# General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja on The Future of Venture Capital: Chanel vs Walmart

Lessons Scaling GC to $40BN in AUM · Investing $5BN+ Into Stripe Over 14 Rounds · Investing Hundreds of Millions into Anthropic at $60BN Valuation

20VC · Sep 22, 2025 · 87 min · 18,932 words
Speakers: Hemant Taneja, Harry Stebbings
Source: https://www.996.fm/episodes/20vc--ep-26a147b6/

## Cold open

**Hemant Taneja** [0:00]:

Our aspirations in venture capital is to be the best seed firm in the world. Venture capital can't scale and performance at the same time. I deeply believe that. Just because we have more money doesn't mean there are more Patrick Hollisons, Sam Altmans that are gonna go build iconic companies. I lost a Series A of Stripe. I lost a Series A of Samsara. I lost a Series A of Snap. Triple triple double double is definitely dead. Going from one to three to nine to 27 is not interesting, or one to five to nine to 27 is not whatever the math is, not interesting. You gotta go, like, one to 15 to 20 to a 100.

## Intro

**Harry Stebbings** [0:35]:

You are listening to 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now I'm so excited for the show today. Today, we welcome Hemant Taneja, CEO and leader of General Catalyst. Now Hemant has scaled GC over the last decade into one of the largest platforms in venture with over 40,000,000,000 in assets under management. He's also been one of the most influential investors leading early investments in Stripe, Snap, Gusto, Samsara, Grammarly, and Canva to name a few. He also played an incredible role in Livongo's $18,500,000,000 merger with Teladoc, one of the largest digital health deals in history. This show is incredibly wide ranging with everything from the future of labor to geopolitics to the future of venture capital. I loved doing this show. Hemant was so open, and it was just fantastic. You can check it out on YouTube by searching for 20 VC, and I cannot wait to hear your thoughts. But before we dive into the show's

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## Conversation

**Harry Stebbings** [4:46]:

Hemant, it is so good to have you here. Last time, it was seven years ago. It wasn't in person. I've been so looking forward to this, dude.

**Hemant Taneja** [4:54]:

It has been seven years. Last time I was younger, and you were a little skinnier. You've gotten fit, and you have no glasses, and I have my glasses right here. Dude, I was much skinnier. I think this was before I fell into a protein It's

**Harry Stebbings** [5:06]:

good. My question to you is you have built now in the last ten years one of the most defining firms that we have in venture. Do you consider yourself a venture capitalist, or do you consider yourself a CEO?

**Hemant Taneja** [5:20]:

Harry, that's a great question. I carry the title of CEO and managing director for a very intentional reason, which is General Catalyst is a business, but it wouldn't be a business if it wasn't venture capital at its core. I am a managing director and a partner just like everybody else in our partnership, but I'm also the CEO. And that's the duality that it's gonna take to build an iconic institution in our industry. Do you think GC is still a VC firm? GC is very much at the core of VC firm. Not only that, I mean, our aspiration is that we wanna be one of the best seed firms like you. That truly is our aspiration because the earliest relationship with founders and that trust is the key to actually doing the best work in building the companies that matter. When you look

**Harry Stebbings** [6:02]:

at total AUM, can you realistically put the hours in and justify that commitment to seed when it's a $200,000,000 vehicle in a $25,000,000,000 pool?

**Hemant Taneja** [6:15]:

Culturally, this gets hard for VC firms as they scale. At GC, the thing we talk about is focus on the ownership and the relationship with the company versus the sizes of check that you put in. And when you reorient yourself to think that way, we get that only at seed. If you think about the last two years, you know, bringing on Jeanette and La Familia, Yuri and Wayfinder, and Niraj and Venture Highway, we've tried to really make sure at our core, we remain very committed to doing the seed work with the same intensity and rigor that you do at twenty BC. Oh, zero rigor here. Oh, no. We're we're just, like, blindfolded throwing dots. I didn't say a lot of rigor. Said the same rigor.

**Harry Stebbings** [6:56]:

Oh, okay. Fantastic. I was feeling bad for a bit of

**Hemant Taneja** [6:58]:

It really it really like, it's a genuine comment. Like, we we internally talk about early stage venture capital as a core. And, obviously, we wanna leverage our core to have greater impact in the world. But if we don't do early stage investing well, we will lose the right to exist. So we're paranoid about that.

**Harry Stebbings** [7:13]:

Do you worry about the transition of venture? Doug Leone said that we've moved from a high margin boutique community to a low margin commoditized industry.

**Hemant Taneja** [7:23]:

Do you agree with that? If you think about the innovation in venture as a role of technology has scaled, all the innovation for the most part ends up being on the three axes, state, sector, and geography. Make the funds bigger, put them in different geos, put them in different sectors. Well, the reality is that role of the companies that we're building is becoming far far more sophisticated in society. The innovation in industry was much more focused on how do we deploy more dollars and try to keep as much of the return as possible, Where the reality should be, how do we retool our proposition for founders so they can build the biggest companies possible? So when you think with that second lens, you have to innovate. You have to think broader than just that sort of fund formation mindset. That is what allows you to break from, hey, going from high margin boutique, so smaller funds, better returns, to low margin scale, which is bigger funds, lower returns. That's only happening because we're thinking about innovation in a constrained way in this industry versus being first principled about how do we transform our proposition for founders. You said that kind of bigger funds, lower returns. Do you disagree with that as a premise then? No. I actually have a strong belief that venture capital can't scale and performance at the same time. I deeply believe that. And the reason is because just because we have more money doesn't mean there are more Patrick Hollisons or pick your favorite founder, Altmans that are gonna go build iconic companies. So we're actually, in some ways, fighting the zero sum game of founders that are naturally, you know, going and doing great things. So that's not necessarily gonna scale because we have more money. But if we can create more tools to have more founders at the scale, then we can actually manufacture more outliers than the ones that naturally exist on the power law. Our mindset is how do we actually expand the proposition to founders so that they can be more companies on the power law? Is a very different way to think about it than do we have enough capital to get everything that's on the power law. If you accept

**Harry Stebbings** [9:18]:

lower performance with bigger funds respectfully, Hemant, what do you tell LPs? When you go out and fundraise for early stage venture funds and much larger funds, Is it just a different LP class? Because I'm sure you hear the podcast and the shows, and it's like, oh, they're just pitching sovereigns who just are happy with 10%, and so it's graduating.

**Hemant Taneja** [9:37]:

Going back to saying that we wanna remain early stage venture at our core, I actually reject being in a business that has lower performance. So what we have done is if you look at our overall assets under management, we've basically said we're not gonna make our venture funds bigger. What we're going to do is actually keep the size of venture fund where we think it can be to create elite performance, which to us is you gotta at least deliver four to five x funds on the capital that you raise and sort of build bottom up. Can you do that, you know, in venture? And then we have creation and customer value fund, which are focused on other value propositions, other capital solutions for founders so they can do m and a more effectively, they can invest in sales and marketing more effectively, but don't scale the venture fund itself because that'll degrade performance. That is the way we have architected our capital that we provide to founders. When you think

**Harry Stebbings** [10:30]:

about where you intersect with them in the journey, as much as I love the, hey, We absolutely wanna be focused on seed and build that relationship as early as possible. When you have the capital supply that you have today, arguably, it's a much better proposition to just do a cliner and put a 100,000,000 into Anthropic at a $183,000,000,000 and play the large check at late stage and actually ride that wave? I don't

**Hemant Taneja** [10:57]:

think so. You don't think so? I I mean, look, our best returns have come from seeding companies like Stripe and Anduril or creating companies like Kayak, Livongo, and Commure and others. Livongo is insane. It was. It was a great outcome for us, and, you know, that's something we built in our offices. How much did GC make from Livongo? A few billion. How big was the fund? So Livongo sat in two funds. It shorted one of the funds approximately three or four x, and it returned one of the other funds maybe close to one x. Is that the best performing investment GC have made? I think you would have to give that to Stripe still. We've been investing in Stripe since 2010. That's a big position for us. My point more is, for us, we obsess over either that the companies are getting incubated at GC or we're investing in the seed round. If we don't, we wanna be the iconic companies, we will invest in them at growth stage as well. And that to me is about believing in the companies that you think will compound for a long time. So, like, take Stripe as an example. We invested in 2010, and I've invested in Stripe 14 times in the last fifteen years, just to give you a sense. Okay? That's one of our core philosophies that when you think something's going to be compounding for a long time, be strong sort of supporters of the company along the way. We invested in a housing, you know, Jeanette has seeded that, if you remember, before, and we've invested that in all the rounds that they've raised since then. If you look at Anduril, same thing. We seeded that, and we invested in every round that they've raised since then. So I think being part of these iconic companies and supporting them along the way is the reason to have the capital base. If we miss them at seed, we wanna catch them as early as possible and then continue to help them with everything we got, our entire proposition as a platform to, you support these founders and help them all the way with endurance. Can

**Harry Stebbings** [12:41]:

I ask when you're at your scale, do you map out the industries that matter, the companies in them, and go, we have to have a check-in these regardless of entry? Is that how you kind of map markets and capital injection?

