Angel Investor Elad Gil: Company Results Have Expanded Tenfold Compared to Ten Years Ago
Elad Gil pointed out that the current company scale and exit results have expanded about tenfold compared to ten years ago, and about one hundredfold compared to the 1990s.
He cited Cursor's spiritual equivalent as an example, stating that similar tools were considered significant deals when sold for $500 million in the past, while current similar products have entered much higher scales.
Cursor's parent company Anysphere was acquired by SpaceX for $60 billion in an all-stock deal in August 2026, with its valuation rapidly rising from hundreds of millions to nearly $30 billion.
The company's annualized revenue climbed from over $100 million to several billion dollars within about a year and a half, covering most Fortune 500 companies.
Gil has long been an early investor in companies like Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase, and OpenAI, and has written a high-growth manual, continuously tracking the scale expansion trajectory of tech companies.
Larger results attract more capital concentrated on a few high-growth targets, with early seed and growth-stage funding skewing towards companies that can quickly reach a billion-dollar revenue level, while the relative attractiveness of traditional medium-scale exits declines, putting pressure on startups that have not entered the top flywheel in terms of financing and talent competition.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Elad Gil was previously responsible for mobile business at Google, later founded Mixer Labs which was acquired by Twitter, and has since continued to invest as an angel in companies like Airbnb, Stripe, Coinbase, OpenAI, and Anduril, systematically documenting the organizational and capital pathways from ten to ten thousand people in his high-growth manual.
His observations focus on how technological leverage allows individual company revenues and exit scales to rise rapidly, leading capital and talent to concentrate on targets that can cross the billion-dollar revenue threshold in a short cycle, rather than remaining in the traditional hundreds of millions exit range.
This contrasts with the late 1990s internet bubble when many companies exited for tens of millions to low hundreds of millions, or the 2010s mobile app era where hundreds of millions in acquisitions were considered top results. The current AI cycle allows product tool companies to leap from hundreds of millions in valuation to tens of billions within two years.
Essentially, this represents capital concentration: as technology reduces the marginal cost of revenue and user acquisition, the distribution of results shifts from relatively uniform to an extreme long tail, accelerating capital and attention towards a few companies capable of forming data or distribution flywheels, with pricing power shifting from a broad range of entrepreneurs to a few holders with scalable pathways.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
- After the scale of results expands tenfold, past large deals become the baseline.
- Technological leverage compresses time, leading capital to concentrate on a few flywheels.
- As exit thresholds rise, medium scales no longer constitute an endpoint.