The Unusual Signs of a Billion Dollar Company

Elad Gil's observations on many of the world’s best known billion-dollar companies and the decision frameworks they used along the way.

A startup miracle is the key difficult thing you need to pull off for your startup to work. It could be hitting product-market fit, a key business deal, a specific regulatory change, or the like. If your startup needs zero miracles to work, it probably isn’t a defensible startup. If your startup needs multiple miracles, it probably isn’t going to work — with every miracle, you are multiplying in another low probability event to get an even smaller expected outcome.