E5: General Catalyst CEO on the Case for Operational Rigor in VC, with Hemant Taneja

**Erik Torenberg** (0:01)
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Welcome back to Turpentine VC, a podcast where we discuss the art and science of building successful venture firms. We're joined today by Hemant Taneja of General Catalyst. How Hemant governs General Catalyst is very similar to A16Z. He's the CEO of the firm, and he runs it like a true business, defining its mission and values, approaching a product from a problem-solving perspective, and more. All the things that apply to enduring businesses, Hemant applies it to General Catalyst. In this episode, we dive into why that's an essential part of their firm's governance. If you like what you hear, please subscribe and leave us a review. Now on to the interview.
Hemant, welcome to Turpentine VC. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

**Hemant Taneja** (1:22)
Thanks for having me, Erik. Excited to do this.

**Erik Torenberg** (1:24)
When you took over as CEO at General Catalyst, was there a CEO prior? Or talk about how that development happened.

**Hemant Taneja** (1:32)
Look, it was really interesting. Our desire to build an enduring firm and an enduring business really started, I would say, middle part of the last decade. I remember this amazing meeting I had with David, Joel, Biltus Sherald, who was our CEO and really one of the co-founders from the beginning. And we were discussing the future of what we were going to be doing with General Catalyst. And I don't take this as hubris. I said, look, you don't realize this. And certainly the world doesn't either. But I think I will end up doing reasonably well.
By then invested in Stripe and Snap. And we started Livongo and Augusto. And I'm like, wow, these are amazing companies. I was just very hopeful that that was going to work. And I said, I would like to build a platform. And this is a firm you guys started. I want to be respectful to what you want to do here. And to their credit, they were like, we absolutely want to build an enduring forum and leave a great legacy. And what do we need to do?
And I think that's really when that journey started. And then, as you know, we brought in Ken Chenault as our chairman and managing director about five years ago now. And that was, you know, a lot of people wondered, why would you bring somebody with a Fortune 500 CEO into the venture business?
You know, our intentionality very much was about how do we learn to be a good business? And I give, you know, Ken a lot of credit, first of all, mentoring me and learning how to take charge. Because if you're going to scale, you need to have to get away from the traditional mindset that this is an artisanal business and it's a small partnership. And we're sitting around the table and making these decisions like Oracle's to, hey, we're going to build a business.
And none of us knew how to build a business. That's the idea of our business, which is, you know, we're not the best operators. And so it was a very intentional choice to bring Ken in to mentor me.
So it was actually, even though we announced it last year, it was a five-year journey. And I remember Ken sat us down at the very first dinner after he joined. And he said to David and Joel and me, he said, I know I'm here. I'm here to drive this succession. And so this can be an enduring firm. And it's just been amazing to watch him, you know, develop me and develop others in the firm and help us navigate this succession as successfully as we have so far.

**Erik Torenberg** (4:02)
It's fascinating because investors, we as Venture Capitalists, would never invest in a company that didn't have a CEO or that had, you know, five CEOs sitting around the table and saying, hey, we got to vote on everything, etc. And yet so many venture firms operate that way.
Talk a little bit about that.

**Hemant Taneja** (4:19)
So in 2012, I remember sitting down with one of RLPs at that time, and they saw that we're starting to think about perhaps scaling our business. And, you know, I said to this particular LP that, hey, we are a business.