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Episode Highlights / Timestamps
00:00 The first billion-dollar solo company (Minecraft)
00:27 Elad’s investing track record
01:12 What “making it” really means
04:03 Where today’s “toys” become tomorrow’s giants
08:51 AI puts building power in millions of hands
09:45 Will more builders mean smaller outcomes?
13:03 AI service shops and vertical software
15:00 AI cutting permitting time from months to hours
16:39 Does AI replace CRMs and SaaS?
19:12 Is off-the-shelf software dead?
23:15 The shift from seats to AI labor units
27:36 Alexandria: translating the world’s most important books
30:36 How Elad uses AI personally
35:06 Where new AI ideas come from
37:48 What’s exciting for the next decade

“The first billion-dollar one-person company? That already happened. It was Minecraft.”

In this episode of The Next New Thing, Andrew Warner sits down with legendary investor Elad Gil — early backer of companies like Airbnb, Coinbase, Stripe, Instacart, and more — to talk about where AI is really going… and what founders are getting wrong.

Elad argues that we’re still in the early innings of AI — and that “software is AI.” The shift isn’t just better SaaS. It’s a move from seat-based software to metered digital labor. From buying tools… to buying units of work.

They discuss:

Whether “toy” AI apps can become real businesses
Why small vibe-coded projects can turn into giant companies
The agent shift (and why it changes TAM completely)
How AI eats into labor markets, not just software categories
Whether CRMs, ERPs, and landing page tools survive
Why some companies should be bought and rebuilt with AI
The real opportunity in foundation models beyond language

Elad also shares what he’s personally experimenting with — scraping and interrogating large datasets using Claude, OpenAI, and Deep Research — and why he believes the next decade will look like the early SaaS boom… but bigger.

And in a surprising turn, he talks about something very un-Silicon Valley: monuments, art, and rebuilding public beauty — including a project called Alexandria aimed at translating the world’s most important books into languages covering 80%+ of humanity.