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

All right, today we are sitting down with one of the smartest people that's ever been on this podcast. His name is Elad Gil, and he is a prolific angel investor. He's a guy who has invested in something like $40+ billion companies, all at very early stages, like Airbnb, Airtable, Andrew Hill, Retool, Rippling— companies that we've all heard of now in the tech space. He was an entrepreneur. He got acquired by Twitter. He was one of the first 100 employees at Twitter. He was early at Google, and he's been very early to waves. He's— he was doing longevity before longevity was cool. He was doing AI investing before ChatGPT came out. So we love talking to people who are like this, that are both very brilliant, very accomplished, and seem to be skating where the puck is going. They sort of know what's coming around the corner, and they've proven that in their career. So we talked to him about how he's been such a good investor, what he's looked for, and his approach, and how it's pretty different than most investors. We talked about his ideas, so things he wants to see built and projects he's working on right now. And then a little bit of life advice at the end where he left us with kind of an amazing tidbit or a nugget about what's made him such an interesting person. So enjoy this episode with Ilad Gil. And so the intro for you is basically you're a super angel investor. Uh, you've invested in a bunch of companies. I think you have something like 40+ unicorns in the portfolio. And impressively, at least 20 or 30 of them were very early stage. So seed stage, Series A, pre-seed, some, somewhere there. That's wild. As somebody who's invested in, I don't know, 100 companies myself, I look at what you've done there and that is prolific. And so first question, it's like, you know, there's a block of wood and I don't really know how to hack, how to chop into this. So I'm just going to swing one blunt swing here. How the heck are you doing this? Why, how have you had this, this success in angel investing?

Yeah, I mean, I guess it's, um, it's probably 2 or 3 things. Number 1, I think I was just lucky, you know, so I think I started investing in a good time when there was a lot to still be done in SaaS and consumer in a variety of areas. Now, obviously, that's also true in AI. I think secondly, I tend to take more of a market-first approach, um, than most early-stage people. I focus on the market and product market more than the founders. And obviously, founders are incredibly important. I started 2 companies myself, so I hope that founders are incredibly important. But I also think that what you're actually building and which market for who matters a lot. And I've seen great people crushed by terrible markets and I've seen reasonably mediocre people do really well. And then lastly, I think I really try to follow the technology and the changes that are happening in technology. And so I got, I got involved with a lot of generative AI companies quite early, you know, Perplexity and Harvey and things like that, simply because I was really keen on generative AI and sort of ML related stuff. And so I started investing in all those things 3 years ago before ChatGPT was out and before Midjourney and before these things really became a trend. And so I think sometimes you end up early in some really important areas simply because you're kind of technology first or market change first.

Were you just doing your own money at first or did you have a fund from the get-go?

No, initially I was just investing my own money. Um, and then I ran out pretty fast. You know, I hadn't made that much money at Google and I invested almost all of it. I invested like over 50% of it. And so I just started running out as I started—

What does that mean, running out? Like, how, like, uh, I guess you initially had wealth from selling your business, I guess. And then like you just put all of it into private companies. How much do you have left?

I put a huge amount of my own money into private companies. Yeah. So, you know, one of my big regrets is, um, somebody pinged me on the SpaceX round when it was like a $500 million company and I really was excited about it. I thought it was such a interesting game and I didn't have enough money for the minimum that they had as check sizes.

And so what'd you do? Because, you know, I had that point early in Silicon Valley where I initially had no money. So I was like, I was helping friends. I was like, man, I can't believe people aren't investing in this. But I myself didn't even look at myself like an investor because I just didn't have a bankroll. Then I realized, wait, that's stupid. I got to think like a founder here and get resourceful and figure out how to get money to invest in these companies. So where did you go once you deployed your own capital? Where'd you go to get the money right away?

Yeah, you know, I started, um, effectively raising small sort of what are known as SPVs, and then that morphed into funds. And now I kind of have a tiramisu cake of different things where there's like different layers that I can do in terms of personal investments, fund investments, you know, very large things would be fund plus SPV. So for example, I led Anduril Series D, or I co-led the last two rounds for, um, Applied Intuition, or I've, you know, I've led rounds for all sorts of companies at this point.

How many other, are there any other partners at your like shop basically? Or are you the guy?

You know, I've recently hired a few people to kind of help me in different ways. I think fundamentally what I want to do is, um, continue to build things, work on things, think about technology, like just take, I would call it almost like the anti-VC approach and be builder first. And so there's a lot of side projects that I, or me and my team are now working on. You know, we're working, for example, um, Shreyan's helping me with, um, We're trying to take the, the, the thousand most important books that are off of copyright and translate them into dozens of languages using AI and then create audiobooks off of any of, off of all of them so people can download the great works of history from anywhere in the world in any language. You know, we're doing stuff like that. And so that also forces us to really use different AI tools and Let's look at Eleven versus Cartesia versus, you know, OpenAI. And let's, let's, how do you actually translate a long-form book with high consistency and how do you QA that?

Are you doing that because you're like, this could be a business, or are you doing that because you're thinking to yourself, just, this is an interesting project and in doing this, I will discover interesting things.

I'm just doing it because I think it's like cool and societally useful. I don't, I mean like There's multiple aspects of why to work on something like this, and I think it's, um, a little bit less short-term and more like, this seems useful and interesting.

