, which is the early legal thing. I funded a lot of really early stuff because they were the only people doing anything in this market that I thought would be really important.

37:42Tim Ferriss:Let me come back to a few things you said. So you mentioned the perplexity founder, or later the founder, who said you're talking about this stuff, right? Or he heard or read or found you talking about this stuff. Where was that? Was that posts on your blog? Was it somewhere else? How did he actually find you talking about anything? Yeah, I mean, I think he pinged me in part because I was involved with a bunch of the prior wave of technology companies, Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase, Instacart, Square, a bunch of stuff like that. And so I think at that point, I was already known as a founder and investor.

38:16But then on top of that, I was just trolling AI researchers and just asking them about what's going on because it was so interesting. There's a bunch of art that was being done with these things called GANs at the time, these generative adversarial networks. And so I was playing around with that. I tried to hire engineers to build me effectively with my journey because I just thought it'd be really cool to make it easy to make AI art.

38:35Tim Ferriss:Let me pause for a second because this is my second question and it's a good time. When you mentioned AI, I thought it would be incredibly important. What were the indicators of that? What was the smoke in the distance where you're like, oh, that's an interesting direction? I think there was two or three things. AI was one of those things that people always talked about. So when I was doing my math degree, I took a lot of kind of theoretical CS classes and there were the early neural network classes and things like that and the math behind it. And so there's always this promise of building these artificial intelligences of different forms.

39:08And one could argue Google was the first AI first company. And back then it was called machine learning and it was, you know, different technology basis in some sense. And I think 2012 was when AlexNet came out and there's this proof that you can start scaling things and have really interesting characteristics in terms of how AI systems work. And then 2017 is when a team at Google invented the transformer architecture, which everything is based on now, or roughly everything. And so, for example, if you look at GPT, for ChatGPT, the T stands for transformer. And around 2020-ish, I think, was when GPT-3 came out.

39:41And that was such a big step from GPT-2. And it still wasn't good enough to really do stuff with, but you're like, oh shit, the scaling law papers are out. The step function and capabilities was huge. You suddenly have a generalizable model available via an API that anybody can ping. And so just extrapolate that out to the next step and this is going to be really important. So it's basically looking at that capability step and playing around with the technology and then reading the scaling law papers. Or just in general, the scaling laws seem to work for everything. And you're like, wow, this is going to be really, really important so let me start getting involved with it.

40:15Tim Ferriss:Do you think you would have or could have done that without a mathematics background? I'm guessing there were probably some other folks, but that leads me to the question of how are you finding and ingesting that? Was it the talk of the town? So it was, in a sense, within your social circles and the networks that you're a part of, it was open discussion, so you were engaged with it? Or are you ingesting vast quantities of information from different fields? And this happened to be something that really caught your attention. I guess it's three things. I mean, I've always ingested a lot of information from a lot of different fields just because I like learning about stuff.

40:49And I was always this mix of like math and biology and, you know, anime and art and other things. So, you know, it's always kind of a mix. And then it was something that my friends were talking about, but it was a bit more like toy-like. Oh, this is cool. And look at what came out. But most people didn't then extrapolate. It's kind of like early crypto or Bitcoin. Like everybody was talking about it, but very few people bought it. And so I think that was part of it. And then third, honestly, I just thought it was really neat stuff that I kept playing around with. This is back to the GAN stuff and the art where these different models would come out and you could mess around with them.

41:20And one of the things that's really under discussed in terms of the importance of it relative to this wave of foundation models and AI and everything else is the way AI or machine learning used to work is your team at a company or wherever else would go and there'd be what's known as an MLOps team, operations team whose whole thing was like helping you set up all the data and the pipelines and everything to train a model. And you train a model that was custom to your use case and what you were trying to accomplish. And then it was, you had to build a bunch of internal services to interact with that model.

41:50So it was a huge pain to get to the point where you had a working ML system up and running in production. And then suddenly you have a thing where you just do an API call. So with a line of code or a few lines of code, anybody anywhere in the world can ping it. But not just that, is generalizable. So it's not just specialized to one use case, like spell correction or whatever. You can use it for anything. And it has all of the internet embedded in it in some sense in terms of the knowledge base. And it can start having these advanced reasoning capabilities. And so one of the most important things is, hey, you can get it with a couple lines of code.

42:23You don't have to go and build an MLOps team. You have to host it. You have to interact with it. You don't have to do all this extra stuff. It just works. That's really important. It's huge.

42:32Tim Ferriss:Yeah. It's kind of hard to overstate.

42:38Tim Ferriss:Just a quick thanks to our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. As many of you know, for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a midnight luxe mattress from today's sponsor, Helix Sleep. I also have one in the guest bedroom downstairs and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. It's something they comment on without any prompting from me whatsoever. I also recently had a chance to test the Helix Sunset Elite. The Sunset Elite delivers exceptional comfort while putting the right support in the right spots. It is made with five tailored foam layers, including a base layer with full perimeter zoned lumbar support, right where I need it, and middle layers with premium foam and microcoils that create a soft contouring feel.

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45:15Tim Ferriss:So I have a million questions for you. The problem with this is like the embarrassment of riches of directions that we could go. So I am using, in my team, Claude Code and assorted tools for all sorts of stuff right now. And one of them, it just so happens, overlaps with an area of great skill for you and experience, which is angel investing. So this is the first time where I feel really enabled to do, and there is some manual effort involved, as you might imagine, but to go back and do an analysis of 20 years of angel investing to try to do any number of things. And I suspect that a lot of what interests me is not particularly useful, like doing some counterfactuals.

45:59Tim Ferriss:What if I had held each of these for three years, for five years, for whatever? I mean, that's kind of like just opus de whipping myself in the back for the most part. But in doing an analysis like that, there are certain things that immediately come to mind for me that might be of interest. And I want to hear what you would do, if you would even do this. Part of it is, frankly, just curiosity. Are the stories I tell myself about this true or not? So I'm interested, who made certain introductions? Are there certain people who just took me there, basically people in hospice care and shipped them over as a last-ditch effort?

46:32Tim Ferriss:Are there people who actually sent me good stuff consistently, et cetera, et cetera? So there are a million and one ways I could try to interrogate the data and enrich it. We're doing a pretty good job of enriching it. I mean, Claude and other tools, OpenAI is very good at this. What are some of the more interesting questions or lines of examination, you think, looking back, whatever it is? In my case, it's about roughly 20 years of stuff. You know, the weird thing I've been doing is uploading pictures of founders and asking the models to predict if they'd be good founders. Oh, wow. Because if you think about it, we do this all the time when we meet people.

47:08We quickly try to create an assessment of that person and their personality and what they're like. And there's all these micro features. Like, do you have crow's feet by your eyes, which suggests that your smiles are genuine? And what does that imply about the sense of humor you have? Or furrowed your brow over time? And what does that mean? So there's all these micro features. And when you meet people, you actually can get a pretty quick impression of them pretty fast. It doesn't mean it's correct, right? But we actually do this really fast as people. So I have this whole set of prompts that I've been messing around with just for fun.

47:40around can you extrapolate like a person's personality based off of a few images? And therefore, can you be predictive about their behavior in any way? I think that's fun, right? Yeah.

47:51Tim Ferriss:Are you finding any signal there? Yeah, it works pretty well. Wow. So I've been doing weird shit, right? Practice smiling, people. I'm just kidding. Yeah, I know. But I think it's interesting, right? Because we do this all the time where we read people. And that's part of the prompt. It's like you're a very good cold reader of people based on micro features and et cetera, et cetera. you know kind of spell it out and then based on that you know not only give me your interpretation of this person but explain the specific micro features for each thing that you're stating about the person and it'll break it down for you it's amazing like imagine what this technology is it's crazy and again i'm not saying it's fully accurate and i'm saying you know it'll be predictive but it's done pretty well in terms of nailing people it's even done things like oh this person probably has this type of sense of humor.