**Hemant Taneja** [12:53]:

The business for me is about sort of getting serendipity and intentionality right. So you definitely won't know the industries that will become important in the future. I'll never forget that one of my big misses when Paul Graham asked me to look at the seed round of Coinbase, and I said to myself, a Bitcoin ATM? What is that? Had no idea what this industry was about to become. Like, I it still haunts me. At the seed, being very much focused on just backing the great founders and not over contextualizing what the returns are, and this is really culturally what Did you meet with Brian? Yeah. Did you think he was amazing? He is amazing. So it was purely the idea that you could It was my my my little brain got ahead of sort of thinking about the world. And so my point was, you definitely wanna add the seed, not be industry focused, to say we're gonna back founders regardless of our view of the world. Then I think the reality is if you think if you take a step back in the world and you think about the tectonic shifts that are happening, the theme that we call global resilience, that every region is focusing on defense, energy, industrials, health, financial services, how to be resilient from a sovereign perspective, that does have impact on industries. That does have impact on how business is gonna get built. So we do look at it saying, are we in the right companies in the context of how the world is reshifting in the context of industries? So as an example, I'll tell you, I think we're the only firm that's invested in a defense prime in US, Europe, and India. We did Anduril, we did you know, invested in Helsing, and we invested in a company called Rafi in India. Well, each of these regions needs to create its own AI deterrent solutions, and they want to see indigenous industries emerge, you know, from a resilience perspective. So we should make sure we're backing that theme. So I think it ends up being be seren embrace serendipity, be humble, that these founders are gonna take us in the world in a way that we just don't understand, and then be intentional where we think there are large macro shifts happening so that we can play certain sectors with a bit more of a thematic lens. What do you think is the most significant macro shift today that not enough people are talking about? The most significant macro shift today that not enough people are talking about is thinking about jobs. I have gone around the world. You know, we have a real focus on understanding how to help governments think about transformations. And the transformation of any country, we think, is in four parts. One is how do you apply AI to deterrence? Because without peace, you don't have capitalism. And if there's no capitalism, then business can't really be a change vector. So you need peace. You need to think about transforming health care, cause we just came out of a pandemic and we saw what it can do and we're still reeling from it. You need to accelerate diffusion of AI into business, cause that's ultimately what's gonna lead to your industries being competitive. And then if you get all that right, you have to think about jobs, cause there is immense reskilling that needs to happen. People are starting to give lip service to it, but it hasn't hit the people yet. We were talking about this earlier. We have a lot of these AI transformations we're doing with these service businesses, these AI roll ups as they're called, and I'm seeing this. I'm seeing what's gonna happen to jobs as AI gets adopted to bring efficiency and productivity to these white collar jobs all around the world.

**Harry Stebbings** [16:00]:

What are you seeing there? Because the MIT study was discouraging. And it's like 95% actually doesn't actually have much impact, and I read them, I'm like, god, this is a bit of a downer. So what are you seeing? Okay.

**Hemant Taneja** [16:11]:

I do think there is merit to the MIT study for the following reason. When you think about transforming an enterprise with AI, you actually have to do four things correctly. First is you have to get your data infrastructure ready so that your technology, your company can adopt AI. Your data readiness is huge, infrastructure readiness is huge. Second is you need models that understand your business. You have to train these models in the context of your secret sauce, your business. Third is you need think about a workforce transformation, because now you're gonna have humans and you're gonna have AI working next to each other. Some humans are gonna manage AI agents, some AI agents are gonna manage humans. Imagine how the org charts have to change. And the fourth, for all this to work, you actually need courage at the top. The CEOs need to really get behind it to drive it. So the idea that all four of these things are happening in a company to make the adoption of AI go from beyond just prototyping a OpenAI or an Anthropic model to really creating change in your business is very difficult. That's why these things are hitting a wall, but that's why this MIT study is giving you the signal that it's giving you. One place where businesses already outsourced and let go of core operations was wherever they wanted to get labor arbitrage over the last forty years. So our whole thesis around AI roll ups was everywhere you offshored for labor benefit, you're gonna onshore for AI productivity. That's where we're seeing a lot of this. So we bought call centers, I'll give you an example, we bought a call center in Philippines, 3,000 employees in one of our companies called Crescendo. It's gonna have a huge change in the set count, it's gonna go on by quite a bit as this fully gets AI enabled. My first question to the team was, well, what are those people gonna do in Philippines, and how many are there? So every country that built their middle class off of offshore labor, how do we really help them think about reskilling those people to be more successful in the world of AI? This is what's not being talked about enough.

**Harry Stebbings** [17:57]:

Do you think this is a twelve or an eighteen month problem or actually a five to ten year problem? I always give back to the Bill Gates. We underestimate, know, the we overestimate a year, underestimate 10.

**Hemant Taneja** [18:05]:

Is this adoption of AI into businesses gonna be fast over twelve to eighteen months or five to ten years? I would say this is a five year problem. And I say that because if you go back and think about the physics with which these companies are getting built, the companies we're building, you have to put these teams together, and they have to go get some customers they can demonstrate progress on, then they have to start accelerating growth. Only after a few years of that do you start to make a dent in the industry, not that it becomes a problem. And so just the diffusion has of technology has its own physics, so it's not immediate, but five years is also not a long time. And so what I'm seeing is that these companies, enough of them are gonna start being successful in these different areas, and they're gonna start impacting jobs in a material way. I'll give you a really interesting anecdote that the CEO of one of the large consulting companies told me. One of their big clients came to them and said, we have 50,000 employees today, Draw up a plan for us that in five years, we are a 100,000 employees, but only 10,000 of them are humans. The rest are AI agents. This is to be provocative, but they're sort of saying, if that was gonna be our plan, how do we get there? This is the kind of stuff people are thinking about. Now it's not gonna happen in the next five years. But our organization's going to potentially change that much over the next ten to fifteen years? It's a nontrivial probability that can happen. That's a very

**Harry Stebbings** [19:19]:

forward thinking CEO and business leader. To what extent are governments prepared, thinking, and equipped for this labor change that could be there within a five year period?

**Hemant Taneja** [19:29]:

I think not enough. I think people are still grappling with what does AI really mean, how fast is it gonna diffuse. They're not even thinking enough about rescaling. I'll leave you with sort of one interesting thought on this particular topic. We're in London today. Okay? Imagine if every nurse and every lawyer and every accountant that works in London becomes a AI agent of some company in The United States in the next ten years. You're gonna hollow out a lot of your labor productivity and give it to a US company or a Chinese company. What I would my point is more about, like, it could actually hollow out the service sector just like we hollowed out manufacturing jobs for globalization before. Getting every region to think about this, this is actually a point that know, Jeanette makes with her European Champions Initiative a lot, which is how do you retain productivity onshore in these countries so that while you do the AI transformation, you're maintaining vibrancy not only because your business has gotten more profitable, but also because you're capturing the productivity gains onshore as well. The governments need to think about this as they are architecting this sort of next phase of their transformation with AI. Which government do you think is most impressive and which is most screwed? I find folks in Singapore to be very impressive. I recently went there, and I spoke at their National Singapore Day, and I was just blown away by the depth of thought that the politicians there have done. I have to tell you, prime minister of Greece is very impressive. He's thinking about how do we really be pragmatic in deploying this. I've met with prime minister Starmor here. I know there is some announcements being happening this week as well around AI, so I know they're making some moves. But I don't see enough of the, hey, let's think comprehensively about this. The answer I usually get when I talk to heads of states about diffusion of AI and this jobs issue that we just talked about is they have belief that if it's gonna be that disruptive, that society will just slow it down. You just can't have a world where I know in Silicon Valley, we covered a billion dollar employee with a company with a single employee, but you just can't have a world where that's what business looks like and people have no work. And so at some point, the interplay of business and society will sort of force it to be a more stable scenario. That's what the governments are sort of I taking think that's true. I think Adam Smith's invisible hand would tell you otherwise. I think market forces are way stronger than that. I agree with you. But I'm thinking that's a little bit of what they take comfort in is that we have time to figure this out, and I don't think we have time unless we're a lot more intentional about it. I vehemently

**Harry Stebbings** [21:49]:

dislike government intervention. I'm, like, as free market maximalist as possible.

**Hemant Taneja** [21:54]:

Is that the same for you? I think you can't make progress if capitalism is not working. But I do think capitalism is a privilege. If you think about what happened in the last fifteen, twenty years, a lot of the nationalism all around the world is because social media essentially struck a chord with the core issue that all the technology productivity didn't really get passed on properly to everybody in society. It created multiple, multi trillion dollar companies, but our own innovation ecosystem, how much did that capture, and how much did society really capture? Actually, a small percentage. We look back and say, wow, venture capital, there's been a real boon in the last fifteen years. But when you look at the overall value creating venture compared to the MAG seven, it's noise. And so are you really creating a world where there's opportunity and capitalism can kind of do its thing? You have to make sure you protect that. That part of it, do think government has a play role in. Beyond that, you gotta be very free market oriented. Let bottoms up innovation, stuff that you and I do, let it go create the future. I mean, that's what you wanna see.

**Harry Stebbings** [22:53]:

Do you worry about the ever increasing inequality of wealth? It plays in our favor in a lot of ways. But I look at so much of the next ten years, and I just see the concentration of wealth to very small networks, and I get very worried. I am worried about

**Hemant Taneja** [23:07]:

that. The whole idea of can we build these companies that can focus on being the most profitable, the biggest, but also in a way that they're inclusive, that's something that I think a lot about. There's this moment. If you think about the last five years, pandemic, we had a situation where because of wars, we actually US kicked Russia out of Swift. So financial infrastructure got questioned. Every part of our energy crisis happened. Every part of our core pillars of society where capitalism maybe is starting to break, all sort of manifested over the last few years. And then AI comes along as an answer to all this. So now the choice we have to make is are we gonna build these business in a way that the value accrues to very, very few, or can we actually do it with a mindset of abundance where everybody benefits? And that's a choice that we have in the way we set up the companies of the future. And I do worry that if it's not a mindset of abundance, then that's not sustainable in the very long term. We won't feel that in the next ten years that you and I will make a lot of money. Our funds will do great, and our our partners will generate great returns, but what do we create on the other side? And I think that's the thing that we have to think hard about.

**Harry Stebbings** [24:13]:

Is it

**Hemant Taneja** [24:13]:

actually

**Harry Stebbings** [24:14]:

a choice, though? If we think about, say, your OpenAI's, your Anthropic, see, I know you're an investor in Anthropic, you know, when we think about the value that they generate, those returns will go to a very small handful of people. Is it a choice that we're concentrating the returns and wealth?

