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
00:41:23 · Elad Gil, Aditya Agarwal
[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 [00:41:36] S1: mean, I think Jeff Bezos is back to building now. [00:41:38] S0: Right here. Oh, how do you define building? Yeah. Right? He wasn't technical at all, and so he hired some guy to build stuff. If you look at Uber, right, Travis has talked about this publicly. Travis and Garrett set it up as a side project. They found the CEO Ryan on Twitter. They literally tweeted, hey. We have this side project. He wants to run it. And somebody put up their hand on Twitter. That was Ryan Graves. Right? And then they... I think they initially outsourced the app to third party developers and then brought it in house. Right? That was early Twitter. I mean, early on.. [00:42:08] S1: Right. Excuse me. We're CEO. [00:42:09] S0: Yeah. And he... They find him on Twitter. Right? And so were they building? [00:42:16] S1: Yeah. Good point. But Garrett always sees he be the first worker. Maybe he did. Maybe he did. But I... You're quite a builder. Don't know. [00:42:23] S0: Quite is that. Again, I I wasn't in the middle of it. I'm just saying, like, it's interesting to look at historical precedents, and I think we have all these myths. Yeah. And it may be 90% true.
00:42:23 · Elad Gil, Aditya Agarwal
[00:42:23] S0: Quite is that. Again, I I wasn't in the middle of it. I'm just saying, like, it's interesting to look at historical precedents, and I think we have all these myths. Yeah. And it may be 90% true. [00:42:33] S1: I was just actually walking by the Cove office, which was 148 Townsend the other day, and I remember because it was impossible to get a fucking cab in San Francisco. So my first ever Uber was, like, a Uber blackened from 148 Townsend to our house in Noe Valley. And it was amazing because I'm, like, don't find a cab in San Francisco. So I was just thinking about that. [00:42:54] S0: One aside, by the way, as I'm afraid, do think builder CEOs tend to do better Yes. On average. So I'm not at all in the game, Matt, and just saying there's there's counterexamples. And it's because they're in the weeds on the product or detailing to... That they're doing stuff. They don't need another person to enable them so they can't kinda shit things and do they... No. So there's all sorts of reasons why it's a huge pothead. So not at all... I think in general, I tend to work with technical founders. I'm just saying it... It's... [00:43:15] S1: At least there are examples where that isn't true. Yeah. Maybe maybe the larger follow-up question is more, is a CEO need... Should they be a little bit more hands on than they were five years ago? Because the tools to... Because in five years, know, if you're essentially... You know, the bifurcation between manager mode and maker mode was pretty stark.