48:37Or this person probably holds themselves back in most social settings and then chimes in with a witty, wry thing that nobody expects or whatever. I mean, it's very specific. Very specific. Wow, that's amazing, right? And so I've been doing stuff like that, which may not be your question, but I've been finding it really fun.

48:55Tim Ferriss:Well, it's related in the sense that, and I'm sure I'm missing some steps, but I love angel investing. The dose makes the poison, So there's usually a case to be made when I get to a certain threshold. I'm like, okay, this isn't fun anymore. I love dark chocolate too, but I don't want just to be force-fed dark chocolate all day. But, and Dean and I have talked about this, I really do enjoy the learning and the sport of it, frankly, and interacting with some very, very smart people. Not all of them work out as far as founders of companies, but ultimately, I'm trying to figure out how to separate signal from noise.

49:34And also, it's fun to try to use anything, but in this case, investing, to sharpen your own thinking, right?

49:42Tim Ferriss:And to stress test your own beliefs and the assumptions that undergird some of your predictions, right? Things like that. Yeah, I'm just wondering if you've ever done sort of a retrospective analysis of your startup investing, or if you're like, no, more market recent style, only forward. You know, early on when I was first starting to invest, I would have this long grid of things by which I would score each company and then I'd go back and see if it was correct. It was roughly correct. I think the hard part is there's a lot of like randomness in outcomes. You know, there's the company that sells for a few billion dollars that you thought was dead or whatever it is, right?

50:17Sure. How do you score things like that? Right now we're in this really weird market moment where trillions of dollars of market cap are all chasing the same prize. And so they're going to do all sorts of stuff that wouldn't happen normally. And it's rational stuff, in my opinion, but it's just stuff that in any other time would never happen. So it's really hard to account for that kind of thing. Relative to all this, I'm much more in the market and recent camp of like, I think very little about the past. I think close to zero about my own past. You know, I just am like, let's keep going. And maybe that's bad.

50:48And there should be dramatically more self-reflection. And I try to self-reflect in the moment, but I don't try to re-extrapolate and examine my entire life and decisions. And, you know, if anything, most of the decisions have been ones where I'm really upset with myself for not being more aggressive on something. In other words, I invested in the company, but I should have tried even harder to invest more, even if I tried really, really hard. Because, you know, there's a handful of companies that really matter. That's all that kind of matters as an investor. Obviously, as a person, I enjoy getting involved with different companies and different founders and helping them whether the thing works or not.

51:20or I think the technology is interesting or whatever. But the reality is from a returns perspective, there's a very clear power law that people talk about. And it's true. And I remember a friend of mine did this analysis. I think it may have been Jerry Milner or someone where it's like, look at all the companies from like, I don't remember the exact dates, 2000 or 2004 until today in technology. And it was something like 100 companies drove like 90 something percent of all the returns. and 10 companies total drove like 80 % of all returns over a two-decade period in technology. If you weren't in that 10 companies, you were a bad investor.

52:01Once you start dealing with these power laws and these outsized outcomes and all that, how can you rate that? It's basically, did you hit one of 10 things or not? That's really the rating. That's probably the correct rate for investment. it.

52:12Tim Ferriss:So I'd love to try to focus on some early-ish decisions on this podcast, because like you said, the earlier decisions, there's how you did things then, there's how you're doing things now, which isn't to say that one is better than the other, but certainly what you do in the past tends to inform what you're able to do and what you do in the present. And what I'm curious about, we won't spend a ton of time on this, but it might be interesting to folks, is to discuss when you moved from purely doing angel investing yourself to involving other investors in your deals. And there are multiple ways to do this, but the reason I want to ask this is because you did a number of SPVs.

52:59Tim Ferriss:I'll explain what that is, special purpose vehicle. But for folks, you might be familiar with venture capital firm. They have funds and they raise, let's just call it$100 million for a fund. It can be more or less, of course. Then they invest in a bunch of different companies, and then you see who wins, who loses. And then if there are profits, I guess conventionally, let's just use the textbook example. The venture capital firm takes 20 % of the upside, and then the LPs, the investors, get 80%. And the venture capital firm takes a management fee to keep the lights on, although it usually does a lot more than keep the lights on.

53:33Tim Ferriss:With the SPVs, you're investing in, let's just say, for simplicity, a single company. And there are advantages to that in simplicity for somebody who's putting together the SPV, but you also have a lot of reputational risk. Because if you have a fund and you have a couple of losers, your investors don't automatically go to zero. But if you have an SPV and it goes to zero, that could really hurt you reputationally. And when I look at some of your early SPVs, which I think included certainly a number of name brands like Instacart and so on, how did you choose which companies to do the SPVs with?

54:11Tim Ferriss:Because that seems like a very important set of decisions to lay the groundwork for creating optionality for what you do after that. I think, to your point, I've always been terrified of losing other people's money. I'm fine if I lose my old money. It's my decision. I'm an adult. It's okay. but I've always been, you know, people give me money are adults or institutions, etc. to invest on their behalf. But, you know, similarly there, I was just terrified of ever losing money for people. And so I've tried over time to be judicious behind the SPVs that I did early on. And the focus was on things that I thought would really be outsized companies.

54:46And so that was, to your point, Instacart. It was early Stripe. It was Coinbase. There's a couple of things like that that were amongst my very first SPVs. And the emphasis was very much on, do I think this can be a massive thing, you know? And also do I think there's enough downside protection in some sense that if it didn't work as well as I thought, it would still be a good outcome for people. So yeah, I try to do that very diligently. It's interesting because a lot of people ping me for help as they think about becoming investors or they're scouts for a fund, which means basically they're given a small amount of money by a venture capital fund.

55:14You know, Sequoia famously has this program. They give people money and then those people invest money on their behalf. And some of the scouts that I've talked to basically treat it like free money or an option. They're just kind of like, I'll just throw in a bunch of stuff, maybe something works. And I pointed out to them, hey, if you actually want to become a professional investor at some point, this is kind of your track record. A, you're a fiduciary in some sense, so maybe I'll be more capable from that perspective. But B, this will establish your track record. And do you want to have a good one or a bad one?

55:41And how do you think about that? And again, sometimes people just get lucky and they hit that one thing out of 100, but that more than returns everything and they look great. But it's hard to be consistently good at this stuff or consistently hit great companies. All right.

55:53Tim Ferriss:So I want to double click on a few things you said, and maybe you could walk us through a pseudonymous example. It doesn't need to be a named company, but when you're talking about setting your track record, you did an excellent job of that before you then went on later to raise funds and so on. and I would love you to perhaps explain some of the things you do in diligence or how you weight things differently and also how you think about the capped minimum downside. I'm not sure that's the exact wording that you used in selecting those deals because you could have selected any number of deals on a sort of due diligence level.

56:30Tim Ferriss:What's the kind of stuff that you focus on maybe more than others and what are the things you pay less attention to than others? There's a big difference between early and late things. On the early side, to the point earlier, I tend to spend a lot more time on the market than most early stage investors. Most early stage investors say, I just care about the team and how good are they? But I've seen teams crushed by terrible markets and I've seen reasonably crappy teams do very well. And so, you know, at this point, I think the market is more important, although I think obviously great teams can find their way if they decide to shift around a bit.