**Hemant Taneja** [24:28]:

I think about innovation in AI in two parts. One is every region's trying to figure out how to become leaders in core infrastructure, and and we're racing to it. And there's not gonna be many. But there weren't that many clouds. There's not gonna be that many AI model companies that actually become at scale and potentially be even bigger than what these cloud companies became. I think that's current Cursor and Speed. That's probably what's gonna happen. But what happens on top? What's the ecosystem we're building and how it interplays with consumers across the board? What happens to health care? What happens to education? How are we thinking about those things? Is there a level playing field so there can be a vibrant, diverse ecosystem that gets built on top? That's what I think a lot about. So for example, is the Amazon of healthcare gonna be an ecosystem, lots of companies, and sort of a more resilient system, or it's gonna be like some company that comes along and they just controls healthcare? The latter is not good for us. And so how do we create a level playing field for startups, for founders so that opportunity can manifest into new successful businesses everywhere versus there's gonna be a few concentrated ones? I think that to me is the place where policy has to create conditions where it allows for opportunity for many as opposed to opportunity for a few. That's the role governments can play, you know, when it comes to technology. I've

**Harry Stebbings** [25:39]:

been very public on my concerns around the labor government in The UK and what it's done for The UK so far. It's the fastest access of millionaires out of any country. It's terrifying. Are you more bullish on the future of the states with the Trump administration or not?

**Hemant Taneja** [25:53]:

My belief is that US is very well positioned. We have energy. We have AI. We have the largest market. We have the largest entrepreneurial ecosystem. In a lot of ways, we're very well positioned. And I think in the short term, in some ways, we're actually increasing our moats. If we really focus on everyone investing in The US and creating, you know, more capital and whatnot. When we fund companies, whether it's in Europe or in US, I always think about it as, hey, you need to go win your market, and then you need to become a global leader. And the thing I worry about in The US today is mostly what is the sentiment and the appetite of the world to embrace companies coming out of The US and let them be global leaders? And I think that's where there's gonna be work to do because we're doing this one time reshift with tariffs and everything on, hey, need to realign commerce and trade, but we were also the keeper of the world order in a lot of ways. And as we are disrupting that, what is the relationship gonna be with European countries, and how well positioned would the American companies be to be global leaders? That's the place where I think rubber meets the road. In our ecosystem, we're talking about sort of companies funded in our world, founders, How will they become global leaders, given that there'll be more friction? That to me is the place where, you know, there'll be some challenges.

**Harry Stebbings** [27:03]:

When you walk around London now, as I do with my mother every weekend, all we see is Anduril posters on the sides of buses and on the sides of bus stops. I always send it to Matt Graham, like, thank you decorating London with American posters, which actually look incredibly British and wonderful.

**Hemant Taneja** [27:20]:

By the way, I loved your post with your mom. I think that's a great thing that you do. I enjoyed your last post about breaking the idea of 90% of your time you spend with your parents is before 18. That was an amazing, insightful comment.

**Harry Stebbings** [27:32]:

I find it incredible that people

**Hemant Taneja** [27:33]:

just

**Harry Stebbings** [27:33]:

accept that. It's like, you can change that. I really appreciate that. But when we go to that, you know, when people become global leaders, the element that's inserted is competition. Because when you back multiple geographic leaders, suddenly Anduril comes into Helsink's path. Is the age of not having competitive investments over? And when you're at your scale, do you just have to embrace that you're gonna be in multiple players in the same space?

**Hemant Taneja** [27:57]:

Look, I think when we invest in these companies, we always wanna see that they will be the leaders in their own market. We have a lot of confidence. Helsing, with this mission, its execution, its access to capital, talent should be the company that gets disproportionate share of defense in Europe. Anduril is doing that in US. We think this company, Roppy, is gonna do that in India that we invested in. And then they should go and be competitive in the global ecosystem. If also, I actually think maybe there's a new innovation in partnerships. We have not innovated partnerships ever. It's it's sort of the same boring old metaphors. And the question is, could these companies all think about engaging? It's not what's happening yet, but are there these resilient ecosystems that get created where they have special advantages because of where they sit in which ecosystems, and they can leverage each other to gain more global share as well. So I'm sort of very keen to see while on one side, we've created some structured inflation because of the need for global resilience. On the other side, I am curious, is the playbook gonna change in how you become market leaders in this next phase?

**Harry Stebbings** [29:01]:

You mentioned kind of on the geo side, it's like this race for infrastructure. And I find there's this often rhetoric that's like, hey. It's China versus The US, and it's the war for AI. Do you agree with that race for AI? Is there a destination? Is there a winner? What does that mean?

**Hemant Taneja** [29:17]:

The way we see it, we are in a bipolar world for sure. Despite all the recent turbulences around tariffs and relationship between the different regions, US, Europe, India, very aligned in terms of core values, and I do think it's gonna settle down to be a place where, you know, AI gets developed with a common set of values. I think the Chinese system is different. And the race to me is only in the context of which AI is better because capitalism will force the adoption. I think about DeepSeek and the open source models that have come about out of China, people are using them in The US because they're better. Now the question is, which AI ends up and there's not much difference between that. I think China and The US are very comparable in what they are in AI today. There's a few months lead here and there. I'd even argue there's always a second mover advantage to people building on top. So I think they're pretty comparable. It is important that you see AI infrastructure in the West gain market share in businesses and be more pervasive. It's equally important to make sure it's done in a way that the compute productivity is captured onshore in each of the geos, so it doesn't leak from a lot of the places to sort of a single company or a single country because that creates imbalance. You wanna be inclusive and abundant in your mindset with AI creation. But is the competitive dynamic something we need to worry about in terms of companies coming out of US versus China? Yeah. That's driving a lot of where the value is gonna be, what our ability to compete globally.

**Harry Stebbings** [30:38]:

In terms of second mover advantage, really interesting element. Do you primarily believe that just because distillation and the benefits that we saw DeepSea can have as a result of being second?

**Hemant Taneja** [30:47]:

You're seeing this in different use cases. Take customer support, for example. When new models come out, if you started building your company when you were in the chat g g three era versus four versus five, you just have more tools at your disposal. So the go to market advantage you may have created in a year having started on g p t four versus five might be anemic compared to the technology advantage that you have if you start in the g p t five or the choices you make and how fast you can move because the models are stronger. Because it's like you're getting this put in force, the unfair advantage, and you know, are you really gonna sort of re architect everything you did and take a step back or not? Because you actually have good momentum. So what's happening is that the good and greater companies getting created with each new model and the model companies that start later end up having some advantages because of technology. And the question is, can you not be bogged down by technical debt even though technical debt used to be on the order of a decade of coding, not a year of coding. Can you actually overcome that and make sure you remain well positioned on the new sort of technology stacks or not? That's the advantage that I think second mover companies could theoretically have in these different verticals.

**Harry Stebbings** [31:54]:

You mentioned kind of the evolution of models there from face to face. Anthropic is a big position for you. Can you talk to me about your first entry point into the company and the thesis that you had on first entry?

**Hemant Taneja** [32:05]:

Look. We invested in Anthropic only, you know, less than a year ago at the $60,000,000,000 round where we saw that the use case around coding was becoming an interesting application that was gonna distinguish them. These models started to become distinguished. Obviously, everybody wants to do everything, but OpenAI is, to me, is more of a consumer company with ChatGPT. I know they have enterprise ambitions, codecs, etcetera. I get it. And Anthropic kind of became an apps company in the cloud world with, you know, with coding as a use case, and we're showing really good traction. That was the time for the first time we felt, are we really betting on these companies with tremendous valuations, tremendous burns, tremendous dilution towards some abstract AGI goal, or they're actually gonna be businesses. So I actually think risk adjusted, that was the round that was interesting to do as somebody who studies investment decisions in companies to say, where did people get lucky and where did they actually make a great call? Why do you think that was the round that was the best? Because that's when the use case that was gonna draw them in and build a relationship with the enterprises became very clear and could scale, and it has. We when we invested What was their revenues? It was at the end of last year. So it was I I think it was under 1,000,000,000, if I recall. And they're gonna they publicly said that they're gonna grow nine times that. That's not the forecast we modeled. I mean, they've done way better than we thought, which is amazing. It's an incredible team, very values oriented, very execution focused. How much do you put in at 60? We put in a few 100,000,000.

**Harry Stebbings** [33:28]:

Few 100,000,000. And then you do another few 100,000,000 at $1.80? I think you would. By the

**Hemant Taneja** [33:33]:

way, I would actually argue with you five

**Harry Stebbings** [33:35]:

that is oversubscribed.

**Hemant Taneja** [33:36]:

Anthropic, this round, probably was the cheapest round I got done this year on a multiples basis. Which company was raising capital at 20 times ARR? They're all raising capital at 50 to a 100 times ARR at a scale that's like 10 times bigger than any of those companies that are raising capital. So like risk adjusted, if you think about it, and I should say risk adjusted carefully because durability of everything in the models is highly unclear. So in that cohort, I would say that was the best price round you could have done. I'm not surprised it was five x oversubscribed. Dude, risk adjusted. Fuck it.

**Harry Stebbings** [34:08]:

That that went out of the window years ago. That's right. Welcome to venture.

**Hemant Taneja** [34:11]:

I eat risk for breakfast, so I'm with you.

**Harry Stebbings** [34:14]:

That that is the caption for it. When you look then out, do you put another few $100,000,000 into the next round?

**Hemant Taneja** [34:21]:

Depends on how the business does, and depends on how they're expanding. But when you get into growth, you have to be very fundamental focused on actual economics, revenues, margins, profitability, scale. This market size for these things is endless. 500,000,000,000 of payroll is developers in the world. Probably, I think about 10,000,000,000,000 of like white collar jobs, if I have that generally correct. It's an insanely large market and you're naturally well positioned to be one of two or three players that's gonna go capture it. So if you believe that, this company could be 10 to 20 times bigger from here and is well priced even at this valuation. If it keeps on that trajectory, of course, you would want to invest. Who would not want to invest?

