I am a serial entrepreneur obsessed with technology and startups. Click to read Elad Blog, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
Visit blog.eladgil.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Nov 2010 – Jul 2025
Tech Industry & Business 14Startups 8AI & Machine Learning 5Career & Management 4Life, Learning & Writing 2History & Retro Computing 1
Below is a list of products or startups that I am keeping an eye out for. I skipped listing things I wish existed that can *not* be implemented with today's technology in strong form - for example, the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer - although weak forms of this may be possible today.
Over the years I have spent a lot of time brainstorming startup ideas with people who are (asymptotically) as nerdy as me. For some reasons, every time I brainstorm with a new set of people, the following ideas come up. This suggests that either all nerds think alike, or alternatively, that they are unsolved problems…
The more I learn about AI markets, the less I think I know. I list questions and some thoughts.
Changing economic markets suggests a shift in how some companies should operate, as well as what risks to assume for 2023
One sign that technology markets often exhibit at the tail end of a cycle is a fast diversification of the types of startups getting funded. For example, following the core internet boom of the late 90s (Google, Yahoo!, eBay, PayPal), in early 2000 and 2001 there was a sudden diversification and investment into P2P…
Every year I take a step back and ask if there are common themes in technology.
I have found that the two biggest causes of having to fire an employee at an early stage startup are a lack of culture fit, and the inability to Get Shit Done. I don't care how smart someone is - if they are unable to work hard and crank out a large amount of high quality work, they will weigh down your startup.
Rather then view LLMs, Transformers, and diffusion models as part of a continuum with past "AI", it is worth thinking of this as an entirely new era and discontinuity from the past
In previous posts I wrote about visionary entrepreneurs, and how to constantly ask how you can 10X your business. However, many startups fail because the founding team thinks *too big* from day one, and doesn't take the time to really define the short term, immediate value their product or business provides.
We discuss Hugging Face, Open Source, and AI
Over the last few years the number of people and businesses online has ballooned.
Most of the times, startup don't work. At some point it may make sense to either (1) give up on your original product and to sell the company, (2) shut down what you are doing and return money to investors, or (3) to pivot. You can read more on making the decision to give up in a future article. This post focuses on…
One of the big myths in Silicon Valley is that co-founders should be equal. However, if you look at the most successful tech startups of the last 50 years, almost all of them had a dominant co-founder for most of the life of the company. This includes[1]:
A subset of AI markets have crystalized in the last 12 months, with the likely market leaders for the next year or two suddenly clear
The two biggest reasons startups fail is running out of money and founding team implosions. One Y Combinator founder I spoke with felt that about ~20% of startups in his batch blew up in the first 9-12 months after entering YC due to founder issues.
I met recently with a friend of mine who has been talking about leaving Google for the last 3 years. Every time I see him he says he is just "waiting for a great idea" to leave to start his own company. I expect him to do what a lot of people do - stick around Google for another 6-24 months, and then join someone…