Elad Gil’s 3 archetypes of hyper-successful founders

February 19, 2025

Elad Gil has invested in and advised some of the largest companies in the world, including Stripe, Airbnb, Figma, Instacart, and Coinbase.

When asked what made the founders of these companies so successful, Elad replies:

“I think a lot of it is: Do you end up in the right market? Is the market big enough? Is it growing? Is it dynamic in the right way? I think half of it just is that you find the right market…. So you need the right market, but within that, there are tons of people who enter these markets and do horribly. So what’s different?”

He notices that hyper-successful founders tend to fall into three buckets:

“The first one is the polymathic, hyper-intellectual, yet very competitive person. And that’s probably Patrick and John [Collison] from Stripe. That was Larry and Sergey when I worked at Google — they were very polymathic, very deep on everything.”

He continues:

“I think the second one is the super hardcore, extremely focused, really really driven, overdrive founder. That may be Travis [Kalanick] from Uber… And I think there are 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 own company. And this second class of founders doesn’t do any of that. They say no to everything, and they’re all-in on one thing.”

Joe Lonsdale adds that this second type reminds him of Peter Thiel or Elon Musk in the early days:

“I feel like Elon used to be more that way because he literally would say no to everything.”

And then the third type of founder is one who is early to a network effects business:

“If you have something that has network effects, you’re going to do well.”