General Catalyst's First-Ever Quarterly Review | CEO Hemant Taneja

**Hemant Taneja** (0:00)
If you look at NVIDIA adding a trillion dollars of market cap in 100 days, when was the last time that was happening? We're gonna have companies that are routinely trading in our companies. The natural gravitational pull is that a lot of that scale is gonna get concentrated in a handful of companies. At General Catalyst, we don't believe that's ultimately what's gonna create the most inclusive, prosperous, sustainable world.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:19)
People are saying we're in a bubble again. How do you think about the fund management of that?

**Hemant Taneja** (0:23)
When COVID happened, we were the first firm to go to the LPs, and we wrote down our portfolio 40% proactively for no other reason than saying this is not real.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:31)
Why did you write a review? Why did you start this now?

**Hemant Taneja** (0:34)
So, we are in an incredibly fast-moving world. If you look at the pace of innovation in software, which is the core of what our industry has supported for a long time, extremely rapid. If you think about geopolitics, extremely dynamic. And I think we have a system in our industry which is very predicted to provocative tweets and messages in general. And a lot of that generally skews us to where it's taking very polarized views, because the stuff that amplifies the world tends to be very black or white. The progress gets made in the gray. And so we're forcing ourselves to take a step back.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:04)
One of the hot topics around Silicon Valley is General Catalyst's potentially rumored.
So, I've heard two people pronounce your name completely differently. Is it Haemon or Haemont?

**Hemant Taneja** (1:26)
Haemont.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:27)
Haemont, is that right?

**Hemant Taneja** (1:29)
The actual pronunciation is Haemont.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:31)
Haemont.

**Hemant Taneja** (1:31)
Haemont.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:32)
Haemont.

**Hemant Taneja** (1:33)
Yeah, there we go.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:34)
Okay.

**Hemant Taneja** (1:34)
You can call me HT, how's that?

**Molly O'Shea** (1:36)
Okay. HT, welcome to Sourcery.

**Hemant Taneja** (1:39)
Thanks for having me, and congrats. It was interesting to hear about all the progress you've made about your own business, congrats.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:45)
Thank you, I appreciate that. Well, today we're at the top of the General Catalyst Power in San Francisco.

**Hemant Taneja** (1:52)
The sun is glowing at us.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:54)
The sun is out and shining. So I also heard that you opened up a new New York City office. So what's going on there?

**Hemant Taneja** (2:02)
Well, we've been in New York for almost 14 years now, and we have been growing. And I think, as you know, one of the teams now at General Catalyst is this company called Percepto that's focused on driving the transformation of enterprises. And it was really important for us to co-locate all of our teams in the same place.
So GC has now got a much bigger space in New York, where one floor is actually engineers, and they're building lots of cool stuff. I'm sure we'll talk about that. And then we have our investment team, and it's really designed to be welcoming for founders and be sort of a builder environment in general.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:44)
I want to talk about the state of General Catalyst today. So you're now called a company. I know this has been in motion for a bit. And you recently just put out, I don't know if this will come out on the day of when it gets launched, but your quarterly review.
So if you could map out for people who aren't aware of the wide-ranging structure of General Catalyst, can you share all the different buckets and the strategies that you cover?

**Hemant Taneja** (3:11)
Yeah. So what are we focusing on at General Catalyst? You know, if you think about the accelerated role of technology and the way the industry is evolving, like one of my most interesting observations coming into this year was, boy, we have to rethink what scale means. Okay?
And I say that because, you know, if you look at Anthropic, adding $10 billion of revenue a month, when was the last time our industry was dealing with that? Or if you look at NVIDIA adding $1 trillion of market cap in 100 days, when was the last time that was happening? $1 trillion? We're going to have companies that are routinely $1 trillion companies. And so I sort of take a step back and think about, in that level of scale and, frankly, the transformation of the world with AI, we were driving resilience and abundance. The natural gravitational pull is that a lot of that scale is going to get concentrated in a handful of companies.