But were you always that way? Because like, I just recently— I'm, I guess I'm, I could say I'm financially secure, and it took a few years before I just recently started feeling like I want to do blank because it's cool. I don't really care necessarily if it's good for the world, but it seems like you have a little bit of that mindset of like, this is good for the world. Are you wealthy and successful because you always had that attitude, or do you have that attitude now because you have security? Do you know what I mean?

I've always been that way. And so, you know, I started off, I, you know, I did degrees in math and biology and I did a PhD in biology because I thought it was societally useful. Like, you're not going to make money as a PhD in biology, you know, unless something magic happens. And so my driver has always been what is useful societally. I think the one other thing I'd say about it is it forces you to go deeper than people tend to go on some of these things that they're just kind of, oh, this is an interesting investment or whatever. I think you actually go to that next extra level of depth and using things hands-on and all the rest of it that I think also matters just in terms of gaining real intuition for certain things. And I don't think you need to be a practitioner of everything to understand the thing that you're, you're a practitioner of, but I just think it, in some cases it can help a lot or it really, um, allows you to hone in on what's important. And that's true of many businesses. Usually most businesses have one or two things that are the fundamental aspect of that business that matters and everything else is just noise or check the box or whatever. And I think that where people tend to sometimes either start the wrong things as founders or invest in the wrong things as investors is they get too wrapped up in what are the 5 things that matter for this business. And usually there's 1, maybe 2.

What's an example of like, I'm not sure which industry you're, you're, you care about most, but what's an example of one of these things where people care about 5 things, but you're like, no, this is the only thing that matters?

Well, I mean, I guess early on with Stripe, their, their one insight was how do we just get every developer using this product? We're not going to worry about mid-market and enterprise. We're not going to worry about and other things. How do we get every early stage technology company that matters on us?

That sounds great. When you tell that story, I'm like, yeah, I'm on board with that. But I own a business now and it's really hard to come up with that insight.

I think it's hard, but I think the flip of it is that's, that's usually the key question. And again, different types of businesses may have that characteristic or not.

Right.

And so sometimes it's two things or, you know, some complex businesses that may have more, you know, and invested in Anduril, there was a very clear, there's kind of like five things I thought a next-gen defense tech company had to do in order to become a prime, which is, you know, one of the really big companies in the market. And I thought without it, you're just not going to make it. And so sometimes it's more complicated, but I think, I think 90% of the time plus it boils down. To one area of belief, or maybe one thing that you just need to see happen in the business to believe that everything else will fall into place.

All right.

So when I ran my company, The Hustle, I think we had something like 2 million subscribers and we made money through advertising and we didn't actually make that much money per person reading the newsletter because advertising in general is kind of a crappy business model. And so I remember sitting down and I'm like, what are all the different ways that I can make money off The Hustle that aren't advertising? And so to make sure that you don't make this mistake, Sean, me, and the HubSpot team we went and looked at a bunch of different ways to monetize your business and we put it all together in a really cool document where we lay it all out along with our research and we call it very appropriately, we called it the Business Monetization Playbook. Go to the description of this episode and you're gonna see a link to that, uh, Business Monetization Playbook. It's completely free. You just click the link and you can see it. Back to the episode.

It's also like, it's also hard now, but easy later, right? If it's hard to figure out what the one thing is, okay, you take some upfront difficulty to sort of make a bet or to figure that out. But then from there on out, your operating philosophy can be a lot simpler because you're now Stripe. You know who you're focused on, you know who you're catering to, and you don't have to have these, like, the decision tree becomes very, very simple later if you did the hard thing.

And it evolves over time, right? The complexity of these businesses often comes later as they become multi-product and international and, you know, all the rest of it. And that's normal. It's just, um, early on, usually there's There's a key insight that drives it.

You said you invest in markets and Anduril when it was first started, most people still don't have any idea about the, about that industry. When you're trying to like master a topic like that, what is your process?

Yeah, with Anduril, um, you know, the main reason I got interested in defense tech was because the big tech companies were running away from it, right? Google had shut down Maven. And I was like, well, of course we're going to need national defense, whether you're a Democrat or Republican, like, of course, you know, like you want to protect Western values. There's conflict in the world. There's bad actors.

But to push back on that, I'd be like, yeah, but there's like, I'm ignorant to the industry, which is why it's easy for me to push back. I would say, yeah, but there's like 10 other companies in that space. You know, they got it covered. Like, how do you, how do you learn enough to know that there's like an interesting opportunity?

Yeah. I mean, I guess it's a bunch of stuff. One is obviously you just read what you can, right? Two is, uh, in some cases you look at market structure and growth rates and that, that kind of stuff. Third is you look at technology shifts.

I want to break down on that. What's your resource for the second one?

Uh, we just go and do the work. I mean, you look at what are the companies and obviously there's like analyst reports and market research and all this stuff, but you can also just ask, okay, how many players are in the market? Is it consolidating or not? What's the growth rate on it? What is the margin structure and the approach that they're taking as a business? Right? So for example, um, the traditional defense tech companies are what are known as cost plus, which means if you have a million dollar drone, they charge 5%. So they can't make more than 5% margins. They make $50K on a drone. You're Andrew L. You can sell 10 better drones for a million dollars. You make 50% margin, which is traditional hardware margin. You make 10 times the margin dollars. And so one of the things that people don't appreciate about Anduril as a business is it's a market cap expansion in the defense world because you have a higher margin, higher leverage business, right? And so you need a different business model, which they've come up with. Um, so there's just a bunch of stuff like that, right?