56:59So I index a lot on market early and that may be customer calls. I may be trying to understand, do I think something could be big? It could just be some intuition around, hey, you know, defense is really important. Nobody's doing defense. Let me find a defense company. So I tend to index a lot on that. And relatedly, I've tended to avoid science projects. And there's some people who get really distracted by, wow, this is really cool. It's quantum and it's this and it's that. And I've largely avoided those things. And, you know, sometimes I miss things that were really good, but often that was the right call.

57:28I actually think SPAC saved the sort of hard tech and science-based investing industry. because if you look at what happened, basically at the market peak, a bunch of SPACs took a bunch of companies public that would not have been able to raise money in private markets later. And they gave them enough money to keep going. But more importantly, they returned a bunch of money to these hard tech funds and that saved them from going under. It gave them all their returns. It was basically the SPAC era. So Chamath basically saved hard tech. I mean that seriously, not being in cheek. And I largely avoided that kind of class of companies.

57:58And I'm not saying it was smart. I would have made money off of it. I just thought there was all sorts of capitalization issues and science risk and market risk and other things to them. For later stage stuff, the hard part often is everything on paper gets modeled out for a late stage company as a two to three X from that investment point. Right. Because all the funds that are driving the rounds underwrite against some IRR clock, 25 % IRR, whatever it is. And so they all come up with these models. and then the models all say all these companies are basically going to 2 to 3x and the art there or the science there, whatever you want to call it, is that a 0.5x company?

58:33Is it going to drop in value or is that a 10x? And how do you know it's a 10x versus a 2 to 3x versus a 0.5? And that's the harder part of growth investing. And there's a subset of things that you're like, this thing will just keep going and here's why. But often it's not mathematical. Often that's just like some market dynamic or some core insight or some market share question. And people tend to make that stuff really complicated and they have these really complicated multi-page models and 50-page memos and all the rest. And often these things boil down to one single question. What is the one thing I need to believe about this company that makes me think it's going to continue to be really big?

59:08If it's three things, it's too complicated. It's probably not going to work. If it's no things, then it doesn't make much sense. So usually there's one or two things that are really the core insights you need to understand the outcome for something.

59:19Tim Ferriss:Could you give an example of one of those beliefs for any company that comes to mind? I'll give you two or three of them. I mean, Coinbase, part of it was just, hey, this is an index on crypto and crypto will keep growing. Because if Coinbase trades every main cryptocurrency and they take a cut of every transaction and have enough volume, they've effectively bought a basket of every cryptocurrency by investing in Coinbase. That was the premise there. Stripe, it was, they're an index on e-commerce and e-commerce will keep growing. back then. Now it's much more complex and there's all sorts of great drivers of its performance.

59:53Andrew Will was, hey, machine vision and drones are going to be important. AI and drones are going to be important for defense. Well, that was it for the belief, for the core belief. It was like cost plus model versus, you know, hardware margin. You know, Andrew Will actually had four or five things that were important there that were kind of like a checklist for a defense tech company. But for a lot of the other ones, it was like e-commerce is good.

1:00:13Tim Ferriss:This is probably too inside baseball, but what were the stages of the companies that you mentioned when you created the SPVs, roughly? Well, I first invested in Stripe when it was like eight people, and then I kept following on, and I ran out of my own money, frankly, and that's when I started doing SPVs. So I think I did my first SPV in Stripe around the Series C-ish. We were in there, something like that. Got it. And were the others more or less similar-ish? Instacart, et cetera? It was probably roughly in that ballpark CED, kind of that range. No, I didn't have funds and everything else. And I was putting as much as I could personally into these things both earlier, but honestly, I just kept going when I could.

1:00:54Tim Ferriss:When you're looking at trying to determine if something is a 0.5x or a 10x, in addition to the core belief, what are other layers of due diligence that you bring to bear on trying to ascertain that? Where something falls on that spectrum? I mean, I do enormous due diligence. So, you know, meet with the CFO multiple times, walk through all the financials, walk through the financial model, walk through customers, call customers, look at executive team. It's a bunch of stuff. My fund is the only one I know that actually does cash reconciliations where we'll go through and do a cash audit to look at cash flows for later stage things.

1:01:25So I do enormous diligence because I want to make sure I'm not doing something inappropriate. But the flip side of it is most of it just collapses into like, what's the one thing? Also, when I work with a company, I actually try to be very fast and straightforward on the diligence in terms of saying, let's just talk about, A, we need to just make sure financials are correct. There's the basics. But let's collapse it down into one or two core questions that help us understand if this thing will keep going. Not, here's 30 pages of questions that don't matter. Right? Which is what a lot of people do.

1:01:55They're like, hey, we need to know the secondary cohort on this fucking thing that's like a tiny product that who cares? They just waste time. They waste the founder's time for the team's time. And I try very, very hard not to do that. As a former entrepreneur myself, I know how precious the time is, and I know how annoying those questions are.

1:02:12Tim Ferriss:I was actually going to, at one point, ask you about this, but we don't need to spend too much time on it. You have a post, this is from a while back, 2011, listing questions a VC will ask a startup. You omitted some of the questions like the one that you just mentioned, but I am curious if any of these questions or additional questions come to mind when you are talking to founders, could be early stage or later stage, that you actually apply yourself. And I know it's from 2011, so I'm not expecting you to remember the post itself. Yeah, I haven't looked at that post in a really long time. I'm actually writing another book now that is sort of the zero to one startup phase.

1:02:50And it gets into some questions like that. You know, I think the reality is venture capital has changed dramatically since I wrote that post, right? Because in 2011, the venture capital funds were largely doing like seeds through series D, E maybe, and then companies would go public. And this whole like 20-year private company thing didn't exist. Do you know why there's a four-year vest on stock?

1:03:11Tim Ferriss:No. Why is that? I can kind of guess now that we're talking about IPOs, but go ahead. Why? Yeah. In the 1970s, they came up with a four-year vest on stock options for employees because companies would go public within four years. And so then you're done. Literally, right? And so it's like a four-year clock usually. And then when Google took six years to go public, everybody's like, oh my gosh, it took them so long to go public. It took six meters. Like they just slide on their hands. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Literally, people would say that, right? And so what happened is venture capital used to be very early stage.

1:03:45And then what we now call growth investing was public market investing, right? That was a stop that people in the public markets would do after four or five years of a company's life. And so the public markets used to be involved very early. And then as Sarbanes-Oxley came out and companies decided they didn't want to go public and there was more private capital available, the timeline until going public stretched out. And so suddenly venture capital firms are doing all the growth investing that used to be public market investing. And in 2011, that really wasn't happening much. It was kind of Yuri Milner from DST and a few other folks, but it wasn't that much of an industry.

1:04:19And so the nature of venture capital shifted radically over the last 15 years. And that means that those questions that I listed there didn't include what I'd consider more growth-centric questions because there wasn't a lot of growth investing in venture.

1:04:31Tim Ferriss:What would be examples of growth-centric questions? Honestly, it would overlap with some of the earlier stages, but it would be much more, you know, by the time you hit a very late stage, it's very financially driven. And so often what at least I and my team look at is what is just the core business and how do we extrapolate that going? And then what are these ancillary things that the company's doing that are almost like options in the future that may or may not come through? And so usually we base our investment on that core. Can they just keep doing the thing they're doing forever? Because most companies mainly get big off of one thing, at least for the first decade.

1:05:03There's very few companies that end up with multiple things that all work. It was just one thing, and then 10 years later, you maybe come up with a second thing that really works. It's like Google Cloud for Google, although obviously there's YouTube, and there's a whole bunch of other stuff. And WeMo, and all these interesting things now. But it took a while. For a long time, it was just search. Search and ads. But then sometimes there are these extra things that are potential really interesting drivers on a business. Like SpaceX was launched, and then it became satellite, right? It became Starlink.