**Harry Stebbings** [34:58]:

Yes. But you also then look at the information to this incredible chart. I don't know if you saw this pie chart yesterday with OpenAI's distributions or kind of Yeah. With the value generated. And 1%, I think it's, like, 5,000,000,000 Yeah. Is to early investors. Yeah. And you look at that and I thought, my word. Well done, founders and team. This is the greatest transfer of wealth from venture capitalists to founders and team members. When you look at the employee stock based comp that's going out now, this is the greatest transfer of wealth ever. Is it actually a great investment when you look at the dilutive nature and cash burn of these businesses? Well,

**Hemant Taneja** [35:30]:

I think OpenAI, I saw that early round. You know, Sam's a force of nature and I've said this publicly, I mean, the guy can bend reality and he has, he's changed the world. I just couldn't get my arms around the structure. If those numbers are correct, I don't know if they're entirely correct, you would say at 5,000,000,000, the $200,000,000 at the billion dollar round only generated 25 x. Our best companies like Livongo and Circle and others, you know, and others, our first rounds were not 25x, they were hundreds of x in terms of returns. So I agree with you, dilution took a huge toll here, but for two reasons. One is because that structure led to, hey, nonprofit needs to be given a share. And the second is the compute that was needed to make this happen. The first one to provide that compute was Microsoft and they had a lot of leverage. That was a good deal for Microsoft. They made a huge amount of return because without that, this was also there was never gonna be a company. So I think it's just the sequencing of who really took the risk, sort of risk adjusted with capital. Microsoft maybe took more risk in a lot of ways, and they did benefit. And then there was so the dilution comes from a lot of that dynamic as well.

**Harry Stebbings** [36:28]:

How do you analyze that relationship with Microsoft? Because speaking of Anthropic, you know, Microsoft has now openly for the majority of the suite that actually are using Anthropic. Yeah. How do you analyze that relationship?

**Hemant Taneja** [36:39]:

Well, I think that relationship was if you remember when that was done, everybody said, Satya was brilliant. Like, that was an incredible way to essentially buy innovations. It's like what biotechs do. Right? And, like, pharma companies do. Bought innovation in AI because the internal efforts maybe weren't as as productive and gave them the halo effect to be the leading AI company, gave them an entry with Azure. Azure has had a huge draft because of OpenAI as well, and, you know, they've really gained market share in the cloud industry as a result. So that was an amazing investment for Microsoft. Is that an enduring investment? No. Obviously, now they've gone at odds with each other because there's an ambition that collides between the two companies, and so they wanna have more choice. They wanna have Anthropic at the table as well. That's just normal, good business thinking. I get it. Taking that bet was hugely valuable for Microsoft. And if you look at the return, by the way, if they put in 20,000,000,000, they're the ones who have the highest multiple return as well. So it was a great investment on a financial basis and way more on a strategic basis. As an Anthropic holder,

**Harry Stebbings** [37:35]:

do you worry when you see Sam talk about, we're gonna need to spend hundreds of billions, and then you see his deal with Oracle where both of them are gonna need to be levered up to the hills to be able to finance it on both of their sides.

**Hemant Taneja** [37:47]:

Look. Never bet against Sam, but I feel like he's doing a lot of things, and he's doing it in every single dimension. Right? The phone, the data center, the infrastructure, and all that. I think Anthropic is a much more focused kind a product oriented company. They have not taken as much money to get here. And to this size as well, I think their enterprise business, I'd argue, will be bigger than OpenAI if it already isn't already. Capital is a lever, but it's not the only lever. I think execution matters, and one of the things I've learned, and Arthur at Mistral really taught us about this, which is you can waste a lot of compute too. So I think a more focused team with a focused agenda, you can probably get there much more effectively, and I think Anthropic seems to be doing that, being targeted in the best they're picking and doing them really, really well. I'm a big believer that that leadership is really maturing to be excellent company builders. I mean, Dario, just think about that person a few years ago running research, and the kinds of choices he's made and the kinds of choices both in business and for society and how they've scaled and the bets they've made and how well they've paid off every step of the way to think the products they've launched. It's like really impressive. And and that's why the investors there will probably end up doing on a multiple basis better than again, you know, in a world of, like, what's durable, what's not. Like, they're trending to be maybe they'll do better in their MOI than the early investors would in OpenAI, if that math is correct, the one that you were referring to. The hard thing is that

**Harry Stebbings** [39:07]:

growth is great until it's not great. And at some point, it does reduce and reduce, and 1,000,000,000 goes to 9,000,000,000, which is insane. I mean, nuts, nuts numbers. Never seen it before. And what is it next year? '27? We should be three x, which would be great still. But at some point, growth does reduce, and then there's the core business that sits beneath it. The thing that I worry about is our ecosystem today is so bad.

**Hemant Taneja** [39:33]:

Hey. Can I just interrupt for a second? Let's say it's 27. I don't know what the numbers they have shared, and they've always done better than they've said, by the way, too. But let's say it's 27. You're not also Anthropic's CFO.

**Harry Stebbings** [39:42]:

Not not a spoiler alert. Yeah. Yeah.

**Hemant Taneja** [39:45]:

Yeah. I gotta caution. And but if you think about it, that business, which will still grow 200% to go from, let's say, let's say, nine's number this year and 27, that's tremendous growth. And you put any multiple on that, that is a very valuable company. Think about tech technology multiples on that kind of a growth. That's a really valuable company. Significant headroom because the market size is so large even from there that they can maintain good growth. It doesn't have to be this crazy growth, but they only price it at 20 times this year's ARR. So 20 times 27. If you

**Harry Stebbings** [40:15]:

take

**Hemant Taneja** [40:16]:

the same multiple, you know, which you could get in public markets with Five fifty? Something like that. My point is that so that's $500,000,000,000 company, like, by the end of next year. I'm not saying that's where it's gonna be, but if they hit their numbers, I don't see why that won't happen. Just from what I'm just saying public market comps, like that's what those things are gonna be valued at. I completely agree. Does margin not matter anymore today? Margin matters absolutely. And I actually think that's another place where they've done a good job. The reality is that when you think about the ROI in the coding space, you're doing the work. Coding agent is essentially a replacement of engineering. Right? You start with low end sort of engine junior engineers to more senior engineers. Even a junior engineer makes 80 to $100 a year. So your pricing power there is actually pretty significant. And if you're truly doing that kind of work, margins are not gonna be an issue. And margins already are not an issue for Anthropic. Have a good command. They've been very disciplined about how they've they've built their business. Do you worry

**Harry Stebbings** [41:10]:

about the competitive nature of the landscape when you look across at codex, but then you've also got your cognitions, and then you've also got your cursors, and then you've got your kind of on the lower, more consumer, and your your lovables, your ratplets.

**Hemant Taneja** [41:21]:

Great. I'll take you back to the clouds. You could use the same logic in the clouds to be like, hey. They're gonna get commoditized. You'll have three, probably three big telcos in every geo. There's probably three big clouds, probably three big AI models. And just, you know, I'm just sort of empirically saying that. Think about the margins that the cloud companies have. They're like seventies. I do think these companies will all figure out the margin structure really well and at scale because there's so many different ways they can add value to hold on to that margin, and they're all kinda getting specialized into, like, different areas where they are gonna be doing that. There are, but there's only three cloud providers, really. Yeah. And when we look at the plethora now that we have in terms of Today. Today. But I think that's gonna shrink. I don't think everybody's gonna make it. And then So you think there's gonna be a real shrinkage in those products? I think you'll have a couple global ones and a couple of sovereign ones in every geo. That probably is what'll end up sort of happening in AI in my view. Not everybody's gonna make it. You have a lot of other models that have been funded, different approaches as well. We'll see what happens to those. Is there like a new architecture that emerges? But it's not gonna be that many. But think about the size of the market. You're talking about the labor market. It's the AI market.

**Harry Stebbings** [42:24]:

So you buy that massive sum, hey, there's a $10,000,000,000,000 labor debt GDP up for grabs, and if we capture 2,000,000,000,000 of that, game on.

**Hemant Taneja** [42:33]:

I don't see why not. I don't see why technology is not gonna do most of that work we do in companies better than humans do, which going back to your earlier point, market forces will take us there then. It'll be cheaper, it'll be faster, it'll be better, and it'll give the businesses more leverage. So I think that's a real trend we're gonna head down the path of. The

**Harry Stebbings** [42:49]:

economy is so on the AI hype wave, or not hype wave, but, like, AI momentum wave, because a lot of it's not hype. And when you look at the concentration of, like, shareholder value accumulation, it's just solely predicated on MAG seven pretty much at this point. Do you worry that we hit a speed bump? And when we hit a speed bump in the AI train mean, literally, the world kind of crashes given how much is predicated on that, or do you think that just won't happen because we are on such an exponential upswing?

**Hemant Taneja** [43:17]:

I don't think it's gonna be that it's a speed bump that spirals us down. For So the simple reason that with every new model with its capabilities, there's a certain amount of that content of white collar jobs, the 10,000,000,000,000 that you mentioned, that is now doable. And what the speed bump is not gonna reverse that. So I think I have this sort of visual in my mind where we're kind of cumulatively taking more and more of the labor content and AI is better than us and more and more of it, and over time it's gonna be most of it, and when robotics comes, it'll be all of it. And so in that context, you know, a lot can already be done. We have the energy, we have the compute to be able to support that. The question is, the really frontier stuff, what are we gonna do with that? And I think you could see speed bumps here. The speed bump could be that the architecture doesn't scale, that you need these world models to take on or some of the new architectures people are developing that are non language oriented that could maybe would be needed. So I think the frontier could slow, but I don't think this transition of labor or melting of labor into productivity is necessarily gonna slow because the economics are way too compelling for that to not happen in my view.