When did you, um, yeah, how early did you invest in Anduril? I think you were Like the first round, it was just the founders.

Yeah.

And so was it, do you hear Palmer talking about this? Then you go research the market or had you just independently been curious about this market?

And then it's back to what I was saying earlier, which is Google shut down Maven. And I was like, oh my God, the big tech companies are running away from this. What a wonderful opportunity for a startup. And so I actually called one of the people at Google that I knew who was working on Google Cloud, which the Maven team was part of at the time. And I said, hey, did all the people who wanted to do Maven quit in protest? And he's like, no, no, no, it was all the people who were against Maven who quit. The rest of the people are still here. So I was like, okay, where do I find somebody who wants to work on this? And so I just started poking around and I met, I ran into Trey at something and we started talking and he mentioned he was working on it. I got super excited about it. So I invested in their first round or they were kind enough to let me invest in their first round. I should say.

That's way more impressive than meeting Palmer. Like the fact that you came to that similar, you guys were sniffing around the same stuff independently. That's pretty impressive.

Well, yeah, but I'm also, you know, the best people I get to interact with, they sort of have the same laid-back approach as you, which is just like, I don't know, I just kind of do the work. I think I was fortunate, blah, blah, blah. Then you start to peel back layers and you're like, oh, so this thing you called luck was actually you. I read that Maven story too. I didn't think to myself, wow, what a wonderful opportunity. I just moved on with my life, right? So Uh, you know, I don't know if you've read the 4 levels of luck thing, but I think number 2 or 3 is, uh, luck favors the prepared, the prepared mind, meaning because you know what you're looking for, you can actually spot luck when it presents itself, whereas the average person might see that same thing and not understand what they're looking at. And so when you saw that Maven story, you saw the opportunity that, wow, if the big technology players are running away from defense, this huge category, that means there's an opportunity for a new technology company in defense. And so what I find fascinating is peeling that back and actually understanding, like, wow, that was incredibly intentional. And I get what you're saying, that not every one of those rabbit holes you go down leads to an Anduril seed round. But the fact that it ever did is remarkable because that's like a career-making single investment, even let alone the other 40 that you did like that. I also want to go back to, like, you said something about market first, and there's that great quote, like, When a great entrepreneur meets a bad market, only one of them keeps their reputation. Um, the bad market. And so how, uh, what's another example from your portfolio that you can think of that drives home this kind of like market first, where the market first approach led you to do something that, um, that worked out?

Uh, you know, I did a lot of crypto investing in like 2017-ish, 2016 through 2018. And that was because there was such an obvious sea change from an adoption and sort of technology basis there. You know, the AI stuff is another one. You know, all the AI companies I invested in was a little bit like, hey, the market's shifting, the technology is shifting. The flip side of it is there's lots of things that I invested in that only in hindsight could I come up with a theme, right? I invested in Notion, Airtable, and Retool within, I don't know, 2 years of each other, whatever the timeframe was. But at the time, there was no low-code, no-code kind of thesis. It was just, these are really interesting founders working in interesting areas. And so in hindsight, there was a market, or at least there was a trend. But at the time it was just like, these are smart people working on good stuff. And so it's a little bit of that. How do you balance both of those perspectives? And sometimes you're thesis-driven and sometimes you're just like, you know what, the thousands of great founders out there working on ideas are going to come up with better ones than I am. And so, you know, let's, let's have an open mind on everything.

I think it was on The Information or something like that. They talked about how you had just raised like a billion dollars. And that you famously didn't have any employees. And Sam Altman has this, or I don't know who said it, I thought it was Sam Altman, where he said something like a 1 or 2 person billion dollar company is going to be a thing now because of AI. But that's kind of what you've already done.

Um, you know, it already existed before that. Minecraft was like, I don't know what, 3 people when Microsoft bought it.

But that's sort of like what you're doing. Like you've got a pretty huge business. With 2 or 3 or however many people you have? Or up until recently, I think according to these articles, you had like 2 people.

I mean, I think there's a long history of this kind of stuff. And if you look at the world's biggest hedge funds or you look at a lot of later stage firms, they tend to have that structure, right? And so if you look at a traditional investment firm, there's usually 1 or 2 people who do most of the good investments. I think in general, there's this odd collapsing down to a handful of people in many types of endeavors. But the reality is there have been multiple businesses that have hit enormous scale that have been quite small. And I think Minecraft is really a canonical example of that. But again, there's also the need to go big sometimes, right? Sometimes you want to win the market and you should hire a ton of people. And so I think the future of two-person companies, at least in the medium term, is very overstated. I think AI is largely going to be business as usual and certain types of teams are going to shrink a lot, right? I'm an investor in a company called Decagon, for example, that's working on the customer success side. And that's an area where I think there'll be enormous leverage to existing customer success reps, but probably there's an overall shrinkage in that industry. If you look at things like what Klarna announced around their use of AI and customer success, right? So I think certain teams will get impacted first versus others through AI. I think the two-person AI company is largely in the future, but there are historical precedents of this happening before AI, right?

Do you measure, I mean, obviously you measure, but I guess like what is the metric that you keep track of for your own investing? So like, you know, at the top of this we talked about, you know, number of unicorns, but you know, you can look at IRR, you can look at your DPI, you can, you know, I did a deep dive on YC the other day and there's like some insane number. I'm going to butcher it because I don't have it right in front of me, but like Sam, I don't know if you know this, but like the first 10 years of YC, They basically turned like something like $12 million into like $10 billion of value for them from themselves because they were writing super small checks early on and getting basically like—

was 7%?