1:05:29Tim Ferriss:Yeah, man. Starlink. What a thing. It's too bad I have so much tree cover here. Can't use it anywhere I spend time. But let's turn to the High Growth Handbook for a second. That was, let's just call it seven-ish years ago. It is an outstanding book. People should really check it out. I mean, especially if you're playing in the venture-back game. What's the subtitle? The subtitle is Scaling Startups from 10 to 10 ,000 People. There's a lot of good advice in this book. I wanted to ask you, if there's anything in this book that you wish... startup founders the book was intended for would pay more attention to or if there's anything that you would add or expand to the book?

1:06:10So when I wrote the book, I had an outline for it that was two, three times the length of the actual book in terms of sort of a lot of stuff I didn't write about sales and marketing and growth and a bunch of other stuff. But, you know, the book was basically written as sort of like a tactical guide. It wasn't meant to be read it from start to finish. There's a bunch of interviews with different people who are, I think, amongst the best practitioners in the world at those areas. But, you know, fundamentally, it was meant to be more like you're suddenly involved with the M &A, jump to the chapter and read that and then put it aside until something else comes up around hiring that you need to look at or whatever.

1:06:40And so it really is meant to be like a handbook or guide or companion to a founder versus, hey, I'm just going to read it start to finish and there'll be some pithy quotes in it or whatever, or one concept over 500 pages. You know, I try to avoid stuff like that. It's very practical. It's very tangible. It's very specific. And this new book that I'm working on is basically the zero to one version of that. It's like, how do you hire your first five employees as a startup? How do you, somebody tries to buy you, what do you do? How do you raise your first round of funding? That kind of stuff. It's kind of like the zero to one technical guide.

1:07:15Tim Ferriss:Let me ask you about one specific section. I think this is chapter two. This is on boards. And if this is getting too in the weeds, tell me we can hop to something else. but I am curious if you could talk about, there are two things. Take a better board member over a slightly higher valuation. And if you want to revise these, that's fine too. But there are two things I'd love to hear you talk about just because this is something that founders have been involved with bump up against constantly. Take a better board member over a slightly higher valuation and then write a board member job spec. And then specifically for independence maybe, I'd love to hear you maybe just elaborate.

1:07:49Tim Ferriss:But could you speak to either or both of those a bit? And if you want to take it a different direction, I mean, it's really just boards writ large. When founders pull together boards, often the early boards are investors because the investors ask for a board seat as part of it or as part of the investment. And sometimes the founders want somebody on board who's really committed to the company and will help that extra. And to some extent, when somebody takes a board seat, it really means, or it should mean that they're all in to help you versus, you know, you can have lots and lots of investors via very few board members.

1:08:17Reid Hoffman has this thing, which is like a board member at its best is like a co-founder that you wouldn't be able to hire. and so you bring them onto your board and it's somebody that you want to spend more time with on specific issues related to the company. But fundamentally, your board should be able to help with different areas of the company. It could be strategic direction, it could be closing tournaments, it could be product areas, it could be customer intros, it could be a variety of things. And usually you want to kind of think of your board members as a portfolio of people. It's going to change between an early stage company and a late stage and a public one.

1:08:48You're only different types of people over time usually. but most companies are very reactive on their board versus proactive and so they tend to end up with a couple investors and then they kind of add somebody from an industry seat and they don't really think through like who they want and why and if your co-founder is kind of like your spouse your work spouse your work husband or your work wife your board members are like your in-laws you know you have to see them at Thanksgiving and you have to like chat with them all the time And, you know, and so hopefully you have somebody you want to see all the time and who's helpful and wonderful.

1:09:22And the bad version is like, oh, it's the like father-in-law or mother-in-law who's always like berating you or whatever. And so you kind of need to find the right person. And it's for many, many years, right? You end up sometimes with people on your board for a decade. And if they're an investor, you can't get rid of them. Right. You literally can't fire this person because they have a contractual ability to be on your board because of the investment. That's why it's really important to figure out the right person. And that's back to valuation. sometimes founders will take a better price from a worse person because it's a better price.

1:09:52And our mutual friend Naval has this great quote that, valuation is temporary, but control is forever. Yeah. Very Naval. Very Naval. And I think that's very true. And so if you're choosing a board member and part of that is a control thing, people who control the board can in some cases fire the CEO, you really want to choose the right people and maybe take a worse price for somebody who's really going to be helpful and they're minimally non-destructive and hope we get to have around for 10 years.

1:10:19Tim Ferriss:Any other books or resources for people who are outside of the High Growth Handbook who specifically want to learn about boards, recruiting, incentivizing the co-founders that you couldn't hire to join the board, et cetera, et cetera. Any particular approach you would take there if they wanted to get more conversant? I don't have anything super useful there. I think the best thing is to call other founders, other people have added people to their board and see how they approached it. I do think writing up a job spec, you write a job spec for everything else in your company. Why wouldn't you write one for a board member?

1:10:52So it's good to write that up and say, what am I actually looking for and why, and what am I optimizing for? So there's a common view of that. You know, you can use search firms, you can ask people, you can target people that you know. You know, if you have angel investors, getting to know them is a great way to see if you want to add one of them eventually to your board. That's what we did at Color. We eventually added Sue Wagner, who was a co-founder of BlackRock onto our board. Her other board seats were Apple, BlackRock, and SwissRU when she joined our board. I just got to know her through just like she invested and we just started working together and really enjoyed her feedback and insights.

1:11:25And so we added her to the board there. So it's kind of like that. You know, you kind of want to maybe get to know some people.

1:11:30Tim Ferriss:Next, I want to come to our, we were joking earlier about the, in some case, sort of revisionist history genesis stories. So I'm looking at, this is from 2018, this is a while back, this is on Y Combinator's blog, and you're being interviewed about the High Growth Handbook. But the sort of end of this piece that I'm looking at says, these stories are never told. People always say, oh, these things just grow organically and isn't it amazing? But almost every company that ended up tens of billions or hundreds of billions in market cap did this, which is taking an aggressive approach to distribution, whether that's sort of Google and the Firefox story or Facebook running ads against people's names in Europe.

1:12:12Tim Ferriss:I just wanted to hear you tell some of these stories because it is the stuff that kind of conveniently that gets left out of TED Talks later. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean, actually, the origin stories for founders is always like, ever since Sarah was three years old, she dreamed of starting an accounting software firm. You know what I mean? Like, come on. You know what I mean? yeah yeah yeah it's so ridiculous and so a lot of the stories that are told about founders are very revisionist and they make it the life's passion of this you know sometimes it really is but you're like no when there were five they did not collect things and then that turned into Pinterest 30 years later or whatever like it's not or that turned into they always dreamed of building AGI when there were four and that's why you know Sam almost started opening AI or whatever so I think a lot of these things are very kind of ridiculous in terms of how they're written later.

1:13:05And I think the product really, really matters. And I think sometimes great product just wins. And the reason great product just wins is it opens up a form of distribution that didn't exist before or people will buy it despite the lack of distribution or relationships for a company. The flip side of it is that the companies that are really good have an enormously good product engine and then they have an amazing distribution engine. And sometimes that distribution engine is built into the product. That's like Cursor or Winsurf just distributing through product-led growth where developers just find it and start using it and it helps them.

