Advising and Angel-Investing in Companies by Elad Gil, Nina Achadjian
Is investing in, or advising other startups or companies a good idea for you? How do you choose which companies to get involved with? What expectations should you set with the companies you help? What are the pitfalls and conflicts and how do you navigate them? How can advising companies help your company or your career? What are signs that a startup is working? How can you help? This session covers these and other topics related to becoming an investor or advisor to other people's companies.
Elad will speak to his experiences as a serial founder, operator, and investor in 25+ billion dollar companies including Airbnb, Airtable, Coinbase, Figma, Gusto, Instacart, Notion, Pinterest, PagerDuty, Stripe, Square, and others.
Elad Gil
"Elad Gil is a serial entrepreneur, operating executive, and investor or advisor to private companies such as AirBnB, Airtable, Coinbase, Gusto, Instacart, Opendoor, PagerDuty, Pinterest, Square, Stripe, Wish. Elad has invested in over 20 “unicorn” companies worth $1B or more, 16 of them at the seed or series A. He is author of the bestselling book “High Growth Handbook”, about organizational and financial scaling of breakout technology companies. Elad is Co-Founder and Chairman of Color, a digital health company focused on democratizing access to genetics and preventative health. He is also involved with longevity biotech including BioAge and Spring Discovery. Elad is an advisor to Electric Capital, a crypto hedge fund, and is involved with leading crypto companies (Coinbase, Anchorage, Bitwise, Tagomi) and new protocols (Coda, dYdX,…). Previously, Elad was VP of Corporate Strategy at Twitter, as well as ran various product teams (Geo, Search). Elad joined Twitter via acquisition of MixerLabs, where he was co-founder and CEO. MixerLabs ran GeoAPI, an early developer-centric infrastructure product. Elad spent many years at Google, where he started the mobile team and was involved in all aspects of getting the team up and running. He was involved with 3 acquisitions (including the Android team) and was the original product manager for Google Mobile Maps and Mobile Gmail, which are used by hundreds of millions of people a month. Prior to Google, Elad had product management and market seeding roles at a number of Silicon Valley companies. Elad worked at McKinsey & Co. and received a Ph.D. from MIT and BS and BA in Math from UCSD. "
Nina Achadjian
Nina is a Partner at Index Ventures where she focuses on venture and growth investments in enterprise SaaS, vertical SaaS, and AI. She is excited by the combination of software and payments to help legacy industries transition from using pen and paper workflows to adopting more modern, vertical-specific solutions. Nina also believes that the combination of voice and AI is unlocking new business applications and soon will become the new system-of-record for enterprises. Previously, Nina was an FP&A Lead for Google’s AdSense team where she managed a multi-billion dollar book of business covering Amazon, IAC and eBay. Nina started her career as a high yield bond trader at Citigroup. She also started HIVE Ventures, the first seed venture fund focusing on Armenian entrepreneurs, where she invested in over 30 companies. Nina graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in government and is a recipient of the Michael C. Rockefeller Scholarship. Nina currently lives in San Francisco and enjoys watching football and Formula 1.
