All posts tagged: Gil

Pav Gil Helped Bring Down Wirecard. His New Startup Aims to Shield Whistleblowers From Harm

Pav Gil Helped Bring Down Wirecard. His New Startup Aims to Shield Whistleblowers From Harm

In September 2017, Singapore-based lawyer Pav Gill took a job at Wirecard, a high-flying German payments business worth tens of billions of euros. Not long after he started, he heard from a colleague that an executive at Wirecard Asia, the region Gill was responsible for, had allegedly been teaching staff how to trick auditors into thinking the firm had money it didn’t have. Gill quietly began an investigation, codenamed Project Phoenix. The results were damning: Wirecard had been fudging its numbers. But when the board of directors caught wind of his work they got “very upset,” says Gill. He was ordered to stand down, and his investigation came to nothing. The head of Wirecard Asia began to make Gill’s life “pretty horrible,” he claims, yelling at him in front of colleagues and attacking the quality of his work. He was effectively forced out. But before he left, in September 2018, he loaded a harddrive with an 85GB payload of email data tied to the investigation. It was filled, he says, with “irrefutable” proof of wrongdoing. …

Gil de Ferran, former Indy 500 winner and F1 sporting director, dies aged 56 | Formula One

Gil de Ferran, former Indy 500 winner and F1 sporting director, dies aged 56 | Formula One

Tributes have been paid to the former Indianapolis 500 winner, Gil de Ferran, after his death from a heart attack at the age of 56. A hugely well-liked and respected driver, De Ferran also enjoyed a successful career in Formula One working as a sporting director for both the BAR/Honda and McLaren teams. The Paris-born Brazilian did not race in F1 but forged an outstanding career in the United States where he raced in the IndyCar/Cart series between 1995 and 2003, taking successive Cart titles in 2000 and 2001 and winning the Indy 500 for Penske Racing in 2003. On Saturday, the Brazilian Automobile Confederation announced De Ferran had suffered a heart attack while competing at a private motor racing club in Florida on Friday. He was taken to hospital but did not survive. The former F1 world champions Jenson Button and Damon Hill both expressed their sadness at his death. “Still in shock that we lost one of the good ones so young,” Button wrote on Instagram. “One of the best behind the wheel …

Renowned investor Elad Gil on how the great AI race will likely shake out

Renowned investor Elad Gil on how the great AI race will likely shake out

Elad Gil, a successful founder and prolific investor, has already been called Silicon Valley’s biggest solo venture capitalist given the massive amounts of capital he has been investing in recent years, including on behalf of institutions that reportedly include Harvard’s endowment. His track record goes a long way in explaining his quiet rise. For example, Gil invested in the Series A round of the highly valued  payment software company Stripe 11 years ago and has invested in many of its subsequent rounds. He also snapped up stakes in the note-taking app Notion, the cloud collaboration platform Airtable, the military tech contractor Anduril, and the design tool Figma, which agreed to sell to Adobe for a whopping $20 billion last September — though Adobe is still working to sell Justice Department authorities on the deal’s merits. In conversation late last week, Gil — who occasionally blogs but maintains a bare-bones site — declined to answer specific questions about how much he’s managing or some of the amounts he has invested in companies. But the quant VC …