7%, but even diluted down like the Airbnbs, the Dropboxes, like just the, even just the top 5 companies, they, let's say they net own like 2% of these when they go public. I mean, they basically had a, you know, 320x on their money. In that first decade. And then a lot of people now think that they're, you know, maybe have— they've sort of lost their touch, or the batch size are too big, or the valuation is too high. And actually, like, their hit rate has gone up even as the batch size has gone up. It's pretty, pretty wild. Eli, do you, do you have a metric that you look at that you kind of— you're proud of, or that, that's the main metric for you, how you've done in terms of the actual money in, money out?

You know, the most important thing to me, and obviously You know, I want to be a fiduciary for other people's money. A lot of my own money is in the funds I invest, et cetera. So obviously there's a financial return aspect of it, but to me, the most important things are probably twofold. One is, um, making sure that founders view me as a useful and positive resource. And two is being involved with the most important technologies and technology companies in the world, because I think that's how you drive societal impact. So I view technology as a lever on the world, right?

I'm not an angel investor, but you're such a hard person to compete against because you're like, you, it just, you, it's very strange that you're an investor because you don't seem like you're money motivated. You know what I mean? And that's a really challenging person to compete against because that's the type of person who wins in a lot of stuff is the one who's not actually caring about the money, but who's caring about missionary versus mercenary type of vibe. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, I know what you mean. I think Naval has a great framework on this. Um, because, you know, John Doerr used to ask, you know, are you a missionary or mercenary to founders in the '90s? And of course you had to say I'm a missionary, right? Like, how could you possibly say you're a mercenary? And Naval's framework is, um, is like, well, of course early in your career you're at least partially a mercenary, otherwise you're never going to find the opportunity and go in it. And then later in your life, you're a missionary. Right? You're not zero-sum. You're trying to do things for the greater good. And then, uh, once you've made it in your career, you should become an artist. You should be doing it for the love of the craft. And now for each person, there's a different mix of that over time. And I think, you know, for me, the motivator is very much technology as a lever on the world, right? That's why I was trying to do biology. That's why I did tech. That's, you know, it's like, how do you do the important things in the world? Now, if you're working on the most important problems in the world with the best people, then probably you end up with a good financial return. Because you're in the middle of the stuff that matters, right? But that doesn't have to be the motivating goal. And that's why sometimes, I don't know if you've ever sat at a dinner which is all VCs, it's like really boring because you're surrounded by at least a subset of people who are very money-driven. And the conversation, I'll give you an example. One time I was sitting at a friend's wedding dinner. And I just happened to get seated at a table where a lot of the other people were his board, which meant a lot of investors. And I sat next to somebody from a well-known firm and I said, hey, what are you interested in these days? And he said crypto. And I said, oh great, we can talk about distributed consensus and trustless systems and censorship resilient products and all this stuff. And I said, that's great. Like, what are you excited about in crypto? And he looks me in the eyes and he says, you can make a fucking lot of money at it. I was like, ha, I thought he was joking, right? I started laughing. I'm like, oh, that's so funny. No, seriously. He's like, no, that's, that's it. That's not a really interesting conversation.

Well, one of the things I liked, uh, is that on your website you publish some ideas that you're interested in or you're working on right now, or you want people to come help you pull off. I'd love if we could rip through a couple of these. Uh, let's start with one that caught my eye. He said, I want to do a new chain of K-12 schools inspired by ancient Greece. What's that all about?

Yeah, I mean, I think fundamentally anybody who has kids realizes that, you know, there may be certain aspects of the education system that are emphasized and deemphasized. And it feels like there's 4 or 5 things that are really useful for kids to learn. And I think it'd be great to try and help establish something that could be used broadly across, you know, cities or regions across the country that would really focus on some of those basic aspects of learning.

What do the ancient Greeks do? What do the ancient Greeks have to do with this?

Uh, it's just used as an example. Really what you need to find is what is the framework that you're going to use to apply so that you have some compass and consistency. And there's a certain emphasis on reasoning and logic and thinking and discourse and debate that I think was resident in that time. There was an emphasis on mathematics. There was an emphasis on writing. There was an emphasis on trying basic forms of understanding. You know, that's when you had Archimedes and lovers, and that's when you had early, um, interesting mathematics emerge. And, um, that's when you had great philosophical treatises written. So, you know, I think there's a lot of— that's also when you focus a lot on beauty and art. There's a lot of emphasis on the physical and being physically fit and resilient. So there's a, there's a lot of stuff there now.

A lot. I, I remember when I, I lived in SF from 12 to 20, and I think there was a, a handful of schools that were started for elementary kids. It was Alt School, one of them. And was there a Wonder School? Is that, does that ring a bell?

Uh, those were more kind of like, hey, we're going to use technology, etc. I don't think there's any need for technology. I think you just need a couple of good teachers and like a reasonable curriculum. And so again, I think it's not that, that I'm not trying to reinvent the school system. I just think you could go back to certain types of basics. It's interesting. There's a school in San Francisco called Proof School, which I think is fascinating. Um, I think their, their line or motto is like for kids who love math and have a very strong emphasis on mathematics in their curriculum. And, you know, kids are doing machine learning in like 10th or 11th grade and, um, you know, I find things like that kind of inspiring where they're like, okay, we're going to take a different lens on it. And our lens is just kids who love math and let's find out what's the right curriculum for those kids. And maybe some of the early literature classes emphasize sci-fi because those are the types of books they like. And maybe the, the history we focus on is XYZ versus something else. And so I just think, um, that's a good example of like a really smart approach to schooling. Um, there's a variety of people who've done these differentiated approaches.

