Home Speakers Elad Gil Quote Founders running successful AI companies should all take a cold hard look at exiting in the next 12-18 months, which may be a value maximizing moment for outcomes.
Words found on the source page on Nov 6, 2026.
More from Elad Gil Blog Random thoughts while gazing at the misty AI Frontier Apr 20, 2026
AI will first automate away the things that are easier to form a closed loop learning system on. This is why code and AI research may be accelerated and then displaced quickly - you can have testable closed loop systems so machines can learn and iterate quickly. Blog Random thoughts while gazing at the misty AI Frontier Apr 20, 2026
If Anthropic and OpenAI hit $100B of revenue by EOY as many think they might, roughly 1% of GDP run rate will be from AI by end of 2026. Blog Random thoughts while gazing at the misty AI Frontier Apr 20, 2026
Multiple later stage CEOs told me that rather then do big layoffs due to AI, they will just stop growing. So if revenue at the company is growing 30%, 50%, or 100%, headcount may be flat or slightly down as they allow attrition to shrink staff. Blog Random thoughts while gazing at the misty AI Frontier Apr 20, 2026
The AI engineer of the future will be managing and orchestrating large numbers of agents to build things (systems and product thinking) vs writing a lot of code themselves (the auto-complete tab era). Blog Random thoughts while gazing at the misty AI Frontier Apr 20, 2026
The top AI researchers became post-economic all at once. (Maybe the closest prior analogues is the early crypto HODLRs?). Blog Random thoughts while gazing at the misty AI Frontier Apr 20, 2026
This means countries like India and the Philippines may be the most impacted soonest in terms of employment and AI as they house many of these outsourced services organizations. It also means some developing countries may lose their services ladder to upgrading their economy and work. Blog Random thoughts while gazing at the misty AI Frontier Apr 20, 2026
While people will undoubtedly get more efficiency out of the compute they have, this artificial compute constraint may mean no one lab is able to break significantly ahead until 2028 at the soonest - re-enforcing an oligopoly market for LLMs. Blog AI Market Clarity Jul 22, 2025
In the future, it is unlikely that many new core LLM companies will get started due to capital moats, barring some new breakthrough that somehow doesn’t spread quickly. Blog AI Market Clarity Jul 22, 2025
Often, adoption of AI is not a technology problem – it is an organization, process, and people issue. Blog AI Market Clarity Jul 22, 2025
We are starting to see the shift from selling seats, to selling units of cognition or human equivalent labor. Blog Things I Don't Know About AI Feb 21, 2024
Cloud providers are easily the biggest funders of foundation models, not venture capitalists. Blog Things I Don't Know About AI Feb 21, 2024
Things seem to be evolving towards the above: Frontier LLMs are likely to be an oligopoly market.
On the same topics Blog New founder archetypes in the AI era Oct 27, 2026
The solo founder is part of a list of maybe new archetypes that I think we’ll soon see a lot more of - and I’ll make both the pro and con case for each here: Solo founders Why: Solo founders can do 100x with AI, so they can ship a v1 when previously they couldn’t have before Why not: Maybe a team of cofounders still makes more progress. Blog Can solo founders win in the AI era? Oct 27, 2026
These days at a16z I’m mostly working on Speedrun , where we write the first check into brand new startups (up to $1M), and a lot of what we focus on is founder backgrounds/profiles. What are the right ones? How will the profiles change as we enter the age of AI? Blog Why I still haven't bought into true RSI Sep 19, 2026
I have my doubts that the labs can afford to spend a constant portion of this compute on internal R&D as the total volume goes up, especially with plans to IPO, as they face increased scrutiny on basic economics. Blog No, Anderson Cooper, AI is not going to kill us all Sep 10, 2026
But in my view, the net effect of the last decade of “Doomer” talk (Coxon appears to be a card-carrying member of that party) has been to make the Frontier AI companies wealthier and more powerful. Blog No, Anderson Cooper, AI is not going to kill us all Sep 10, 2026
Everytime they scream that AI is going to kill us all, VCs toss in billions more. Blog The coming product retention crisis Sep 8, 2026
That’s a fair question at the dawn of the AI age when an app might take about as much time to build as editing a Youtube video. So this means average product retention will collapse, and the days of seeing >20% D30 will feel like a dream. About this quote 
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