And a friend of mine used to work with Steve Jobs at Pixar.

And he said that the thing that Jobs is really good at was listening more clearly than anybody else,

or really that clarity of hearing what somebody's really meaning under their words,

and then communicating more crisply and concisely and directly than anyone else.

Does it help being independent to just kind of have your own conviction?

What I've observed is that you need to have the ability to do things that may be unpopular.

And so often it's more, how do you double check the assumptions that are being made either

broadly, societally, or by yourself?

How do you make sure you're asking the right questions and revisiting assumptions?

That's really, I think, the core of it. And so Andrewo was a conviction in the importance of a market.

Stripe was a conviction in a company and its momentum. And then investing in Gen.A.I. early was conviction in a technology wave.

If you look at a lot of the AI world, one of the things that I find really striking is how much opportunity there is

and how oddly clustered all the startups are in a small number of opportunities and then there's

just white space. And so, you know, you'll have seven companies all jumping on the same identical thing.

And then there'll be like all these opportunities that nobody's doing anything on. And if that

industry is a slow adopter of technology, actually building a company to sell into that industry may not actually be useful because it may just get adopted too slowly. And so maybe what you do is you just buy some assets and roll them up and go after it. And then you're like, okay, do I invest in a company? Do I incubate? Or in some cases, do you do a buyout? You would do that? Potentially, yeah. I mean, I've already... Welcome to the Peel, where we explore the world's greatest startup stories. I'm your host, Turner Novak, founder of Bannanac, the venture capital firm that invests on its own conviction. I'm excited to share this conversation with

Alad Gill. Alad is the founder of Color and Mixer Labs, which he sold to Twitter and an investor in

iconic companies like Airbnb and Stripe and upstarts like Perplexity and Andro. Our conversation

covers a lot of ground, including building cool things, why AI is underhyped, fixing education,

why there aren't large biotech companies, how to get conviction in unpopular investments, the importance of

ambition and leadership, the importance of speed of execution, when it's okay to give up.

Non-obvious startup advice, a large investing strategy from early to late stage, how he incubates

...