Elad Gil’s 3 archetypes of hyper-successful founders

I got very lucky so you know I helped out um uh a lot of these early teams and they just happen to be some of the biggest companies you know it's Airbnb it's stripe you know eventually 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 like 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 uh yesterday where I was just trying to brainstorm on what are there specific signs of truly outside 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 couldn't 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 matter what you need the market right now within that there's tons and tons of people who enter these markets and do a horribly 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 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 don't do any of that they're just they actually say no to everything and they're just all in on one thing in a really Trav definitely that way yeah yeah so I think

that's another Arch type 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

um like Parker at Rippling 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 um things

like that on so Z maybe has Network effect plus maybe some of the polym math side or something like that yeah or just I I I I don't know him so I don't know if he's on the intense Focus or the polymathic side or whatever but I'm just saying like um 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