1:13:35And so they tell other developers an espresso word of mouth. But often there's very aggressive sales, marketing, other components to it. And so, for example, when I was at Google, they were spending hundreds of millions of dollars a year, which at the time was real money, on putting search. And they had this little thing called the toolbar that would like fit into a browser. Because right now browsers, like with Chrome, you type in words or whatever, and then it instantly searches it. Back then, the main browsers were like Nutscape and Internet Explorer, et cetera. And the browser bar thing didn't exist.

1:14:07And they had this little client app that you'd install and they paid basically every company on the internet to cross-download it. In other words, installing Adobe, you're installing some malware detector thing, and it would always download the toolbar because they got paid to distribute it, right? So very aggressive tactics. And you're putting that with Facebook and Facebook buying ads against people's names. Can you explain that? What are they doing? What was their endgame? Yeah, they were basically trying to create network liquidity in markets where they were earlier behind. And so they would basically buy ads of literally a person's name.

1:14:38And one of the most common queries is people searching themselves. And so you'd be like, oh, let me look up Tim Ferriss on Google or whatever. And there'd be a Facebook ad saying, hey, Tim Ferriss on Facebook. And you'd click and you'd land on the sign up flow for Facebook. This was years ago. So this was TikTok and ByteDance. It was basically they spent billions of dollars distributing TikTok so they could build enough of a network to train AI algorithms to start telling people what to do and also to get content cores on.

1:15:02Tim Ferriss:Where did they spend that money on distribution in this case of, say, TikTok? My sense is it's ads again. You kind of see this over and over again. I mean, for Enterprise, Snowflake spent billions of dollars on salespeople and compensation and channel partnerships. So again, like distribution is really important. And every once in a while you see a company that actually wins not because of product, but because they're just better at sales and marketing and distribution. And often that's a bummer for technologists such as myself because you're like, you know, the best product should always win.

1:15:29Sometimes it does, but sometimes it's just who was early and developed a brand or who got ahead on distribution, you know.

1:15:36Tim Ferriss:I'm looking at a piece in front of me. This is from a while ago, but it's you discussing long-held dogma that ends up being unviable. So for instance, the common-held belief after PayPal's sale to eBay that fraud will kill you in the payment space. I'm wondering how you orient yourself as an investor to stress test those types of dogma. It's really hard because you start off with some set of beliefs. You think something's interesting. Maybe you invest in it, maybe you start a company in it. And then it turns out the thing you think is really interesting turns out to be really hard and you get killed.

1:16:12And then five years later, a company comes up that actually does it and wins. The question is why? Why did the thing suddenly work when it didn't before? Or, you know, there's 10 attempts to do X and then suddenly, is it the technology got good enough? It could be a regulatory change, it could be a market shift, it could be whatever. An example that may be Harvey and Legal where selling to law firms traditionally has been awful. And Harvey's not much broader than that, right? They also have very strong enterprise adoption and, you know, lots of different people using them in different ways. But the dogma was always like building stuff for law firms is crappy as a business and you should never do it.

1:16:46But what AI did is it shifted things from selling tools to selling work product or selling units of labor. That's really the shift in generative AI. We're going from seats and we're going from software and SaaS and we're moving into a world where we're selling human labor equivalents. we're selling work hours or labor hours or whatever you want to call it it's a cognition and so harvey is effectively helping really augment lawyers in different ways and part of that's a knowledge corpus but a lot of it is this tooling that really helps lawyers achieve the goals that they have in different ways in a collaborative manner in some cases and so this is a fundamentally different type of product from what people were selling before and so it opened up the market in a way that the market wasn't open before there's actually a broader conversation around is the world market limited or founder limited in terms of entrepreneurial success?

1:17:35The Y Combinator school of thought is that we just don't have enough founders. And if we had 10 times as many founders, we'd have 10 times as many big companies. And there's an alternate school of thought, which is how many markets are actually open in any given moment in time. And those are the ones where you can build big companies. Because if the market isn't open to innovation or change or whatever is undergoing a shift, you can't really build anything there anyhow, so why do it? And the striking thing about AI is it's opened up tons and tons of markets that were closed for a long time. And it's opened it up because of capabilities, but it's also opened it up because every CEO is asking themselves, what's my AI story?

1:18:10And way more openness to try things than I've ever seen in my life. And so we have this odd moment in time where things are massively available for founders to do new things. And if you're an AI company and you're not seeing explosive growth quickly, something's fundamentally broken. Because the markets are so open that you can suddenly grow at a rate that you've never grown before. There's always been cases of companies that just go like this. But again, you look at the ramps of open-air and it's the fastest ramps to tens of billions ever. Percentages of GDP. It's crazy.

1:18:40Tim Ferriss:If we come back to your comment of not necessarily market first and strength of team second all the time, but like you said, you 90 % agree with that. And if you have an excellent team and a terrible market, that's going to be a difficult one. to execute. How do you determine what is a good versus great market or just what is a great market? What do you look for? And the example you gave, I might be overreading this, but when you said that when Google shut down, I think it was Maven, that's an interesting kind of event-based approach as an input to investing, right? Because you're like, okay, if they're not going to build it, that suddenly creates a playing field for startups to play in that space.

1:19:24Tim Ferriss:So could you speak to more of how you determine or look for great markets? I mean, there's a few different ways to think about it. One is like, some people take the framework of why now? What's shifted now that makes this suddenly an interesting market? Because people have been trying to do things for a long time in every market. And so that may be a regulatory shift. Samsara, the fleet management company, benefited from the fact that suddenly there's regulation around needing in-cap monitoring of drivers. So you had suddenly cameras watching people so they don't fall asleep while they're driving trucks on the road.

1:19:52And so that was their entry point to start building out a suite of software. But it was a regulatory shift. Sometimes there's technology shifts, like what's happening in AI. And the crazy thing about the AI shift is the foundation models instantly plugged into a massive set of markets, which is basically all enterprise data and information and email and just all white-color work was suddenly available to AI. because it was the perfect technology for that. It also plugged into code, which is a type of what color works. So it's just suddenly, it just inserts into language and language is used everywhere in enterprises as well as in consumer.

1:20:25And so there's just a massive market to tap into and transform or set of markets. Robotics is a little bit different from that because even if you had the world's best robotic model, the sub markets that already have robotic hardware are quite small on a relative basis. And so you don't have that instant runway that you would with language unless you come up with something new there. That's kind of an aside. But I think robotics is really interesting and will be important. It's more just that nuance of like, what's the instant thing you plug into commercially? There's regulatory shifts, there's technology shifts, there's incumbency or company shifts, competitive shifts.

1:20:55A company may blow itself up, they may get bought by a competitor. One company I'm excited about on the security side is called InPhysical and they're basically competing in part with Hashi. Hashi got bought by IBM. Anytime you get bought by IBM, you slow down a lot, usually. Suddenly it creates more opportunity for a startup. So I just feel like there are these different things that can change at a given moment in time. It could be the markets growing really fast. That's Coinbase and crypto, right? You just have suddenly this adoption and proliferation of token types. So there's lots and lots and lots of different markets that are interesting.

1:21:24The commonality is usually like, is it also big? Is there a big enough TAM? And there's two types of TAMs. There's fake TAM.

1:21:31Tim Ferriss:So yeah, just for people listening who might not have it, a total addressable market. Yeah, total addressable market. So what's the market you're in? And sometimes people come up with these fake markets. They're like, oh, well, we are facilitating global e-commerce and global e-commerce, I'm making up the number, is$30 trillion a year. And so we're in a$30 trillion a year market. And if we get just a tenth of a percent of that, it's$300 billion of revenue. And you're like, that's not your market. Your market is like you built this little optimization engine for SMB websites or whatever. That's not a$30 trillion market.

