Elad Gil’s 3 archetypes of hyper-successful founders

I got very lucky. So, you know, I helped out a lot of these early teams and they just happened to be some of the biggest companies. You know, it's Airbnb, it's Stripe. You know, eventually I ended up helping out Coinbase and Figma and Instacart and all. And, you know, it's been a great ride.

Like, what is it about teams, for example, like Stripe, that to differentiate them from others? Like what. What about what guys running that. That company made them special.

Yeah. You know, I've been, I've been kind of noodling on this. I had a conversation with some folks on my team yesterday where I was just trying to brainstorm on what are there specific signs of truly outsized successful outcomes in terms of the types of founders? And I think a lot of it is just like, do you end up in the right product market? Is the market big enough? Is it growing? Is it dynamic in the right way? And so I think half of it is just you find the right market. And some of that could be luck and some of that could be.

But those guys are like, I mean, obviously, I know you agree they're special, but they seem like they're like some of the leading kind of intellectuals.

No matter what, you need the market. Right?

Yeah.

Now, within that, there's tons and tons of people who enter these markets and do it horribly. Right, right. And so what's different? And so I, I almost view it as there being three types of founders that become hyper successful. And I'm just. Yeah. Testing this out or spitballing it. Right. I don't know this. Correct. The first one is kind of the polymathic, hyper intellectual, yet very competitive person. And that's probably Patrick and John from Stripe. Honestly, that was Larry and Sergey. When I worked at Google, they were very polymathic, very deep on everything. They'd go down into the weeds on the data y. And so I think one almost like super founder, arch type is that. I think the second one is the super hardcore, extremely focused, really, really driven overdrive founder that may be, you know, Travis from Uber.

That reminds me of like Peter at WISH back in the day, but when he was doing well.

Yeah, Peter was, was, was just super focused. And I think there's almost signals of those because a lot of people in our ecosystem now, for example, are doing angel investing or they're involved with lots of other companies while they're running their company. And that second class of founders didn't do any of that. They, they're just, they actually say no to everything. And they're just all in on one thing and it really travels.

Definitely that way.

Yeah, yeah. So I think that's another archetype and there's a few people I can think of who just had massive success that I just view as incredibly focused. Right.

I feel like Elon used to be more that way. Cuz he really would say no to everything.

Yeah, yeah. Some of the best founders are just like Parker at Ripling is incredibly judicious with this time and he's just like, this is, you know, he's really focused. Uh, and then I think there's a third type of founder which is just like the network effect business. And it's just you have something that has network effects, you're going to do.

Well, even if, even if you're a clown car.

You could be. Well, you could be Zuck. And then you take it to the next level. Right. And you start doing things like Llama and things like that.

So Zuck maybe has a network effect plus maybe some of the polymath side or something like that.

Yeah. Or just. I don't know. I'm sorry, I don't know if he's on the intense focus or the polymathic side or whatever. But I'm just saying, like, maybe he's sort of an overlapping arch type of like one of those things. Plus you now have a network effect business, so it's a default defensible.