Gil Elbaz

Elbaz holds a bachelor’s degree from the California Institute of Technology, with a double major in Engineering & Applied Science and Economics.⁠[1][2]

In 1998 Elbaz co-founded Applied Semantics, which built contextual advertising products and was the original developer of AdSense. When Google acquired Applied Semantics in 2003, Elbaz stayed on as an engineering director in GoogleGoogleGoogle is an American technology company founded by Larry Page and Sergey Brin and incorporated in 1998. It became an Alphabet subsidiary in 2015. Its businesses include internet search, advertising, software platforms, cloud computing, and artificial intelligence.Open the full entry’s new Los Angeles office, working on AdSense and other products.⁠[1][2]

In 2007 Elbaz founded the data company Factual and served as its CEO. Factual launched in 2009 as a repository for open data and later focused on using location data to improve advertising, serving developers, publishers and advertisers with location-context data; it raised $104 million in total, most recently a $42 million round led by Upfront Ventures and Felicis VenturesFelicisFelicis (whose funds and earlier brand use the name Felicis Ventures) is a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California, founded in 2006 by former Google product manager Aydin Senkut; it has invested in companies including Shopify, Canva and Adyen.Open the full entry.⁠[1][3][2]

Elbaz also founded the nonprofit Common Crawl Foundation, which aims to make web information more widely accessible; he is its chairman and also serves on the board of the XPRIZE Foundation.⁠[1][2]

In 2013 Elbaz and David Waxman launched TenOneTen Ventures, which raised its first fund in 2014. His investments include Climate Corporation, later acquired by Monsanto for $1.2 billion, GoodreadsGoodreadsGoodreads is a social cataloging and recommendation website for readers, where users build “shelves” of books they have read, are reading, and want to read, post ratings and reviews, and get recommendations based on the reading of friends and similar readers. It was founded by Otis Chandler and Elizabeth Khuri Chandler in late 2006, launched in January 2007, and acquired by Amazon in 2013, and it is one of the largest communities of readers.Open the full entry, later acquired by AmazonAmazonAmazon is a publicly traded U.S. technology and retail company founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, with its principal corporate offices in Seattle. Its businesses span e-commerce, logistics and fulfillment, digital advertising, membership and entertainment services, consumer electronics, and Amazon Web Services cloud computing.Open the full entry, as well as Scopely and Kaggle.⁠[1][2]

On February 13, 2018, a16zAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry released the podcast episode “a16z Podcast: Data, Insight, and the Customer Experience,” drawn from a discussion at the annual Andreessen Horowitz summit in November 2017. Elbaz, then founder and CEO of Factual, appeared with Mixpanel co-founder and CEO Suhail Doshi and Foursquare CEO Jeff Glueck, moderated by Lauren Berson, discussing how companies use data to understand context and their customers, what personalization means, and how to gain insight from data without drifting toward a surveillance future. The episode was uploaded to the a16z YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel on January 1, 2019.⁠[4][5]

On April 6, 2020, Foursquare announced that it would merge with Factual; terms were not disclosed, and the combined company kept the Foursquare name with David Shim remaining CEO. Elbaz stepped down as CEO and joined Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley on the combined company’s board as co-chairman, and then joined TenOneTen Ventures full time. Announcing the merger, he said, “Marketers need an independent and neutral party they can trust.”⁠[3][1]