1:22:03So really, it's kind of defining the market. There's a really famous example of this where defining your market changes how you think about it. And so that was Coca-Cola. Coke and Pepsi were roughly neck and neck in terms of market share for decades. And then one of the Coke CEOs said, hey, maybe we should be thinking about our share as share of liquid salt, like drinks, not share of soda. And so we just went from 50 % market share to 0.5%. And that's why they bought Dasani and that's why they entered all these other markets, right? Because they said, our definition of our market is wrong. We're out in the soda pop business, we're in the drinks business.

1:22:40And so I think also sometimes reconceptualizing what you're doing can really help change your scope of ambition or how you think about what you're doing. If you were trying to spot along the lines of the fraud will kill you in the payment space,

1:22:52Tim Ferriss:any dogma in the AI world, the sphere of AI, anything hop to mind where you think, maybe that's not true now, or maybe in like two years, it'll be completely untrue, but people will have latched onto this belief as one of the thou shalt not or thou shalt commandments. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, there's some things that have circulated in the past around what's the ROI on the capex spend of then will it ever be paid back? I think that stuff is probably off. I think fundamentally, there are moments in time where it's very smart to be contrarian. And moments in time where being consensus is the smartest possible thing you can do.

1:23:31And I think right now we're in a moment in time where being consensus is very right. You know, you can really overthink it. And what's a contrarian thing? We should go do a bunch of hardware stuff because blah, blah, blah. You know, maybe just buy more AI. I think people make these things way too complicated.

1:23:47Tim Ferriss:Yeah, true. In every aspect of life, probably. Let's just say you were mentoring. This is somebody you really care about. We can make up an avatar, whatever. Nephew of one of your best friends or son of one of your best friends or daughter who's really smart, got an engineering degree, came out of MIT. has a couple of hits in angel investing and they're like, all right, I think I'm going to raise a fund. But they don't have the access necessarily that you do to AI, let's just say. Are there any things categorically you would say would be on the do not invest list because they're likely to be annihilated or consumed or replicated by AI?

1:24:29I think the reality is that when people start off as investors, a lot of the times the reason they have early stage funds is because you can always get access at the earliest stages of companies if you just start helping people. I mean, that's kind of what I did accidentally, but the reality is I've seen it over and over. You fall in with the right group of people because the smartest people all self-aggregate together and you just start helping people out and they just ask if you want to invest and you start investing and suddenly you have a great track record and you raise bigger funds and then you go later stage.

1:24:57That same cohort has grown up and they've started doing later stuff and then suddenly you can get access to everything else, right? That's kind of the traditional venture story, and it has been, I think, for decades in some sense. So I think that's still very tenable, and you can still do it for AI, and you can do it for anything. I don't think you have to go off and do energy investing or something.

1:25:14Tim Ferriss:You have mentioned in the past a key learning—maybe that's an overstatement, but you can correct me—from Vinod Khosla. And I think the wording is along the lines of, your market entry strategy is often different from your market disruption strategy. Yeah. Could you speak to that? And there's sort of two or three versions of this. Version one is you do something that's really weird and it starts off looking like a toy and then it turns out to be really important. And that would be Instagram or Twitter or some of these more social products, right? Where the initial use case is very different from how it's used today and it kind of evolved as a product and how people perceive it and use it.

1:25:49And that's one version of it. And that's usually more consumer centric. Another version of that would be SpaceX and Starlink where they started off with launch and getting things up into space and they realized, hey, they have a cost advantage for satellites. and then they built out the Starlink network, which is now like a major driver of their business. And so what they did expanded a lot and kind of shifted in terms of their market entry was space launch, their disruption is Starlink in some sense. So I do think there's lots of examples like that over time.

1:26:15Tim Ferriss:Coming back to information and consumption, how do you consume most of your information? What would the pie chart break down to in terms of if you listen to podcasts versus books versus X versus white papers versus something else? I think a lot of what I've done is collapsed into three things. It's X, it's reading some technical papers slash journals in some cases, if it's more of the biology side, although I don't do biology investing, I just like it. But, you know, papers, although the papers in the AI industry have really dropped off given the competitive nature of everything now. And then talking to people.

1:26:53And so I found that like 20 minutes with somebody really smart on a topic gives me more information and insights and leads on what to go read about than doing some exhaustive search. Actually, the fourth thing is now using models to do research for me. That could be OpenAI, that could be Cloud, that could be Flexity, that could be Gemini, and for each of them, I actually use different things or I do different things with each of them. What do you do with the different models? I'll just give you one example versus go through every single one of them, but Gemini, I actually feel like if I'm looking up more activities, like, hey, I'm planning a trip somewhere, I actually feel like the Google Corpus and all the stuff they built over time is quite useful for like travel tips, the port types.

1:27:33And so that'd be a Gemini specific thing. That doesn't mean the other models can't do it well. It's more just like I've tended to get more accurate rankings of things that way. And I'll ask for like breakdowns and rankings across multiple dimensions and all the stuff for scoring and things. I did like a deep dive on a few different areas of like ADHD and ASD. What's ASD? Oh, I'm sorry. It's autism spectrum. I see. I got it. So basically, like, if you look at autism, it went from, I'm going to misquote the numbers, so, you know, I should look these up later. But I think it's something like one in a few thousand of the population was diagnosed with autism like 30 years ago, 40 years ago.

1:28:08And now it's like 3%. So you're like, well, what is that? Is that a change in older parents having more kids? Which it turns out that that's not the driver. Is it some shift in the environment? It turns out it's just diagnostic criteria shifted. And there's a lot of incentives to actually diagnose people in the schools. That's roughly the summary of why we have so many kids that are classified as either having attention deficit, where there's also like a financial incentive for doctors to do it because they can prescribe drugs versus autism. But both have gone up dramatically in terms of diagnoses.

1:28:38And it's unclear to me that more people actually have it. It's just diagnosed dramatically more broadly. Which model were you investigating that with? Usually when I do things like that, I use two or three models at once. And then I ask for primary literature and then ask for summary charts. And I actually have this whole breakdown of like stuff that I ask for to output. so that I can go back and double check the data and then reread the literature and everything else. And there's really interesting things that came out of the autism one in particular because it turned out maternal age actually has a bigger impact than paternal age in some of the studies.

1:29:08And people always talk about paternal age. And then you're like, why are people only talking about paternal age? Is there a societal incentive for that? Is it a political belief system? Like, why is that the point of emphasis? So there's other things that kind of come out of that in terms of questions, in terms of the why of things. why were you looking into that specifically? I saw it was interesting. Yeah. Okay. Got it. Seems like it's gone up a lot. Let me try and understand why. And so I started looking into it. I was also talking to a friend of mine in her sort of mid to late 30s. And she was dating a guy who was in his late 40s, early 50s.

1:29:48And she brought up, oh, she was worried about autism and, you know, what would happen with them if they had kids and all this stuff. And so then I did this deep dive as part of that too. The takeaway was, I can't remember exactly what it was. It was like, I'm making it up, so please don't quote me on this. I can look it up later. But it was like, there's a 10 % increase for every five to 10 years incremental paternal and maternal age. And again, maternal was actually a little bit stronger in some of the data sets. And the thing is, though, if you believe that it's one in 5 ,000 or one in whatever in the population, that 10%, 20 % difference doesn't matter from a population frequency perspective.

1:30:24It's just diagnostic criteria went way up.

