00:33:23 · Elad Gil
[00:33:23] S0: Most likely, there's enough good founders who are just not pointed at the right things. And so it's ineffective... Or it's a it's a faulty search function. And if you think about it, entrepreneurship is a distributed search around, the economic landscape of the world. That's really what's happening. Right? You're really running a giant search function across across the economy. And, it's not an efficient process, and there's, you know, unequal information and unequal access and all the rest of it. And so, it doesn't work well. But I think there's probably enough good people that if you pointed them at the right thing. Now the folks side of it is, if you ask people how many great product people exist on the planet, I asked a very well known public market CEO who runs one of the most interesting product companies that question. I said, how many great product people do you think exist in Silicon Valley or in tech? And he said, at most, a few 100. And so then each company has at most a couple of those, and those are the people with high agency who are grinding big things for those very large companies. Right? And so there's there's... Now he may be robbed. Maybe there's tens of thousands in the wrong sort of tests or maybe there's, like, 50. I don't know. But, it is striking if you look at that overlay of, you know, if everything's a bell curve, then you need outliers on multiple aspects of multiple bell curves to do certain things exceptionally. So then you're compounding small probabilities. So one argument is for any given thing, there's not that many people, and one of the parts of that bell curve is almost always agency.
00:34:49 · Aditya Agarwal, Elad Gil
[00:34:49] S1: I was gonna say, I actually think that the most... The longer that I am in Silicon Valley, the most determining bit that I find is actually the psyche agency. It's like, given a particular situation, is your first reaction is like, I'll just do it. I'll just do things. I'll figure it out. Like, isn't it... Like, even any problem, your reaction is not that, oh, this seems super hard. It seemed too possible. It's more like, yeah. And I have to do it. We'll figure it out. There's some way... There... There's nothing that can, in some way, stop you. That doesn't mean you won't get stopped. But your first reaction is always like, oh, yeah. I gotta figure it out. I'm guide on my way out of it. Right? I think the open question for me and my variant of it was, is that something that can be truly inculcated slash taught slash developed versatility? Is there something a little bit more intrinsic about it? Yeah. It's about... I think it's probably both. And I think, you know, one of the questions I ask at the end, which I'll probably just ask now, is, in this incredible age of technological capabilities, what do you want your kids to have? And the first answer is just like agency. Say, I want all my kids to be like, I [00:35:59] S0: thought you were gonna say Bitcoin. That's what I think of. Yeah. Bitcoin. It may study the same. [00:36:05] S1: So my Ruchi's brother was visiting us this last week, and turns out that I gave all of his children a bunch of Bitcoin 6 years ago. And then I asked him, like, do you know where the keys are? And he's like, lost it.
00:36:05 · Aditya Agarwal, Elad Gil
[00:36:05] S1: So my Ruchi's brother was visiting us this last week, and turns out that I gave all of his children a bunch of Bitcoin 6 years ago. And then I asked him, like, do you know where the keys are? And he's like, lost it. [00:36:22] S0: Alright. Agency sounds like the right answer. [00:36:24] S1: Anyway, agency Okay. Coming back to it. [00:36:30] S0: You can buy Bitcoin ETFs now, by the way. So it makes a [00:36:33] S1: But they also go down when Bitcoin goes down. Yeah. Availability. Absolutely. I don't care. That's... Yeah. It's interesting. So Elad wrote a great book called The High Growth Handbook. Prateek actually has a chapter in that book. I think it's The Wolf. It's kinda named after Pulp Fiction's Harvey Keitel, you know, kind of like character, the wolf. But that was... I'm sure that that book was written, what, ten years ago? [00:37:00] S0: Something like that. Seven, eight years. It's been [00:37:02] S1: a while. What's the biggest thing you advise or off gate pay? And make
00:37:02 · Aditya Agarwal, Elad Gil
[00:37:02] S1: a while. What's the biggest thing you advise or off gate pay? And make [00:37:05] S0: it shorter. Now it's headache. Can the AIs read it well? Yeah. Yeah. Spent a GI on it. Yeah. Don't think... I I think a lot of it is still reasonably relevant because a lot of it is... Was about people related stuff. It's true. Or the basics of fundraising or how do you fire somebody for the first time or how do you hire executives or how do do m and a or... You know? So I think there's some aspects that were kind of moment in time, like, for some of the major funders of startups and stuff like that. And there's, a section on that. But I think in general, it... It's... It... Beasle and Beast still kinda works. I think, I'm actually writing another book for starting... Start best me during this, which is more about the zero to one phase of start ups. Okay? And so I've been working on that, and that's been pretty fun as, like, a project. [00:37:50] S1: So what is high growth human meaning for Inc '26? Like, when you take a look at head of, like, a company, what is your marker for, like, that is guybusters will go? Like, that kind of fits into the e log. You're like, you will definitely pay attention to the numbers.