What's your plan with, uh, with this school thing? Is you're, you're looking for kind of an entrepreneur to spearhead it? What are you looking for?

Uh, yeah, I need somebody to spearhead it. I think, um, you know, traditionally there's this directly responsible individual or DRI problem, right? It's really easy to come up with ideas and then usually you need, um, help executing them. And so, you know, it's something that I'd be happy to sponsor. Uh, but I, I really would need to find somebody who can drive that sort of thing day to day. You know, my kids are very happy in the schools that they're currently in. So it's more just something that I think would be societally useful to do more broadly. Um, and then, uh, especially if you can do it as a chain, then you end up with some sort of consistency and the ability to bring it to different populations that may not have access to this sort of schooling and other things. And so I think there's a really interesting project to be had there.

What other ideas, Sean, did he have listed there?

Uh, there's one cool one. You, you said you, I think, got a PhD in biology and you talked about longevity. You've looked into a lot of longevity. You funded clinical trials and you said something that Um, I was curious about, you said there's some exciting things that are going on in longevity. Uh, you mentioned a company called BioAge and how they have a new drug for muscle. Okay. You have my attention. What is the new drug for muscle? And generally what's exciting to you about that space?

Yeah. I mean, BioAge is a company that just went public, um, and is in their quiet period. So there probably isn't a ton I should say about them. I was an early investor there and a board observer. And, um, I think I was the first investor in that company. Actually, it's a, the, the CEO is this really exceptional PhD and postdoc. I think she did her postdoc at Stanford in biocomputation of aging. And, you know, they now have different drugs in different phases of clinical trials or preclinical work, and all that should be in their S-1 and in their public financial materials that I would encourage people to go look at. But in general, I think that aging is an area that's been dramatically underinvested in. And part of that is because of the structure of big pharma. And, you know, that, that industry tends to have very old companies, right? Sort of driving the agenda, which has its own implications. And then obviously it's highly regulated. But also if you just look at, for example, the National Institutes for Aging, which is a very small budget relative to the NCI for cancer or other parts of the NIH, and most of that budget just goes to Alzheimer's. And so actual fundamental research into aging is quite sparse. We know that aging is a developmental program that can be perturbed, right? I actually worked on that for my PhD. I worked at the intersection of aging, longevity, and, and, um, excuse me, longevity. Cancer and insulin, there's certain evolutionarily conserved pathways that if you tweak them, you end up with organisms that'll live a lot longer, right? You can knock out a gene in C. elegans that lives 2, 3 times longer, for example, as a healthy adult. And we know that there's drugs that do that in mice, et cetera, genes that do that in mice, which means you can do drugs.

I like how you're saying we know as if me or Sam know anything. We don't know this. You, you, you smart PhD people know this. And can you explain in layman's terms what you just said?

You said there's like, we know that aging is like He'll say like a sentence and there's like 5 things that I'm like, wait, what? Yeah.

5 tabs need to open in my browser.

Yeah.

It's okay. C. elegans, they're living 2x longer. Uh, you said that aging is a something-driven thing.

I was just a developmental program. So basically there's a few different theories of aging. One of the theories of aging is you just accumulate a bunch of damage over time and systems break because of that damage, like mechanical damage type of thing. It's just mechanical damage. You get hit by sunlight and UV and whatever. And then there's another view of aging, which is this more almost like a developmental program that's regulated by signals in your body. Just as, you know, when you go from a baby to a child to an adult or whatever, that's just a developmental program. And if you look at different organisms, different organisms will have different clocks for aging. Right. And so why, why can turtles live so long or why, why do certain animals die so young? Right. And you're like, it's just a developmental program. They have a set lifespan that's genetically defined.

And why would that be the case? Like, why would we have an off button?

Uh, you know, there's all these theories and who knows? I mean, I don't, I'm, you know, I don't know. Uh, there's theories, but I don't know which theory is right. Um, and, uh, the, the other piece of information that we have is that we know that there's certain drugs that will extend lifespan in multiple organisms. You take a drug and Or you give a drug to something and it lives longer. Rapamycin would be an example where in mice, um, mice will live 10 to 30% longer based on actually their sex, right? So female mice, I think, will live longer than male mice on rapamycin. And then there's knockouts that you can do in genes. And if you knock out a gene, certain organisms will live a lot longer. And that means that you can develop a drug for it, right? That's how the drug industry works. You can do a drug that mimics a gene knockout or a gene upregulation and you end up with the same effect. And so we know that you can make things live much longer. And there is very little being done in people around that. And so the question is why, right? And imagine if you had another 30 or 40 or 50 healthy years.

And when you say, uh, the question is why, what's the answer? Is it that, uh, it's not funded enough? It's not safe enough? There's, uh, some other commercial disincentive for it?

Yeah, it's 3 things. It's not funded enough. For all sorts of reasons. Second is from a regulatory framework perspective. Until very recently, the FDA did not have like a good definition of, of what it means to build an aging drug, right? Because in general, this sort of point 3 in the broader medical world, aging is not considered a disease. It's considered a natural state. And so why would you develop a drug against a natural state? And so, uh, there's a company called Loyal, which is doing aging in dogs. And they actually defined a series of like endpoints.

