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Elad Gil is an American entrepreneur, angel investor, and advisor. He is the co-founder of the company Color and the former vice president of corporate strategy at Twitter.
Gil has a bachelor's degrees in mathematics and molecular biology from the Univeristy of California San Diego. He also earned a PhD in biology from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2001.
From June 2004 to September 2007, Gil was a product manager at Google. He started its mobile team, was part of three acquisitions, and was the product manager for Google Mobile Maps. He founded the company Mixer Labs in November 2007 and worked there until it was acquired by Twitter in December 2009, at which point Gil moved with it and became the vice president of corporate strategy at Twitter from December 2009 to May 2012. Gil also worked at McKinsey & Co. for a short, unspecified time.
Gil is a chairman of the crypto fund Electric Capital. He is also a chairman of the drug discovery company Spring Discovery. As of 2021, Gil is an advisor for the following companies: Harbor, Rentmetrics, Schematic Labs, Bitwise, Adku, Age 1, LIFX, Founders Den, HealthSherpa, Mino Games, Any.do, and BioAge.
In 2013, Gil co-founded Color Genomics with Othman Laraki. He is also a chairman of the company, and previously held the role of CEO from 2013 to fall 2016. Color is a population health technology company that performs genetic testing for hereditary genes, such as cancer and heart disease. They offer testing kits for both physician and individual use. The company is headquartered in Burlingame, California.
In early 2020, Color expanded its testing services to produce testing kits for the virus COVID-19. The company began developing a new, high-throughput lab with a goal of processing as many as 10,000 tests per day with results reported within twenty-four hours to physicians. Color's tests were able to be processed quickly because they were LAMP-based; most other COVID tests developed in the US at the time were PCR-based. LAMP's distinct difference over PCR is that it uses isothermal amplification and not thermal cycling to amplify the DNA for testing. This saves time and money when processing tests. LAMP tests typically have a lower accuracy rate than PCR because of their simplicity, but Color processes their LAMP tests in a different manner than other companies, which makes it more accurate. They first extract and purify the RNA from the test sample in a machine that uses magnetic beads, which concentrates the RNA and makes it easier to get an accurate test result. As of early 2021, Color processes up to 150,000 COVID-19 tests daily.
Since 2020, Color has since partnered with more than one hundred companies, organizations, and schools to supply or process COVID-19 tests, such as with United Airlines, the University of Southern California, and the University of California San Francisco. In April 2020, Color partnered with the city of San Francisco to create CityTestSF, which set up COVID-19 testing sites across the city. This partnership helped give the city one of the highest per-capita COVID-19 testing rates in the country.
Gil wrote a book called High Growth Handbook: Scaling Startups From 10 to 10,000 People. It was published on July 17, 2018.