**Harry Stebbings** [44:18]:

You mentioned the geo winners in some respects. You mentioned Mr. Alla. I love Arthur. I think the world of him. I'm obviously a proud European. A lot of people are going, It feels like they've been left behind, calling a spade a spade. Do you think sovereignty is enough of a reason for Mr. Al to be a winner?

**Hemant Taneja** [44:35]:

It's a great question. So, you know, Jeanette's on the board there, and we talk a lot about it. We've had many conversations and and meals with Arthur about this as well. I look at that company, and I see Arthur's growth from a scientist to a CEO. And remember, it's a it's a two year old company. And Do you wanna hear a funny story? Yeah. I got

**Harry Stebbings** [44:52]:

introduced to him by Jean Charles at Alain. Yeah. Sure. And I was the first VC he ever met. And he took a video call with me on a park bench in Paris, and I said, dude, I'm gonna give it to you straight. I've never had such a bad pitch, and you are competing against Sam Altman, the mother of all fundraisers. This is not gonna end well. And now I see him pitching, and I'm like, well, fuck.

**Hemant Taneja** [45:15]:

He changed. He changed. But I think this is the point. Not only in his ability to aggregate capital, he stayed focused on doing really disciplined work in the way to build models. And I think they were compute constrained and capital constrained, so they fell behind, but think they've caught up. Like, everything I hear now is that their models are now again sort of there as they're investing. He's figured out how to aggregate capital. I mean, you saw that. He's also figured out that his relationship with customers needs to be a lot more commercial than if you build it, they will come. And so I I am bullish on what they will do even though I was anxious about it because he and his team are growing up. I think they're learning how to be in this competitive world. And if and by the way, there were no if there were two companies not existing in this world, OpenAI and Anthropic, you said this is the hottest startup in the world in terms of how fast they're scaling and what they've accomplished and their valuation and progress. It's just you have the overhang of these two monsters that the flywheel going with capital and products and so on, And that's why we say it's interesting. I actually think they'll build a pretty compelling business. I see a lot of interest from companies in Europe, but all over the world that want an open source player. Like, who else is truly dedicated to open source that is doing it in the way that enterprises care? It's not meta. They're not an enterprise company. In the West, it's really mistrial today.

**Harry Stebbings** [46:28]:

Can you name to me success stories where sovereignty was the number one driver of their success? All

**Hemant Taneja** [46:33]:

The US defense primes were built off of sovereignty. We were the biggest allocator of spend in defense, and that's what Lockheed Martin and Raytheon and Boeing, that's a lot of what it was. And then sovereignty also dictated who and which countries they sold to and what now because the state department gets involved, but, like, it was all dictated by that. I think AI is that strategic a technology. Does

**Harry Stebbings** [46:53]:

revenue growth matter anymore? You know, we just had the founders of Macron on the show. Yes. We we led the seed there. I did an amazing job. Yeah. 1 to 500,000,000 in seventeen months. Unbelievable. Well done. Thrilled for you. Does it matter anymore, though? Because every week, there's

**Hemant Taneja** [47:11]:

a new one to 101 to 500. The internal conversation I had about this was, of course, it matters, but the normal has changed. When we did Samsara and Gusto and some of these companies Triple triple that are double like Yeah, triple triple double double, right? If you look at these companies and say, wait a minute, going from one to three to nine to 27 is not interesting, or one to five to nine to 27 is not, whatever the math is, not interesting. You gotta go like one to 15 to 20 to a 100, and they're all on a revenue basis more interesting than the stuff we thought was the most interesting five years ago. That speaks to the way value concentrates in the hands of a few companies. That speaks to the fact that these technologies underneath are so high leverage that they're potent in making these companies grow fast when you actually get a product right. That's what's going on. Durability is a question. Like the thing that's unknown is, you know, we never had so much scale without kind of just taking durability for granted. And what's the question that we all grapple with today? Loveable is an amazing company, Anton's done a great job. Is that gonna be around? Marc Andreessen an amazing company. The people that are naysayers, that's what they say. The people that believe in it, like, you know, we have a huge conviction in Merkow. We think this you know, we have our own thesis. So it's sort of everybody's kind of grappling with this and we all have our theories and people will get lucky. And I do think some of these companies that grow really fast in this will also not be around. So funny. I'm very good friends with Ro Driscoll

**Harry Stebbings** [48:34]:

from Scale, I think is one of the most brilliantly strategic but SaaS OG. Yeah. Exactly. And I learned from him a lot. And he said, like, the go to market's fundamentally changed in the world of AI, where bluntly, it's a case if you just go into a market, scream the loudest in the room, gain mindshare, and deliver from there. Your Harvey's, your A Bridges are great examples of that.

**Hemant Taneja** [48:55]:

Do you agree with that? So, you know, if you look at Harvey or who invested in Legora and Yudia, take the legal space. It's not just that they screamed the loudest and they wanted. I think the interesting thing that has happened with AI, I wanna go back to sort of one important observation, which is for the first time, every CEO in every industry, in every country is thinking about what do I do with this technology. Never happened before. Cloud wasn't like that. Certainly, PCs weren't like that. Internet wasn't like that. Everybody's like, what do I do with this? Right? So all of a sudden in every department, people popped up early and they got to go around and there was resonance with the customers. There wasn't as much evangelism for the earliest companies. Everybody just wanted to engage. So that's why these companies got initial momentum so fast, but then I wanna go back to my second mover advantage. But some of the ones that I've started after had a chance to take a step back and be like, oh wait, there's a better technology now and I think we've learned the proposition needs to be better. The initial diffusion in the zaikai was really fast, but the actual deployment, to my earlier points, were like, you know, people are like, well, how do we really use this? And that's where now this next generation of companies that are coming out just more sophisticated at that. Is the early mover advantage in some of those companies really gonna take hold or not? I think it remains TBD. So when you look today, is triple triple double double dead? Triple triple double double is definitely dead. I I tell our investors, don't bring that to me.

**Harry Stebbings** [50:12]:

What do you do with the generation of SaaS companies you have? I I hope you have it because I have it. They're good companies.

**Hemant Taneja** [50:19]:

They're good companies. By the they're good companies, they're durable companies, they're gonna be around. And this is actually an observation I give Pranav and our team a lot of credit. He sort of said, hey, these companies, venture capital doesn't like them anymore because they grow 20 and they're not hyper growths, nobody wants to fund them. But there are some founders' lives work. And if you give them alternate ways to endure and scale, they will. And they will create value, it'll just take longer. And that's where we actually have also made sure our customer value fund supports those types of founders as well. We obviously wanna support the fastest growing companies in venture, but also the ones that are fundamentally good businesses that are profitable if they were not investing in sales and marketing, and give them capital to scale their sales and marketing. That's what customer value strategy does, and it's entirely focused on those founders deserve to endure and compound because their companies are good, their customers like them, they're they're growing, they're just not in the zeitgeist.

**Harry Stebbings** [51:10]:

I've never felt so much uncertainty in what I do. I am trying to understand, it almost feels like COVID, where we had these highly transient categories that were created, it's like, do they remain and we actually just do exercises at home all day on pelotons, or do we go back to gyms? You didn't know what would be enduring strong markets and not, and I feel that is the case here. Have you ever felt such uncertainty in investing? And what would you advise me?

**Hemant Taneja** [51:33]:

I'll give you the same advice that we follow here at GC. This is peak ambiguity. And so everything we do to support founders, everything you do, you know, you were showing me a lot of your cool ways of supporting founders, get them excited. All the products and the solutions we have created to support the founders. The question is to what end? And I think having a true sense of long term set of principles that you believe in, in a world of ambiguity, that's all you can lean on. The way you navigate ambiguity is by having having a true north. In The US, we have this enormous movement towards transforming healthcare post pandemic. And and so everything we do in healthcare, we go back to saying, is this decision gonna make it proactive, affordable, accessible, or not? In Europe, the work that Jeanette is doing is very much about Europe's resilience with AI. So everything we do, we sort of look at it and say, is this gonna make the economy here more resilient? And sort of this investment decision or this relationship decision or this partnership decision or not. And sort of having that kind of a sense of where you're going so you're directionally aligned with your values is the only thing you can lean on. And there's so much uncertainty, it's so difficult. I feel bad for investors that are learning in this era because the signals to determine if your decisions were right or wrong, you in some ways have none. You have this again, you have this great revenue growth to lean on, but no durability, and then you have And then you have great margin structures. So it's like you have to be values oriented. You have to have a sense for what am I really trying to do. At GC, we say we build deep relationships with people, we build enduring companies, and we're doing that to transform industries across the world. And and what does that do? It gives our founders access to talent, access to policy sophistication, access to distribution, and access to differentiated capital. If we give founders all of that and we have a set of values with which we want to march down these industries, I think we'll be okay. We're trying to take faith in that and I I would sort of have everybody think about that because I do think we are building the future. It's an amazing time. We will shape what this society is gonna look like for probably a hundred years. I mean, this shift is as big as what electricity was, you know, hundred hundred fifty years ago. We get to shape it, but I think we we have to make those decisions. What do you want this to look like? And I think that intentionality should always be in the back of our minds as we make the short term decisions, as we deal with FOMO, as we deal with how are we scaling our business, how are we supporting our founders, what are the kinds of things we choose to do and not to do, because there's way more opportunity than anyone of us can do. We need a true north. You

**Harry Stebbings** [54:00]:

continuously mentioned the exponential market size or the insane market size that we have. It makes me think of a it's either a Buffett or a Munger quote that it's better to buy a great business at a good price than a good business at a great price. Is there any point in being price sensitive if markets

**Hemant Taneja** [54:16]:

are a trillion dollars? You know, one of my partners, Joel Cutler, used to say price only hurts once. It's like buying a Gucci bag. Price only hurts once, but then you'll never regret it. Stop true. Whenever I see my mother with a Chanel bag, I'm reminded of the dent it caused. Well well, I think I think there's actually wisdom in that comment even though it's a cheeky comment, which is, first of all, when did we ever get price right? I have been doing this for twenty five years. We've seen all these models. I am yet to see some investor, at least in our firm, ever nail price in the way they thought it was gonna be. Usually worse than that, and we make all the money when it's better than what we thought. So if it's if money's all made in what's better than we thought, like, using price to pass, investors use price as a reason to pass because they couldn't gain conviction elsewhere, and this just makes them sound pragmatic. I get very ticked off when somebody says, I love this company, but I don't like the price. I'm just like, well then, you don't know if you love this company. You're just taking solace and trying to be like him, a price disciplined investor, because you didn't really understand the potential of this company to see what it's actually gonna be. If it's gonna be destined for greatness, then jump in.