Is that Kevin Rose? Is that thing Kevin Rose invested in? I think he talked to us about it.

I don't know.

That's like my favorite, like longevity company. It's like, yeah, forget the humans. Let's save, like, I'm all about it. Let's save the dogs. I think it's both, uh, going to have an easier regulatory pathway, but also, uh, good for society. Like, uh, my dog living longer. I, I support nothing more than that. Um, Does that— what have they found? Is that working? I haven't kept up with the, like, actual science of the company.

Yeah, I think— I, I don't know. I'm not an investor there. I think the founder is quite good. Um, I just haven't been involved there. Um, you know, as I mentioned, one of the main things I've been involved with in that area is a company called BioAge, which again just went public. And there's all sorts of information there in the public domain now about them that is worth looking up.

You, uh, you know, there— what was that crazy quote. It was like, um, what Silicon Valley nerdy people are doing for fun, that's like what everyone else is going to do in the next like 10 or 15 years or something like that.

Nerds do on the weekend.

I hope not, because then there's going to be a lot of veganism, which sounds awful.

Well, that's what I was going to ask you, which is like, you, uh, you kind of fit that stereotype. You have a lot of resources and you're in the know with a lot of like interesting new things. Are you taking any like interesting pharmaceuticals? Are you doing metformin? What do you think is interesting right now that you think will be a little bit more popular in 2, 3, 4, 5 years?

Yeah, the honest answer is I don't know. I've tried to stay away from taking anything chronically unless I think it would have a huge impact. And so far, there isn't anything in the market that would really map to that. You know, a lot of it honestly is like, do you exercise? Do you sleep? Do you eat well? You know, there's, there's reasonably good data around rapamycin that people should work with their doctor on and sort of figure out if it's—

but you're not—

no, you haven't done anything there. So again, I've, I've tried to ask, let me wait until there's something that I feel is big enough impact. Some people, for example, in the aging community will take a certain subclass of statins for heart disease and neuro, and then they'll take, I think a subset was taking some baby aspirin similarly for heart disease. So there's some people who've done some things that Again, you should talk to your doctor about if you want to consider stuff like that. I haven't done anything like that because I just don't want to take things every day.

When Sam says that quote about, you know, what the nerds are doing on the weekends and what they're tinkering with in their spare time is what we'll, we'll all be doing, you know, 10 years from now.

Yeah. I'm just going straight to hardcore gene therapy. So I'm just going to, I'm just kidding. I'm going to CRISPR my genome.

But are you kidding? I mean, it sounds pretty cool.

I am kidding. Yeah. Yeah. I think, um, a lot of that stuff. Feels very premature to me. There are some people doing self-experimentation like that in the public domain. I just don't know that some of those things will work. It's kind of interesting because I feel like when people talk about gene delivery, there's like 3 or 4 aspects of it that matter. And everybody focuses now on sort of the CRISPR side of it, which is can you modify a gene in a, in a cell versus can you target it to the right cells? Will your immune system target those cells and turn it off? Like there's all this other stuff that can you hit enough cells for it to matter? There's all this other stuff that traditionally have been the real issues of gene therapy that aren't, aren't being addressed as effectively as sort of the CRISPR-Cas stuff.

So you, um, you've been interested in longevity earlier than I would say like this current, current kind of wave of interest. You know, I think you not only did you study it in school, you, it's, I saw on your site, you said you personally identified a gene that's involved in lifespan. You funded your own clinical trial at Stanford. It didn't work, but you're like, It's okay, I'll try. I'm happy to try again. Um, I'm curious, what do you think of Bryan Johnson and what he's doing?

You know, I've, I've never met him. Um, I haven't looked deeply into what he's doing, so I think it's great that people are raising awareness for this kind of stuff, but I don't have any specific insight or opinion. Like, I just haven't looked into it.

I'm surprised. How come you haven't looked into it? That seems like it's right up your alley.

I've been busy in terms of just focusing on like hardcore biopharma for this stuff, right? Like drug development that can benefit society at large. That's, that's what I vote. So it's just a different area of focus, right?

What I want to know is, are there any ideas on there that are just, they're just cool, but not necessarily like a world-changing serious thing?

Like, do you ever think his monuments thing, because he talked about the monuments thing, I think that's dope.

Oh, um, so one thing again, I need, I need somebody to come work with me on this and I'd happily fund it is, um, If you look at every society at sort of its peak, um, they, they would build large-scale monuments towards progress. And so it's like the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Honestly, I don't know if you know the origins of the Eiffel Tower, but it was built in the late 1800s for a World Fair in Paris to show off French steelmaking prowess. Right. It was an ode to technology and an ode to steelmaking because steel was like modern tech and it was very controversial at the time. People thought it was ugly and all this stuff. Right.

A lot of bridges were built in America at that period, you know, with Andrew Carnegie, were built with that idea of like, let's prove. So like the Eads Bridge in St. Louis, it was the same thing where they would do these, they would build these amazing bridges and then they would do like all these funny things. Like they would get an elephant to walk across it to prove, yeah, to prove that it works strong. You know what I mean? And, uh, but yeah, but so like these like flexes, uh, like exist.