00:38:05 · Elad Gil
[00:38:05] S0: Yeah. I don't I don't have anything prescriptive because I think it's a little bit market segment dependent. And so if you're looking at, like, a defense tech company or something, it's gonna be pretty different than if you're looking at an AI vertical company. But in general, you know, everything is growing faster than one would expect. And on the ace... AI side in particular, obviously, we're seeing these massive ramps. You know? I think Chris Ruchi now rumored at Yeah. Was just... You know, what an insane ramp. And you see multiple companies growing really fast. You know, Harvey's growing really fast. Like, Decagon and others are growing really fast. So you just see these things lift off. And I think it's back to, like, these markets are open. The capabilities are massive. The transition is large. The ability to iterate on product is high. Everybody wants to try things right now. So, again, it's a very magical moment and a very manic moment. And, you know, I've... I was looking back in history at the nineties, and in '99, 450 companies went public. In the first few months of 2000, another 450 companies went public. And so say that you had 1,500 to 2,000 companies go public over a five year span, how many of those are still relevant? I don't know the number. It's a dozen, two dozen. It's very, very few. Most of the companies went to zero. Those are the most successful companies. They went public. Right? It's not the average company. It's the the most successful companies, 90 something percent are just gone. And so then you think about it... That in the context of AI, and you're like, okay. Most of these things are not gonna exist. A handful of things are gonna be Amazon and Google and etcetera. Right? And so then as a founder, how should you think about that? And for every company, there's a handful of companies that'll keep going forever. Right? That's probably OpenAI and Adobe and PRDs things obviously going forever. There's a lot of companies that are looking really good right now. They should probably sell at some point. And for every company, there's, like, a twelve month period, which is sort of the value maximizing period that's gonna be the most viable and important it'll ever be. And then in many cases, these things go to zero or close to it.
00:40:06 · Elad Gil, Aditya Agarwal
So one thing that some people do to have good hygiene around this, and by the way, think there's some companies should absolutely never sell. Right? The companies that we work should never ever ever sell. But how do you know if you're one of those? Right? And so good hygiene, I think, for companies, especially if you have a board, is once a year to preschedule a board meeting that's talking about exits. Should we sell? And if so, I do? And is this a value maximizing moment? And because you preschedule it and it's annual, it takes the emotion out of it. It doesn't look like you're trying to sell or want to sell. It doesn't look like you're against it. You're just gonna have a rational logic based conversation on the market, on competition, on your position, on your growth rate. Like, if your growth is like this, that you see the second derivative of changing, then maybe I could tend to sell ins. You can fix it. Right? And so I think it's worth just having that conversation ongoing. Because, again, in most of these cycles, 90 something percent of things end up not working even if they look like they're working. [00:41:05] S1: Even the CEO's job in today's, like, world is a little different than it quite a privilege of us. [00:41:11] S0: Oh, so? [00:41:12] S1: Like, should every CEO... Like, do they have to be billing as an example? Like, is it possible to kind of be at the forefront of this technological [00:41:23] S0: Was Steve Jobs building? Was Jeff Bezos building? Did they have access to Claude Code? I don't know. Who knows, maybe? That's why Amazon is so successful. I