**Harry Stebbings** [55:17]:

What about if it's a capped upside company? Okay. Let me just walk you through this. There's a data I'm just making this up. Super interesting data providing company, and you're like, okay. But this is a good business, and I can easily see a 2 to $4,000,000,000 outcome here either to a strategic or as a public company, and I'm getting in at 80,000,000 pre. That's a great way to make a lot of money. It's a potential 25 x on an early stage check, and in a $10,000,000 check, I can return my fund almost. Great. But if it's $1.40, it's very different to 80.

**Hemant Taneja** [55:46]:

The multiples. A 100% right. But we say these things as a capped upside company. What does that mean? When my next investor in Stripe, all the guys that I called the new payments were like, this is a niche thing. Like, why are you doing it? I kid you not. I was like, you know, I just don't wanna listen to the experts about what they think their industries is or is going to be. Markets expand also. So the humility in this business also is just understanding we don't know what's gonna happen in the future. If it's truly a captive site, then you shouldn't be doing it anyways. It's not a price question. Like, we're in the business of trying to build and back companies that can become, you know, enduring very, very large businesses. That's like a precondition. I feel like people get stuck either because their companies are just completely mediocre, and they're not even gonna be worth 2 to 4,000,000,000, or they're actually great, and you're not willing to stretch because you're not willing to believe what the world's gonna look like.

**Harry Stebbings** [56:33]:

I always think of Peter Thiel's biggest investing mistake, which was not doing the next round in Facebook. Yeah. When did you not do the next round in a company that with the benefit of hindsight, you're like, oh, I should have done?

**Hemant Taneja** [56:46]:

I I don't think we have time for all my mistakes, but I'll I'll give you a very recent example. We have a company that's, you know, a Decacorn now and actually called the investor who led it at GC saying, congratulations. You're gonna make over $1,000,000,000 on this investment, and you're an idiot because you you gave up not making the second billion. You gave up making the second billion. Why? Because you didn't double down. That is where you can get a lot of it wrong. Right? I mentioned earlier in Stripe, I've invested 14 times. That's what it takes. If you're in the best companies, you really should be buying into them constantly. In fact, that's the reason to scale capital. The reason to scale capital isn't to be a low margin business. It's because you wanna have capital to pull the very best ones and really lean into them. That's ultimately where you drive you return your best businesses. And that requires courage, conviction, belief in how markets are gonna change. Do you worry about capital concentration limits? I have invested in I don't know the exact number. Probably over 200 companies, and 70% is like 10 companies over twenty five years. Capital concentration is the way you drive return. Which single You just gotta be right. Which single company are

**Harry Stebbings** [57:54]:

you most capital concentrated in? Stripe. You know, it's about a billion dollars. Is cross fund investing concerns bullshit?

**Hemant Taneja** [57:59]:

LPs often worry about it, don't like it. Well, cross fund is an important consideration. We do think a lot about before we cross fund, but we do cross funds. We wanna make sure you have done enough capital to work in the fund that it's in, where you feel uncomfortable about the risk you're taking before you cross it. If you really believe in something, you wanna make sure that becomes one of your positions in that fund before you go to the next fund. I try not to have more than 10 to 15% in a single company in a fund. So at some point, it does. If it's truly a great company, you will be forced to cross because you should have multiple funds benefit from that.

**Harry Stebbings** [58:31]:

I always remember Brian Singer saying capital concentration limits are the enemy of great venture returns, which is why we'll often have 30% in a single company. And I thought, wow. I I need to get more courage. Yeah.

**Hemant Taneja** [58:40]:

I mean, concentration is key to being great at investing. I genuinely believe that. When companies go

**Harry Stebbings** [58:46]:

public, you have the choice to distribute or not. How do you think about whether you are better placed than your LPs to manage those positions once going public?

**Hemant Taneja** [58:57]:

I always look at it as it's a variety of things. One is, will our time matter? If our time continues to be spent on this company, will it matter in terms of compounding from here or not? So some of the ones we started, for example, that would make sense if you wanna stay on and do that. The other thing I look at is how long should we hold it to make sure we drive the best returns for that fund? Is this the company that should be compounding most to keep generating returns and driving performance given our commitments to the LPs? Because a lot the LPs will have their public sleeve and their private sleeve. You give them stock, they'll sell it, and it's like programmatic for them. We wanna make sure we give it to them at a point where we've really captured enough value, so that's another factor we think about in that context. Which suggests you do think you're better at managing it than them. Well, they may not be managing it, is what I'm saying there.

**Harry Stebbings** [59:41]:

But by selling it, they're managing it has out of

**Hemant Taneja** [59:43]:

programmatic, that in their private sleeve, they're just not gonna hold it, and the privates team is basically told that once you get stock you sell. And also the other thing is you wanna in our lead companies where we lead, where we go public, we have a lot of stock. You also have to be measured in how you distribute stock because doing too much at one time, you'll you could also hurt the prices of stock, which hurts the rest of it. So I think there's also a pacing question of how do you liquidate. How do you

**Harry Stebbings** [60:06]:

think about navigating secondary markets? You know, when we look at there's a very strong chance that we have a trillion dollar private company in an OpenAI of the world. How do you think about navigating secondary markets when public market is sometimes not there?

**Hemant Taneja** [60:20]:

Well, look, I think for the very best companies, private markets behave like public markets. There's a secondary market. You can liquidate, so your shareholders can take liquidity, your employees can take liquidity, you have access to credit, you can do M and A, your stocks value, you know, your valuations believed. I'm talking about very bit of the stripes, SpaceXs, and I think OpenAI is gonna get there, Anthropic and so on. Right? So the very bad Databricks is getting there slowly. So the very best, that's what happened. Then there's the very good companies, but not the, let's say, the top 10 or 15 private ones, not the magnificent private 10, if you will. For them, going public and getting validated actually could be more helpful. It may be that the secondary market isn't behaving as well or they can't do m and a as effectively or they need to access a lot more capital than they can just being in the private markets. And I think those decisions are what ultimately then push you to go public. And then there is the, as I said, this bloated set of companies that are good companies that will compound at 25% maybe forever, that have no access to public market because they're too small. They're not a billion dollar company growing 30% a year that the public markets, you know, would be excited about, and they're too slow for venture to fund. And that's the purgatory where we need innovation, and that's where the customer value fund resides to, like, help these companies get to that scale so they can go public someday.

**Harry Stebbings** [61:32]:

Is the extension of private markets not an increasingly harmful thing to the distribution of wealth in society. When we look at the before, it would be your fidelities, your tea rose, and the pensioners of the world. My grandparents would pay them 20 bps, 30 bps, 40 bps. And now with the extension of private markets, you get money and get two and twenty.

**Hemant Taneja** [61:53]:

When I published my first book, Unscaled, in 2018, I had the leadership of Vanguard come by, and they talked about, look, Main Street doesn't have access to this asset class. So I spent a lot of time in 2018 saying, how do we do that? How do we actually give retail access to our funds? Now with four zero one k changes and some of the 40 act evolution, you actually can do that. So I fully expect that you will start seeing products that give retail access to the best companies in technology, and we will definitely engage in that because it's the right thing to do. Do you agree with that? Like, when I saw the LaFontes

**Harry Stebbings** [62:27]:

talk about this, I was like, oh, wow, guys. Well done. And and then part of me is like, well, isn't that what we want? The democratization of access.

**Hemant Taneja** [62:34]:

Yeah. Look, I think everybody wins in this. You open up large pools of capital for investing in technology, but you also open up large pools of opportunity for people that don't have it otherwise. So, like, we don't need to look at it as, oh, we're doing it because it's sneaky. I think it's good for the world and we should do it, and if you're oversubscribed, make room for it. That's where this matters, which is when you have more capital than you wanna take on in a fund, would you let it in or not? And what I'm saying is that we should be making room for Do you think fee structures need to change? I am very much focused on performance as the number one thing. That's why I said in the beginning that I measure us as how good a seed firm as we are in the context of everything we do is, like, is our core right? Are we doing the highest risk, highest reward work? Are we helping founders in the earliest stages? So you wanna stay high performance. And if you wanna stay high performance, then your incentive should be much more focused on generating carry and making it a prosperous place for your team than generating fees, which to me can be a distraction. By the way, we you know, just to say, like, in our business, we don't distribute any fees. We invest everything back in the business. And that's a deep belief that we don't wanna be in the game where the partners of the funds at General Catalyst want bigger and bigger funds because they can take, you know, bigger and bigger distributions. Whatever fees we get, we invest it back in the business.

**Harry Stebbings** [63:47]:

I'm so sorry to be so blunt, but don't partners make, like, 3 or $5,000,000? Less than that. You worry that you're not gonna get the best partners? Because they are getting that at alternate funds.

**Hemant Taneja** [63:56]:

Depends on if they're focused on performance and salary. I think that that to me is a filter. And my commitment is that you go deliver, you know, your dream and you'll make more money than anywhere else. But it's gotta be aligned. We gotta be focused on performance and value creation versus being rich and fat and happy salaries. That is just not the culture we want. Do you think that is the same or reflective of the rest of the venture ecosystem? I have no idea. I pay no attention to it. You don't? No. You Do not pay attention to your competitors? I don't know what people get paid there. I don't.