There's a flex side of it and there's an inspirational side of it. Like where are the large-scale inspiring pieces of beauty and art in society anymore? Like, where have they gone? Why aren't we doing those anymore?

Vegas Sphere, that's the last one.

Yeah, seriously, I think that's a real example of large-scale societal beauty, right?

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

But what was the last thing like that that we did? It's been decades, right?

It's been decades. And I actually find it to be quite saddening. And, and that's actually sort of what you said is once you get to a point where you're financially secure, uh, on a human basis, on a human level, you do things, uh, for art, for artistic reasons because it makes your soul feel good. I, I do wish we did that a little bit more as a country. Um, but there was a period between like 1870, right? Post-Civil War up to like 1960s or so, right around when JFK passed. Like where there was this like series in America where we did a bunch of like interesting experiments where you could just say it was just cuz, you know what I mean? And I, and I really appreciate that.

Yeah. And part of that is going to be regulation. And then part of that is this odd postmodern cynical thinking, right? There's a very strong anti-progress movement in the US. You know, basically the idea is, um, you buy land and you construct giant monuments that are inspiring. I don't know. I mean, it's pretty simple-minded, but imagine if you walked out in San Francisco and you looked across, you know, to the view with the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz, and there was a giant statue that's kind of an ode to the future. Why don't we have that?

How much do these things even cost?

You know, the land, it depends on where you do it and it depends on the regulatory framework. The land in major metros tends to be the more expensive part of it actually versus the construction. Ratio basis.

Let's walk through an example. What's one that you, you fantasized about? You're like, okay, what if we did this? That would be cool. I would be—

yeah, there was actually an island for sale in the bay, um, that ended up selling. I can't remember for how much. I remember that. $9 or something.

Was that up by Stockton?

Uh, no, it was in the bay. It was actually in the, in the, in the water. It was like a little island. And, um, you know, you, you, um, It was on the market for a while. I actually looked at it a couple times in terms of thinking, huh, maybe this is the thing. Maybe this is the anchor thing, but I just think it's going to be so hard to do anything in the Bay Area. Right. I mean, it's hard enough to construct a public toilet. Like, are they really going to let you build a beautiful monument? Right. On any reasonable timeframe. But there's lots of other metro areas that are much more amenable to this. And there's a global version of this and there's a US version, but often in major metros, it's the land. And then the construction actually isn't that bad because really what you're building is a big statue. And in some cases you're building out a base or foundation under it that may be part of a building. Maybe you want to build an elevator up if you have a big view or vista, but you're not building a large commercial property with all the plumbing and electrical and, you know, all the extra stuff that goes into it. Right. Often these things are kind of like hollow shells with—

and what would it be of like, you know, what's our equivalent of the Statue of Liberty or the Eiffel Tower? That's like, you know, to demonstrate their steel prowess? Like, what do you think would be the modern equivalent that would have some meaning?

I think there's lots of stuff you can do. I actually think, um, you know, one of the things that the intention around Monumental, which is what we're calling the project, uh, is to also solicit ideas from people who live in locales and what do they want, right? What do they view as inspiring and what do they want to drive their children, their children's optimism forward, right? This is in some sense an ode to progress, but more importantly, it's a way to encourage the future. How do you encourage inspiration in young people, right? How do you get people jazzed about the future and technology and optimism and doing things and building things and moving society forward? And I think part of this lack of ongoing societal beauty and ongoing great works is a reflection of cynicism that, to your point, came in in the '60s and '70s and has really kind of spoiled the well.

Oh, it— well, yeah, I mean, that's my— that's one of my favorite eras to read about. Basically, like, in the mid-'60s, uh, Malcolm X, JFK, RFK, there's a— there's a series of assassinations. And like, one can argue that that was like the death of innocence in America. And so it's like kind of like an interesting period to, to read about.

Maybe. I mean, you look at all the stuff that happened in history before that, some pretty awful stuff happened roughly every couple decades, right? I mean, World War II was not a happy time. World War I was not a happy time. The Civil War was not, you know, there's a lot of shit that's gone down.

No doubt about that.

Maybe the boomers self-internalized things in a different way because they were self-absorbed as a generation.

And so maybe for them it was a big moment, but it just seems like there was just a shift. There was some mindset shift and I, maybe that is what it was attributed to. I don't know what it's attributed to. Have you ever, uh, I don't know if you guys, Sean, you definitely have. Well, maybe you have actually. Sean, driving to Duke, do you guys ever remember seeing all these crosses on the side of the highway in the South? I bet Ari has, but like, you know, there was this guy who was, um, he, when he, uh, he was old and he had saved up roughly $3 or $4 million and he spent all of that money building crosses on the side of the highway. Now, regardless if you like dig Christianity or not, it doesn't matter, but I always thought it was so interesting. That like this guy dedicated that money to that. If you guys don't remember seeing this, it was like a big deal in the South. It would like, you'd be driving to the South and every 50 or 100 miles you would just see this huge cross and that's all you saw. Or you would see these billboards that says Jesus Saves. You remember those?

Yeah, I've seen those.

I never understood what that is, dude.

And it has a phone number that you could call and I would call that phone number every once in a while just to see what would happen. And at this point, a lot of it goes to a dead phone number. But it was basically a lot of it came down to this one man who had saved roughly $3 million and he spent it on that. And then other churches started following, following it and started doing it. And I always thought it was really interesting, uh, the idea of just spending money just for this cause. And, and your logical brain is like, that's silly. But then like your heart is like, oh, that's actually kind of an interesting idea. How much of your own money would you spend on doing this monument project?

