Elad Gil: The Guy Behind Silicon Valley's Greatest Unicorns [The Knowledge Project Ep. #228] - Farnam Street - readwise.io  ## Metadata - Author: **readwise.io** - Full Title: Elad Gil: The Guy Behind Silicon Valley's Greatest Unicorns [The Knowledge Project Ep. #228] - Farnam Street - Category: #articles ## Highlights - �e �rst dimension is what people call product-market �t: Is there a strong demand for whatever it is you’re building? And then secondarily, I look at the team. I think most early stage people �ip it—they look at the team �rst, and how good is the founder? And obviously—I’ve started two companies myself—I think the founder side is incredibly important and the talent side is incredibly important, but I’ve seen amazing people get crushed by terrible markets, and I’ve seen reasonably mediocre teams do extremely well in what are very good markets. And so in general, I �rst ask, Do I think there’s a real need here? How’s it di�erentiated? What’s di�erent about it? And then I dig into [asking], Are these people exceptional? How will they grow over time? What are some of the characteristics of how they do things? ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jtr65nc90h1zsdz5t6gp2te0)) - Actually, Notion was a rare example where I did it as a person investment. I met Ivan Zhao, who’s a CEO over there, and everything about him was so aesthetically cohesive in a very odd way—the way he dressed, his hairstyle, the color scheme of his clothes, the color scheme of the app and the pitch deck. �e only other person I’ve seen that with is Jack Dorsey, who started Square and Twitter. �ere was this odd, almost pure embodiment of aesthetic, and I just thought it was so intriguing and so cool, and I’ve only seen two people like that before, so I had to invest, and it was just this immense consistency. It was very weird. And you go to his house and it feels like him. Everything. �e company feels like him, everything feels like him. It’s fascinating. He’s done an amazing job with it. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jtr67vxa88vm5pm7ywjz1pbb)) - And selling means selling employees to join you. It means raising money; it means selling to your �rst customers; it’s negotiating your supply chain. �ose are all aspects of sales in some sense, or negotiation. And so you need at least one person who can do that, unless you’re just doing a consumer product that you throw out there and it just grows and then people join you because it’s growing. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jts7s4jehncqspca04mab46k)) - �en you need somebody who can build stu� and build it in a uniquely good way. And that was Wozniak, right? �e way that he was able to hack things together, drop chips from the original design of Apple devices, etc., was just considered legendary. And then as the thing starts working, you eventually need somebody like Tim Cook who can help scale the company. And so you could argue that was Sheryl Sandberg in the early days of Facebook, who eventually came on as a hire and helped scale it. And Zuckerberg was really the mixture of the product visionary, the salesperson, etc. ([View Highlight](https://read.readwise.io/read/01jts7t93rajwq9gdhys82z97q))