**Harry Stebbings** [64:23]:

Which competitors do you most respect? All of them. They all make us better. If you were to choose one so I could say, like, point nine. I think point nine in Europe have done an incredible job really carving out their industry and knowing what is that type of deal.

**Hemant Taneja** [64:35]:

Andy Golden, who ran the Princeton Endowment, and he's doing some stuff with us now, he had a huge impact on me as I was helping build GC. He always said run your own race. It's actually a chapter in my upcoming book is about that, like, play your own game. Do you not think you can learn from others? No. I wanna learn from others, but I don't wanna be in the game of we're competing in the zero sum game of venture capital. When you look at that product that you give

**Harry Stebbings** [64:59]:

to founders, you have a lot of products now from, you know, the geos of your Europe and your Indias and your USs to the seed, to the growth, to the customer value, to the roll ups. What product do you not have that you would like to have? Do you have, like, a square heritage or a wealth management business? We do. Of course, you do. We do.

**Hemant Taneja** [65:16]:

And that's actually growing rapidly. It's a fairly large business at this point. We have a roadmap, to be honest. And I always look at it as what do the founders need? And we have a roadmap of things that we think about, you know, that we will over time experiment with and see if we should bring in. I mean, we have really three products. We have venture capital, starting with seed. We have customer value fund, and we have creation, which is where we do the roll ups and hatches, building companies from scratch, sort of being really builders. We have three products today. But which one would you most like to have? I think we need to figure out infrastructure. The race in AI, the thing that I'm very focused on learning about and we're early in our thinking is, in order to get AI right, you have to get energy right. Everybody knows this. And if you think about energy, it's a really interesting opportunity with all the new demand to actually move towards sustainability profitably as well. But in the short term, you don't have sustainable solutions. You really have natural gas in The US, for example. So what is that arc with which we're gonna think about energy to really get AI right? That's an infrastructure problem. That's an example of something I'm like, well, if we care about using AI to change the world, you know, all of our transformation work is about transforming industries, businesses with AI all over the world, then we need to figure out what to do with energy.

**Harry Stebbings** [66:25]:

How do you think about how you need to change the capital supply base with the different products? I very much operate in the Endowment Fund Foundation world, which is lovely and nice, but does it change drastically when

**Hemant Taneja** [66:37]:

you move across products? It's a great question, because I think as we went through the succession at GC from David, Joel, and me running the business sort of most of last decade together, the two of them before that, to me taking on as CEO, I think at that same time, we also we had a succession from a leadership standpoint, you know, Ken Chenault came in, became our chairman, mentored me, but also had an interesting evolution of our LP base. Because the LP, the Indominate Foundations, which many of them are huge backers of us are of ours and I consider them sort of really part of our team, The mindset there was we want managers to be dedicated in single strategies, and we will create the portfolio. The break in strategy we did was to say, well, no, we need to have all the strategies that make the founders successful, and you back us to make the founders successful, then we'll create And that's what we were on a campaign to convince enough of them to stay on with us and do that, and they did. Then we went and got a lot of the states in The US, states in pensions, because that part of it was, going back to your point, I wanna make sure we create wealth for everybody in The US, so that was like a motivator there as well. And now we're actually very deeply partnering with sovereigns as well because as I said earlier, the AI, the transformation of the countries, but there the relationship needs to be more of a partnership. We're helping them think about, hey, what you can be doing in your regions and let us be a strategic partner to you, and you be a capital provider to us, like we're doing the sort of interesting partnerships in that regard. And you have to go to sovereigns because they're the only ones who can write a billion dollar check. No? Some states can as well, but there is scaled capital in each of these areas. The key is how does your work fit in the context of their strategy, and GC is sort of a flexible platform where people can engage in that context. And as we were talking about cheeky jokingly before, retail's another one that's about to open up. Right? And there's like $16,000,000,000,000 of retail capital that's What will cause retail to open? Retail is opening up in terms of the 40 act regulations, in terms of the changes in the can four zero one k invest in alts? It is gonna open up, and it should open up. And we need to be responsible about exposing retail to the right part of the risk curve in privates. I think it's very important that we do that. So being very thoughtful about if and when we do make GCO, we don't we don't do that today available, like, what would be the right way to do it? I think the whole industry is gonna think about that. So so in my view, all these pools are there, and I think if we are to service the founders the right way and have the capital and the flexible capital solutions all available for them to build their companies, that we need to engage with all these capital sources that are willing to support different parts of that stack. When retail opens, is it a trickle or is it a flood? Hopefully, it's a trickle. It sort of starts slowly and then scales. I do think it'll scale in a big way, but I think we should be we'll be careful. Because

**Harry Stebbings** [69:17]:

I worry when we go back to your very early statement that there's not many Patrick and John's or Sams or Darios. The problem is there's not enough truly generational defining entrepreneurs for the supply side of cash. That will only get worse. I'm not looking at retail opening up going, woo hoo. I'm going, wow. This is about to get harder.

**Hemant Taneja** [69:34]:

That's right. So I think retail can open up to be in the very best companies at scale, in my view. I think Robinhood is working on some work there, for example. And they just announced they're gonna create, like, a way to give retail access to some of the top companies as well. I think it's a recent announcement. So that's one, which is I think there you could be, hey, giving people access to SpaceX and Stripe, you're not gonna regret it. It'll do right by them. You'll feel proud of it. What you don't wanna do is take retail and put it into the bottom quartile of the venture capital funds that lose money because they got access to it. Think that's where it needs to be trickling in to make sure it it goes where return we should not put retail into very high risk situations where they lose money. I, like, I feel very, very strong about that. We have to be careful. So I think it needs to be trickling down the risk curve in terms of how retail accesses our asset class.

**Harry Stebbings** [70:21]:

What did you do that you wish you hadn't done in the last ten years? It doesn't need to be deal I'm more thinking about, like, products, strategy, firm build.

**Hemant Taneja** [70:31]:

You know, the good thing about our culture, and I give the founders of GC a lot of credit, is anytime I had a crazy idea, they supported it. So I've I've usually gone and have been able to do most of what I wanted to. There's one place I look back and say, did I make a mistake? When the financial services market took off, I was like, I wanna be in the best company. And I was like, let's invest in Stripe, but let's not do Square and whatever else. And when the AI stuff happened, I was like, I wanna be where I think I can risk adjusted, make the most money. I think in hindsight, we should just go on and index those. You know, some of the other investors like Jerry Miller and others that did a great job at it and did very well. Was I focused on I wanna be the best, and I was like, see how good I am that I did the best one. And if I could go back, I would understand that in certain parts of the stack, indexing, if you can afford to, you have the capital base too, is a better strategy than trying to pick in a world of peak ambiguity. And that's something that I'm a slow learner. I feel like I've been at it for twenty five years, and I'm starting to understand that better. And you've moved to that now? I have not moved to that, but I'm gonna wait to see the next time. I missed it in AI. Our friends at Lightspeed did a great job in AI, for example. I think it's gonna work out really well for them. Why do you think that? Because when you know the trend's gonna win, but you don't know which one's gonna win, you're better off backing all of them than trying to pick and meaningfully play and get it wrong. That's a very hard decision to make and get it right. Do you regret not being in OpenAI when you had the chance to but didn't because of the structure? This is a daily conversation I have with myself and with my partners. I mean, I do regret it because the amount of learning we would had if I was sort of at a front door seat really understanding what's going on, like, I wish I had that. Would it have prevented you from doing Anthropic? I don't think so. I I think there are plenty of investors that are in both companies. Look at structure. Many people overthought it, and I overthought it as well. And there's a lot going on that platform that's changing the world, and I don't have a front row seat.

**Harry Stebbings** [72:19]:

So, yeah, I do regret that a little bit. We mentioned focus on performance. Circle's IPO was nuts, and it did wonders for the fund in terms of returns. How did that fund return look? We were chatting about it outside.

**Hemant Taneja** [72:33]:

Yeah. That fund is one of our two or three best funds. And just to tell you what was in it, was Livongo was in that. Snap was in that. Circle was in that, Gusto. It's probably gonna end up being a 13 to 15 x fund. Story's not over yet. So How big is the fund? It was 500,000,000. Wow. Well done. We need to keep doing it. That was a long time ago. What is GC in 10? I think GC is gonna look like the most diversified solutions for founders to build enduring companies. That's the lens with which we justify everything that's on it. And if you looked at it, GC as a business is gonna feel like a strategic conglomerate, where every part of GC is in service of founders, whether it's giving them access to distribution or access to policy or access to capital or access to wealth management, it's all about founders. So it's the platform for founders. How many team members do you have?

**Harry Stebbings** [73:25]:

We are over 300 people. 300 people? Yeah. Positively small compared to Andreessen. Absolutely fine. We're tiny. Final one, then we'll do a quick fire. On the future venture, everyone does this binary. You're either, you know, the massive AUM gatherer or you're the boutique provider, and that's it. Everything else, la Pebbelle. Do you agree with that binary view of venture, or do you think it's an alternate view?

**Hemant Taneja** [73:48]:

I don't like that view. I don't like that framing because we My framing is actually Walmart and Chenault. Totally. Totally. But I but I would say we wanna have the biggest AUM in venture because that means we're doing the best job, but not because we have a lot of companies. We've raised a lot of money, but because we're in, like, 20 stripes. Well, the biggest AUM doesn't mean you're doing the best job. No. No. I'm saying but I'm saying the kind of AUM I want is the biggest because we have but with the fewest number of companies. Meaning, our companies have created a lot of value. It's not the amount of money we raised. AUM can be one of two things. How much money did you raise? Or what is the value of the capital you raised? I want the value of the capital you raised to be the biggest. But are the amount of money we raised to be smallest. That's when you've created the most alpha. So that's why I think this biggest AUM is not like a very informative way to look at it. And if you're boutique, you could still have really big AUM. If your portfolio was only the top 10 companies that got funded, if that was your portfolio, you actually would have the biggest AUM even if it was a 500,000,000 fund or $300,000,000 fund, whatever you call boutique. The focus needs to be on being the support of the best founders to build the biggest companies, which will give you the biggest AUM, will give you the biggest performance, and not focus on, can I go raise the most amount of money for venture? That's why I said in the beginning, our aspirations in venture capital is to be the best seed firm in the world or second best after you.