Um, I don't know. I mean, I think it'd be good to try and get the first thing up and running and then, you know, do it as a joint effort with lots of people. Because again, the hope is you actually feed the needs of local places. You know, another example where I think there's this sort of craftsmanship applied, there's a park in Oslo where somebody spent, I don't know, it was a decade, two decades building statues in this one park. It was an artist who went in and he just, and you go in and it's all this consistent, this consistent series of statues from one person, right? One artist who spent a big chunk of his life Making them, uh, I think he made something like 200 sculptures over a few decades, right? And so there's other forms of this in terms of people trying to contribute works. And the question is, why aren't we, again, why aren't we doing it? Like, what happened? What happened to us societally to stop doing all this really inspiring, amazing stuff?

Yeah, well, I think the good news is it only takes one, right? Like, I think Elon showed that when, when he started doing projects that none of the other entrepreneurs really wanted to do and no investors really wanted to fund. And then it created this wave and it just kind of sparked inspiration where now a bunch of people do that, right? Like, I think the closest thing we have to that is like Tesla and SpaceX, to be honest, of these, like, that's our moon mission, right? It's like, wow, this guy just poured his entire talent and net worth into these like super high risk, low probability, you know, useful for society, hard but awesome projects.

And he pulled it off.

And, you know, that changed the wiring in every founder's brain. You know, it doesn't even matter what you're doing. You might be doing some boring insurance company, but you still— that example still lives in your brain, right? And I think that's, that's pretty powerful.

You're a pretty serious person. You take life serious. Like, you, you, like, you see problems and you're like, I want to solve them. Is it— what do you do just for shits and giggles, like, just to unwind?

Before you have kids, there's all sorts of things you do that the time goes away for once you have them. But, you know, I used to do— I don't know what to call it— like intensive travel, you know? So I'd go to India for 2 months and do yoga for 2 months there with a guy who learned from a guy in a cave kind of thing. Or, you know, just, just different forms of very immersive travel was one thing I used to do a lot of.

If somebody today had the freedom to do that, what would be your— what's Gil's guide to that intensive travel? What would you tell— what was really transformative for you? Or like, what was your approach to that?

Yeah, I think it's basically spend at least a month in one city. And adopt, decide to learn something there. And so, you know, maybe you want to go learn how to draw, or maybe you want to go to France and learn to make pastries, or maybe you want to, you know, in my case it was go to India and do this very intensive yoga experience, or maybe, you know, and especially if it's part of a community that you join, you get really immersed in interesting ways and not just the topic, but also the people around it and the local people. Right? Because then you're really forced to be part of something. There's actually a, a person I know who's about to start a company, and I convinced him to go do this because he had an extra month or two, and he said it was like the best month he'd spent. He went down to Brazil and enrolled in some classes down there, and he just spent a month doing it. And so I personally think it's super interesting, and how often in your life can you actually get a chance to do things like that? But also it is a different form of travel than, hey, I'm going to, you know, I went on a Chinese tour group of Italy once. And on these Chinese tour groups, they try to see as many cities as possible in as short a time as possible. That's check the box, right? Okay, there's the Leaning Tower of Pisa, check, we saw it. It's like you stop for 10 minutes and then you run to the next thing. You know, that's very different from, hey, I'm just going to sit in one place for a month or two. That's awesome.

Yeah, I've had great experiences doing that. We used to go to Buenos Aires for, you know, basically 4 to 5 weeks, one live in one city, live like a local. And everywhere I would go, I would do two things. I would play basketball because that was like something I grew up doing. So it was like a native fluency I had. Even if I couldn't speak the language, I could always kind of make my way in there. But also I would go, if I ever travel with my brother-in-law, he loves jiu-jitsu and I'll never go with him to a jiu-jitsu class here in the States. But jiu-jitsu has this like really intense camaraderie and openness and inclusiveness. If you go to— so we went to jiu-jitsu gyms in Spain, and you immediately feel like you're one of the people and you're learning from them, and they have actually different techniques. And again, we don't even speak the language, but man, it's like an incredible fast way to bond or get—

I actually feel like the jiu-jitsu community is one of the most vibrant ones right now along those lines. Yeah. And to your point, it's basically you go anywhere in the world and you plug in. That's how this type of yoga I used to do was. It was the same thing. You just show up. And you knew how it worked and everybody was kind of in the same, uh, they had the same vibe and they were part of the same kind of crew. Like you were instantly adopted. And my sense is that jiu-jitsu community today is a good example of that, where you just, you show up, you're instantly part of it. They pull you in. Everybody has a common thing to talk about. Everybody has common interests in a really positive way, even though it's a very diverse group around the world.

Right.

Um, and there aren't that many communities like that. And I think there's almost these interesting questions of like, how did these form and why did they persist? And all the rest. But this is back to my point on doing quote unquote a hobby or learning something that it's actually plugging into a community like that I think is important.

I love that. I think of all the things we talked about today, that was the most useful, surprisingly, right? I wanted to learn about investing from you, but I got a totally different golden nugget out of this. Where should people find you if they want more?

I guess they could find me on Twitter. You know, I'm @AllodGil and then, you know, just hope more people go and build interesting things. I think, you know, there's a lot to do.

We appreciate you.

Great. Yeah, thanks so much for the time.

All right, well, take care.