1:30:26Tim Ferriss:Yeah, that's true for a lot of diagnoses. A lot of stuff, but like societally we're told, oh, it's the age of the parents that's driving all these autism rates up. And you're like, no, it's like all these incentives. And then you look at some of the school systems as like 60 % of all the autism diagnoses, and I think it was the state of New Jersey or something, were not actually based on any clinical criteria. Is there a teacher randomly saying this person has autism? God, terrible. You start digging into these things and you're like, wow, this is super interesting. And these models are really valuable and helpful for that.

1:30:57So I've been doing a lot of back to your question of where do I get information. Part of it has been these deep dives with models and like questions that I just find interesting where I ask them to aggregate clinical trial data or aggregate different types of information. And they give me the primary sources and then give me summaries and double check things. And so I have like a whole series of prompts around that to kind of also clean data and check it. and that's really fun. And then I always set it up in multiple models and just see what they each come up with.

1:31:22Tim Ferriss:When you talk to people, this may be too much of a kind of amorphous topic for us to dive into in a meaningful way, but let's just say you find somebody you want to talk to for 20 minutes. How do you typically find those people? I suspect there are a lot of ways, but are you finding them on X versus finding them in a technical paper versus finding them somewhere else just to get an idea? And then when you get on the phone with such a person, are there repeating trains of questioning or certain ways that you like to approach it? I think there's three different types of things. One is, hey, I'm doing a deep dive in an area just because I think it's interesting or maybe it's relevant to like an area I want to invest in.

1:32:01Often, honestly, is it interesting? And then I'll try to quickly triangulate for the smartest people on the thing and that may be technical papers that may just be asking each person I talk to who's really smart. There's one form of that which is, hey, it's very informational and I'm trying to do a deep dive on something. I mean, I work with some of the early AI researchers at Google. That's how I knew like Noam Chazir, who started Character and then went back to Google. And that's how I've met a bunch of other folks. But some of the people I just met, you know, just interesting paper. Let me look them up.

1:32:27Or, hey, everybody says this person's really smart. Let me talk to them. That's one form. A second form is I do think like really smart people tend to aggregate. And so if you're just hanging out with smart people, you keep meeting other smart people. And people who are polymathic tend to hang out with people who are polymathic. It's kind of like attracts like frostbrize of things. So that's sort of a second set. those are probably the two main things. I mean, sometimes people also just refer people over to me. They'll say, hey, I think you two would like chatting. There's a separate thing, which is there's people that I go back to recurrently, which is more like, I think this is one of the smartest people about where AI is heading and let me talk to them all the time.

1:33:00Or this is one of the smartest people about longevity. Like Kristen, the CEO of BioAge, I call sometimes about random longevity related things because she knows so much about every topic in it. She's very thoughtful. She's very willing to question her own assumptions. It's very just like truth-seeking in a way that people aren't. And people always use that term and say it. But she really is just like, what's correct? Let me just figure it out. She's like a PhD and postdoc in like bioinformatics and aging. And, you know, she's super legit. And so that's an example of somebody that'll call for like longevity stuff.

1:33:35So I just have certain, well, I'll call for certain topics.

1:33:39Tim Ferriss:So you have literacy in biologies. It's kind of quaint how I went to the first quantified self-meetup in whatever it was, 2008 or something, with 12 people sitting around in Kevin Kelly's house talking about measuring things with Excel spreadsheets. The world has changed. So there are armies of tens of thousands of self-described biohackers and so on talking about longevity. There's a lot of nonsense. For yourself personally, where have you landed in terms of interventions or thinking about interventions? for yourself? I haven't done a ton. It feels like a lot collapses into like sleep well, exercise a lot, et cetera.

1:34:21Like there's a handful of things that kind of matter. E-well. And so I've kind of collapsed onto that stuff. I think there's one or two things that maybe you can take that are helpful. And then there's some things I always thought it'd be fun to experiment with that I haven't done yet. Like what? I thought it'd be cool to try like a rapamycin pulse or something. So stuff like that. But the reality is that I'm kind of waiting for the real drugs to come out and then maybe I'd use those. Some of the ones that I actually think will really impinge on longevity or certain systems, like we were talking earlier about as you age, muscle that holds the lens of your eye weakens and that's part of the reason that your ability to focus kind of gets screwed up and so there should be eye drops for that.

1:34:58There's a bunch of stuff around neurosensory aging that I'd love to find as startup. There's a bunch of stuff around the cosmetics of aging that I've long been talking about trying to find. I actually funded a clinical trial at Stanford to work on that, for example, because I think it's very under-invested in. And peptides to me is basically that. I think a lot of people are taking peptides as like certain forms of health, but also certain forms of cosmetic applications like 5-HKCU and melatonin and all these things are basically cosmetic in nature.

1:35:24Tim Ferriss:You mentioned a handful of things that seem helpful to take. Are those just vitamin D or are we talking about other things? What are on that short list? Vitamin D and creatine. Yeah, got it. I don't know. What's on your list? I mean, you've thought about this so much more than I have. what are you taking or what are you thinking about? I'm much more conservative than I think people would expect. You know, I played around with a lot of things in my earlier days. And a lot of it is very, I would say, capped risk. If you're experimenting as I was with first-generation Dexcom continuous glucose monitors in 2009, very unpleasant to wear.

1:36:01Tim Ferriss:And I might have been, I wasn't aware of any non-type 1 diabetics using them at the time. But I wasn't using much in terms of, let's just say, questionable gene therapy flying to other countries to use something like a folistatin, not to throw it under the bus. But I feel like the general heuristic of no biological free lunch, I recognize it's very simplistic, but it's pretty helpful. At least it will aid you in avoiding a lot of pitfalls. So, I mean, there are things I'm experimenting with. Different forms of ketone esters and salts, for instance. I think some could be very, very interesting for cerebral vasculature.

1:36:42Tim Ferriss:And since I have Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's, et cetera, in my family, including for people who are APOE33, so there are certainly many other risk factors, I'm paying a lot of attention to that side of things. You know, Obisetrapib, I think, is one to keep an eye on that's not yet ready for prime time. But rapamycin is interesting. I do think rapamycin is interesting with a lot of asterisks because you can screw yourself up if you don't know what you're doing. And if you're playing with any immunosuppressant, I mean, you just have to be very careful. But looking at combining that, for instance, one of the experiments that I might do is, And I would have a cleaner read of signal if I only did one intervention, but real life is different from waiting for science sometimes.

1:37:31Tim Ferriss:So possibly combining Norwegian 4x4 interval training with rapamycin pulsing to look at volumetric changes, if any, in the hippocampus and other areas. I think that's a pretty interesting hypothesis worth testing. But otherwise, it's basic, basic. right? It's creatine. It's the vitamin Ds. Look, if you have methylation issues or you're taking medication as I am, like omeprazole, which can inhibit magnesium absorption and other things, like you want to keep an eye on that, but not too fancy. I think urolithin A is pretty interesting. The data keeps mounting on that. I do have a key interest in mitochondrial health.

1:38:15Tim Ferriss:So if there are things, which could also include regular intermittent fasting and occasional three to seven-day fasting, which could be a fast-mimicking diet most recently for me, based on the input from Dr. Dominic D 'Agostino, trying to foster autophagy and mitophagy with some regularity. Not all the time. I'm not trying to optimize for that all the time. one thing I've been wondering so if you look at like a computer and often the key to fixing your laptop or the key to fixing any system is you just fucking reboot it right you reload the system and it just works magically and there's a bunch of cruft that kind of accumulate is there like a equivalent of that is it like going under for anesthesia is it some nerve like freezing thing that some people have been doing recently oof yeah I don't know Sounds scary.