**Harry Stebbings** [75:07]:

I I have two more. Was the most memorable first founder meeting, and then I'll tell you why I laughed?

**Hemant Taneja** [75:12]:

I mean, I have to say it was with Patrick Carlson. It's just one of those, you know, like the movie Sixth Sense when the ring falls and the guy's like, oh, shit. I'm the one who's dead, and you you just feel like you didn't know something about the world and how to think about it. That's how I felt with the name, because I asked him, who are your ideal customers? And he said, they haven't been born yet. And he was talking about the developer movement. Remember, this is 2010. Right? Developer movement and what's about to come. And I'm just like, oh, crap. I don't even have a complete view of the world and what's happening around me is how I felt in that meeting. And I was like, I have to back this person. I don't even know payments. I mean, everybody all the payments people are telling me what's wrong with the payments. Was like, I kinda don't care. Like, I I don't know what's in this thing, but, like, he sees something and we have to be part of it. And and that moment taught me a lot about humility in terms of what this business is all about. It really is about, you know, backing the best people. And honestly, it had a huge impact because I saw him and John build Stripe. I was like, well, why does our business run so shitty when we are in service of trying to help build businesses that can be run really well? I wanna run well. GC should be running with the same rigor these companies run. And I think we still run pretty good. We're still a very messy company, but the aspiration is we wanna run with the same rigor as as, you know, companies like Stripe do. Which loss hurts

**Harry Stebbings** [76:24]:

the most? So the reason I laughed when you just said about the I've only lost one deal in three years. It's not me being, like, arrogant. It's just the truth. Yeah. I lost to you, which is great. And you know what I hate, by the way, when you lose? Because, you know, we people do. And they phone up and, Which one? It's Sea of Ash and Kai in do you know them? Yeah. Yeah. Out of Shopify, amazing guys. Love them. Fantastic. Well done. Was Jeanette. Yeah. And awesome. Great founders. What I freaking hate, though, is when other investors call up and they're like, hey, can we, like, share it and have some of yours? And you're like, are you kidding me? No. Yeah. So I never do that. Yeah. But that one, like, sticks in my mind as one I'm I'm annoyed.

**Hemant Taneja** [77:05]:

First of all, Harry, you should be losing more. I'll tell you a little story. When we moved to the Bay Area, I lost this company at a series a of a company called Klasko. We were rated the b. Awesome. And I remember my partners from Boston came, and they were they just felt bad for me. They're just like, you can't be losing because that's just gonna, like, emotionally devastate you and then you're not gonna be able to compete here. And I was like, are you kidding me? If I'm not losing, I'm not winning. Because the very best founders go meet all the five to seven great firms and they pick one. So theoretically, your win rate, as long as it's over 30%, you're actually maybe in the right fight. So it's very important to be in the right fight. So you actually wanna feel like you're losing more. Everybody that in the team, when they come and tell me, I haven't lost in my category, I'm like, well, then you're just in the wrong pond, buddy. So even that's think that's, like, an important thing, which is there are so many smart people There that use you go. That fucking hurts too, but I was worried about saying no. I I think we're we should enjoy the pain. I actually think if we're win if we're losing, we're winning. That's like something I genuinely believe about ventures. Like, you need to be in the right fights, and then you gotta win your fair share and not dwell on it beyond that. The things I lost, I mean, I have so many of these moments. Like, Drew Houston, when he was starting Dropbox, I asked him come work at GC with me because I had him intern for Chris Dixon at back Chris' company. And I said, come work with me. He's like, no. I'm gonna go start this file storage company. And I was like, file storage? There's emoji. That was the first million dollars would have been a $2,000,000,000 return because I'm like, what is this thing? Even though I was willing to work with this guy, I didn't give money on that. But you didn't lose it. That's a miss. Well, to my own brain. That's a miss. So one way you lost it. I lost a Series A of Stripe. I lost a Series A of Samsara. I lost a Series A of Snap. And the first one I won was a Series A of Gusto. If I look at my most competitive fights when I first got to the Valley, I'm like, oh my god. This just sucks. No one's ever gonna pick me. Fuck this. I'm gonna get out of Boston. You know? And and I did. I I lost a lot. But the key was I stayed on, and then I was able to, you know, do the next round. And but those moments make you better. It just sort of you gotta realize there are a lot of smart people in the industry. They're just very smart. I called

**Harry Stebbings** [79:09]:

up my mentor who's this kind of one of the best investors in the world, billionaire, genius, and I called him up after losing this deal to Andreessen, I said, fucking hell. Like, what the fuck? And he's like, Harry, all of my biggest returns I've never made when I won the deal. I always lost the deal, and then I just had to scrabble and buy secondaries from angels, from operators, from founders, and that all

**Hemant Taneja** [79:33]:

of those ones were my best returns. The thing is, in the very best companies, you don't get the amount of ownership you want anyways because founders command a premium, and so you're constantly building ownership after that. Like, you know, as I mentioned, my biggest overall investment is in Stripe. How much do you have in Stripe across everything? It's still sub 10%. And so Like, a 2,000,000,000, a billion? No. No. More. 5,000,000,000? More. But but I think that does

**Harry Stebbings** [79:57]:

More than 5,000,000,000. But I

**Hemant Taneja** [79:58]:

think the key point is it's a lot. But the point is Stripe's gonna be a trillion dollar company. He's gotta give it ten years. You know. So I'm we're it's a compounding business that Patrick and John always say infrastructure is hard, but it also compounds, and they're sort of steadily just doing that and making some really smart choices in this AI world. And so you gotta have a long term view. You know, we'll have a 25 hold probably on on Stripe in some form or the other. So when these companies are good, you wanna keep buying in. And then at some point, you say, okay, I have done enough. And now, you know, the next five x where it just seems extraordinary to think about way more beyond that, maybe I'm gonna I'm gonna stop. So at some point, you you have to sort of say, okay, I gotta move on to the next thing. There's some firms that are trying to make all their money on SpaceX and keep buying SpaceX. I'm like, that's great. And I actually think, you know, I've got a lot of runway with SpaceX. That's a good investment, but I wanna go back to next generation of entrepreneurs as well and figure out if we can generate alpha there too. Listen, dude. I could talk

**Harry Stebbings** [80:50]:

to you all day. I need to do a quick fire because I'm sure you actually have some other place to be in life. Tell me, what have you changed your mind on most in the last twelve months? This

**Hemant Taneja** [80:59]:

idea of indexing. Being in every company and When you have macro trends, should you index or not? I'm being open minded to thinking that way about major technological trends or market shifts.

**Harry Stebbings** [81:09]:

What has been the biggest challenge in changing your leadership? So, like, for me, I'm very emotional, and as I lead, I need to dampen my emotions.

**Hemant Taneja** [81:18]:

I think it becomes really hard going from becoming a master at something to being a teacher at something. The reality is when you can teach something is when you've truly mastered it, and I don't think I'm very good at that. You know, some of my partners will say, gibberish comes out of your mouth when you try to teach. It's much better to just watch what you're doing and, like, make sense out of it. I'm still trying to figure out how to crack that.

**Harry Stebbings** [81:37]:

What would be your single biggest piece of advice to an LP navigating venture today?

**Hemant Taneja** [81:42]:

The proposition for founders has to change. You want to embrace entrepreneurial VCs that are innovating around that. What worries you most in the world today? The short term alignment of value creation in business with long term prosperity of everybody, being inclusive and abundant in that. What would you do if you weren't scared? I'm not scared. I don't operate with fear. I'm I'm doing what I would do. I think we take a lot of risk. I think we're innovating in every dimension that we possibly can. We're pushing ourselves as much as we can. So I'd like to think I would do what I'm doing. Does money make you happy? No. Money is a byproduct of the impact I wanna create. Biggest advice on parenting? Teach them to be unique. And in the world of AI, teach them to ask questions, not solve problems. Is

**Harry Stebbings** [82:30]:

college less valuable than ever?

**Hemant Taneja** [82:33]:

I have a 16 year old, and he's definitely going to college. I have an 11 year old, and I talked to him the other day, and I said, hey, Ajay, you may not need to go to college. The world may change in how we think about developing skills. He was happy about that. Final

**Harry Stebbings** [82:47]:

one for you. What are you most excited about? I like to leave on, like, a a tone of positivity. What are you most excited for when you look forward?

**Hemant Taneja** [82:53]:

Look. Technology is neutral. What I'm most excited about is that, you know, over the next twenty years, if I look at GC, we'll probably invest, what, 300,000,000,000, $500,000,000,000 into the world through helping shape what AI does for society. I and my partners and my, you know, broader team have the opportunity to leave a mark, and I wanna get it right. I wanna get it right where, you know, when I'm some days living at senior living facility, that I'm like, hey. I I did right about the world. It's actually turned out to be okay

**Harry Stebbings** [83:22]:

through the shift. Listen, Hemant. Shows like this remind me why I love what I do so much. You gotta remember, I love investing. This is my true passion. Yeah. And being able to speak with you and discuss the craft of what I love so much is is such a joy. So thank you for being so brilliant. Thanks for having me. This was fun. Really enjoyed it. I think you could tell just how much I enjoyed that show. If you wanna watch that episode on video, you can check it out on YouTube by searching for 20 VC. I always wanna make the show the best it can be. Let me know how I can make it better for you. Email me, Harry@20vc.com. But before we leave you today,

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**Harry Stebbings** [83:59]:

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