Gil sits in an unusual position for this page: he has both operated and financed at scale, and he wrote the book that collects the practice. He started two companies, Mixer Labs (acquired by Twitter, where he became a VP) and Color Health, worked on AI and mobile at Google, and now runs Gil & Co, a multi-stage investment firm whose disclosed positions include Airbnb, Anthropic, Figma, Stripe, and OpenAI. He holds degrees in mathematics and biology, including a PhD from MIT.
The reason he is cited here is High Growth Handbook, which is less a book of opinions than a compiled operating manual for the post-product-market-fit company, assembled from his own experience and from long interviews with operators. Its executive-hiring chapter tells a founder who does not know what a great CFO looks like to go meet three or four great CFOs at companies a few years ahead of theirs and ask what they would hire for. Two of the six operator citations on this page come out of that book, his own and the Rabois interview it contains, so his weight here is partly as a practitioner and partly as the editor who got other practitioners on the record.