Inside General Catalyst's health assurance transformation playbook, with Holly Maloney

**Holly Maloney** (0:03)
The platforms that are building today have an incredible opportunity to endure and compound for a really long time, just given how all the incumbents are leaning in. And then also just like the mind shift of health care and sort of the consumer zeitgeist moment that we're seeing right now, people really wanting to be in control of their health. And so the system has to meet that moment and give people the experience and the quality as expected.

**Unity Stokes** (0:31)
Welcome back to StartUp Health NOW. My name is Unity Stokes, co-founder of StartUp Health. This is the podcast where we get to have deep and meaningful conversations so we can get to know the change makers, the entrepreneurs and innovators who are transforming health. Stick around, it's going to be another great show.
So without further ado, Holly, welcome. How are you? It's great to have you here.

**Holly Maloney** (0:59)
Yeah, it's great to be here. I'm doing well, thanks.

**Unity Stokes** (1:01)
I thought we'd kick things off with both learning a bit about you and your background and also within the context of General Catalyst. General Catalyst, I think, it's not a traditional venture capital firm, it's so many things. And I thought it'd be helpful for you to share with the group how you describe General Catalyst. I think it's obviously one of the most important investors today. You've, as an organization, invested in great companies like Anthropic and Stripe and Airbnb, but also so many of the most important digital health and AI health care companies today, many of which you're on the board of or have led those investments for. But you also invest at all stages and you have a cat co and we'd love to dig into all of that. So just to kick things off, tell us a bit about you and then how you frame General Catalyst.

**Holly Maloney** (1:55)
No, absolutely. And again, thanks for having me. So my background, I've been with General Catalyst now coming up on nine years this fall, which is amazing. It has both flown by and feels like I've been here forever. Prior to General Catalyst, I was with another investment firm for about seven and a half years and did a few years of advising, always working with sort of high-growth technology companies, did that out of undergrad. I studied economics at Bowdoin College. I spent most of my life in Boston. Actually, when I first joined GC, I was still in Boston. I moved out to the Bay Area about six and a half years ago, right as the world was shutting down with COVID. My now husband had been here and knew we were going to be on the same coast eventually, and as the world was shutting down Friday, March 13th of 2020, that felt like a good day to make it.
Wow. The whole reason why I joined General Catalyst coming up on nine years ago is because I felt like the organization was at a real, really approaching a significant inflection in its business, and I felt like the next wave of investing was going to really require a creativity that had always been in the DNA of GC, and I guess all I can say is that both the inflection and the creativity have wildly exceeded my expectations, but that is the whole reason why I joined, and I'm so grateful that I did. General Catalyst as an organization has been around for 26 years. We were started in Cambridge, Massachusetts by a couple of former entrepreneurs who had built and scaled companies very successfully without venture funding, because they felt like they could never actually find people that really understood the nuances of operating and scaling. And so they wanted to spend the next phase of their careers building just that. So the partner that could meet founders where they are and truly be a transformation partner to them. And so now as we sit here, General Catalyst today, 26 years later, is how we describe it. It's a global investment and transformation company with venture at its core. So we're still meeting the most ambitious founders, where they are from creation stage to growth, and beyond. And we're really driving core themes of global resilience and applied AI.
And we have offices in many locations. So I'm here today in San Francisco, but we also have offices in New York, Boston, Berlin, Bangalore, and London. And we've grown to over 40 billion of assets under management and have supported some of those iconic companies that you mentioned, but over 800 businesses since inception, which we're really privileged to have worked with all of these exceptional people. And it still feels like we're just getting started. Our core domains are the innovation economy. So AI applications, AI infrastructure, the theme of global resilience, which we would include sort of defense, energy, infrastructure, and manufacturing. And of course, health assurance, where I spend all of my time and we include our life sciences work in that.