1:39:10Tim Ferriss:Oh, maybe stellate ganglion block? Yeah, that's it. The stellate ganglion block. Yeah. I mean, the rebooting, I'm letting out an exhale because there are some interesting options for very specific use cases. It makes sense conceptually. You're more qualified to speak to this, but I would say just spending a lot of time around neuroscientists. And I spend a lot of my time in terms of information intake, reading, or doing my best. Fortunately, with AI tools, it's become a lot easier, not just getting a synopsis, but actually using it to help you learn concepts that you can kind of layer in some rational sequence.

1:39:50Tim Ferriss:But I read a lot of neuroscience stuff and a lot of optical stuff. There's actually a surprising amount of, I mean, there's maybe not so surprising, like very strong intersection there. So if you're looking at like PBM and photobiomodulation through the eyes, I mean, you can do it transcranially as well. I would give a note of caution for that for folks. But the reboot side, I would say, for instance, and people have experienced this to a lesser extent with GLP-1 agonists, if they take it for weight loss, maybe they stop smoking or they cut back on drinking or they have these kind of system-wide decreases or increases in impulse control.

1:40:30Tim Ferriss:For someone who's, say, an opiate addict, I think that Ibogaine, which in the future may take the form of an active metabolite or something like that. In flood dosing, at least that seems pretty necessary at this point, relatively high doses. Under medical supervision, because you can have fatal cardiac events, co-administration of magnesium seems to help, but it's dangerous stuff. People should be careful. You can, and there are lots of people historically who deserve a lot of credit for this, like Howard Lotsoff and his wife, but opiate addicts can go through flood dosing of Ibogaine and come out and they're basically given a window with which they won't experience withdrawal symptoms, physical withdrawal symptoms.

1:41:16Tim Ferriss:And I think they're probably applications to other things with Ibogaine or pharmacological interventions like Ibogaine. And some of the craziest stuff, honestly related to that molecule is, and I'm skeptical of this simple description, but sort of reversal in brain age. So it changes in the brain based on MRIs. Nolan Williams, rest in peace, and his lab looked at this pretty closely pre - and post-dosing of ibogaine for veterans with traumatic brain injury. And some of that might be due to something called glial-derived neurotrophic factor, right? People might be familiar with like BDNF. So Ibogaine is one interesting option.

1:42:00Tim Ferriss:Anesthesia, I've become a lot more cautious with general anesthesia. I just had surgery yesterday and I opted for local anesthesia, which in this case was not a big deal because it was just, you can see it, had something cut out of my head. But coming back to the, and I'm going to riff for a second here, but the autism spectrum disorder and ADHD example you were unpacking where you talked about the incentives, they might be in perverse incentives to diagnose. Well, I mean, not to quote Munger, right? But it's like, follow the money, right? And a lot of people are put under general who really don't need to be put under general, but it adds a very, very, very huge line item to the tab.

1:42:48Tim Ferriss:And there are people who go under anesthesia and wake up and do not retain the same ability to recall memories and so on. Like their personalities become in some way destabilized. And the fact of the matter is that a lot of anesthesia is very poorly understood. We know it works, but it's very poorly understood. And I don't think a lot of people realize, because why would they unless they've just spending a lot of time looking into this. There are lots of medications that are incredibly well-known, commonly prescribed, for which the mechanisms of action are really poorly understood, if they're understood at all.

1:43:32Tim Ferriss:We know based on studies, they appear to be well-tolerated, like side effects profiles include A through Z. And it certainly seems to exert this effect or have an impact on biomarker X, but we don't actually fucking know how it works. And there's just a lot of stuff that falls into that bucket. And so I am cautious with a lot of it. But to come back to your question, I went off on a bit of a TED Talk. The most interesting reboot that I've seen, I don't want to really water it down to like the dopaminergic system because there's a lot more to it. But Ibogaine, I think, more so than Ibogaine itself shows what is possible.

1:44:09Tim Ferriss:And I don't know if that's limited to drugs. I am very bullish. There are going to be fuck-ups. There are going to be some sidebars that don't look so good, but brain stimulation and bioelectric medicine, broadly speaking, is one of the great next frontiers, certainly in treating what we might consider psychiatric disorders, but also for performance enhancement. And we're at a point kind of looking for those external why now answers, right? There are actually some really good answers to why now for this as a field. And I think people will be experimenting a lot with this, but without the use of pills and potions and IVs and actually non-invasive brain stimulation, maybe some invasive in the case of implants.

1:44:55Tim Ferriss:So that's a long answer. But yeah, that's what I'm thinking about and tracking. I mean, some of this stuff we'll see, but I think a lot of this stuff could be outpatient procedure. You walk in, you're in there for an hour or two, and then you're out. So we'll see. Let me ask just a couple of last questions. And then if there's anything else we want to bat around, we can bat it around. But I appreciate the time. A lot of five years from now is looking back at a lot of today. Are there any beliefs, positions, could be related to AI or otherwise, that you think are more likely than others to be wrong?

1:45:26I think there's all sorts of things that are going to get wrong. And I think we're living through a period of big change, which means big uncertainty. And so I wouldn't be surprised if half the things I think are going to happen don't or happen even more so or whatever it may be. And that's part of the fun of it, you know, in terms of if we had a perfectly predictive future, it'd be very boring, right? Because we'd know exactly what's going on and that'd be awful. It just ties into notions of free will and all sorts of other things, right? So I think, you know, I'm sure there's a lot. There's a separate question of just one exercise I've been going through recently is, and I've never done this before.

1:45:57You know, a lot of what you do in life, it's back to the John Manon quote. life is what happens when you're making other plans. For the first time, I'm actually thinking, like, what's my 10-year plan? Across a few different dimensions of life. And the basic question is, you know, I won't get it right. I can try and have a plan for 10 years. Of course, it's not going to be what I think. But it's more, does it change the scope of ambition that you have? Does it change how you think about life? I've been trying to think in those terms, like, what do I want to do over the next decade? And that, what does that mean in terms of the near term what I do in order to get there in 10 years.

1:46:29And so I think that's been very eye-opening for me in terms of shifting some of my mindset around what I should be trying or not trying to do. Now, the AGI-pilled people will say, well, in two years we have AGI, so it doesn't matter where your plans are. But I find that to be a very kind of defeatist view of the world. You know, it's like I'm going to give up versus saying, great, I'm going to have this plan and I can adjust it as needed. But through this time of change, there'll be some really interesting things we're going to do in the world.

1:46:53Tim Ferriss:Well, do you have anything else you'd like to say, comments, requests for the audience, things to point people to, anything at all before we wind to a close. People can find you on x at eladgil, eladgil.com, certainly the Substack blog, blog.eladgil.com, and elsewhere. We'll link to everything in the show notes. But anything else that you'd like to add? Yeah, I just want to chat with you as always. I really enjoy it. So thanks for having me on. Yeah, thanks, man. Always a pleasure. And to everybody listening or watching, We will link to everything in the show notes at tim.blog slash podcast. And until next time, as always, be a bit kinder than is necessary to others, but also to yourself.

1:47:30Tim Ferriss:Thanks for tuning in.

1:47:50Tim Ferriss:Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field and then I test them and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.

1:48:31Tim Ferriss:If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. You guys know I love wearables. I'm sure you do as well. and they're great, but they give you data. Typically, they do not give you solutions. That's why I absolutely love The Pod by this episode's sponsor, 8Sleep. I've been using their stuff for many, many years now. It fits over your existing mattress, tracks your heart rate with 99 % accuracy, plus respiratory rate, HRV, and sleep stages. It is wild how much it correlates accurately to the stuff that you wear on you.

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