YouSaid · the spoken record

Hemant Taneja

lines on the record: 116
first: 2025-09-22
most recent: 2025-09-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I was 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, you may not need to go to college. The world may change in how we think about developing skills. He was happy about that.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not scared. I don't operate with fear. 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”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The short term alignment of value creation in business with long term prosperity of everybody, being inclusive and abundant in that.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Some of my partners will say gibberish comes out of your mouth when you try to teach. It's much better just watch what you're doing and make sense out of it. I'm still trying to figure out how to crack that.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think the key point is it's a lot. But the point is, Stripe's going to be a trillion dollar company. It's got to give it 10 years, 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 got to have a long-term view. We'll have a 25-year hold probably on stripe in some form or the other. So when these companies are good, you want to keep buying in. And then at some point, you say, okay, I have done enough. And now, you know, the next 5x where it just seems extraordinary to think about way more beyond that, maybe I'm going to subs. At some point, you have to sort of say, okay, I got to 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 Elon's got a lot of runway with spacing. That's a good investment, but I want to go back the next generation entrepreneurs as well and figure out if we can generate alpha there too.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. As I mentioned, my biggest overall investment is in Stripe.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Boston, you know, and I did. I lost a lot. But the key was I stayed on and then I was able to do the next round. But those moments make you better. You just got to realize there are a lot of smart people in the industry. They're just very smart.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 going to pick me. Fuck that.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we should enjoy the pain. I actually think if we're losing, we're winning. That's like something I genuinely believe about ventures. Like, you need to be in the right fight. And then you got to 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 to come work at GC with me because I had him intern for Chris Dixon. I'd backed Chris's company. And I said, come work with me. He's like, no, I'm going to go start this file storage company. And I was like, file storage. There's Moji. That was the first million dollars. Would have been a $2 billion return because I'm like, what is this thing? Even though I was willing to work with this guy, but I didn't give money on that. But you didn't look.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, we call Class Studio, where he did the B. And I remember my partners from Boston came, and they were, they just felt bad for me. They're like, you can't be losing because that's just going to emotionally devastate you and then you're not going to 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 grade 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 want to feel like you're losing more. Everybody that in the team, when they come and tell me, I haven't lost in my category game, I'm like, well, then you're just in the wrong pond, buddy. So I think that's like an important thing, which is there are so many smart people. No, I just lost money the other day. There you go.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can be run really well. I want to 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 want to run with the same rigor as companies like Stripe 2.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I have to say it was with Patrick Collison. 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 just feel like they didn't know something about the world and how to think about it. That's how I felt with him 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. I was like, I kind of don't care. Like, I don't know what's in this thing, but like he sees something and we have to be part of it. And that moment taught me a lot about humility in terms of what this business is all about. It really is about backing the best people. And honestly, it had a huge impact because I saw him and John Bill Stripe. I was like, why does our business run so shitty when we are in service of trying to help build businesses?”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, 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 the amount of money you raise 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 million fund or $300 million 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...”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally, totally. But I would say we want to 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”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think GC is going to look like the most diversified solutions for founders to build endearing 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 going to 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.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That fund is one of our two or three best funds. And just to tell you what was in it, it was Livonga was in that, Snap was in that, Circle was in that, Gusto. It's probably going to end up being a $13 to 15X fund. Story's not over yet”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so. I think there are plenty of investors that are in both companies. Look, that 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. So, yeah, I do regret that a little bit.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is a daily conversation I have with myself and my partners. I mean, I do regret it because the amount of learning we would have had if I was sort of at a front door seat really understanding what's going on. I wish I had that”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not moved to that, but I'm going to 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 going to work out really well for them.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 that supported it. So 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 want to 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, you want to be where I think I can adjust it, make the most money. I think in hindsight, we should just go and index those. Some of the other investors like Jury Milner and others that did a great job with it and did very well. I was focused on, I want to be in the best. And I was like, aha, 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, if you have the capital base to, it's 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”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They just announced they were going to create 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 going to regret it. It'll do right by them. You'll feel proud of it. What you don't want to do is take retail and put it into the bottom cortile of the venture capital funds that lose money because they got access to. I think that's where it needs to be trickling in to make sure it goes where return. We should not put retail into very high risk situations where they lose money. 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.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. So I think retail can open up to be in the very best companies at scale, in my view. I think Robin Hood is working on some work there, for example.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 careful.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Retail is opening up in terms of the Fordia Act regulations, in terms of the changes in the Ken 401k invest in alts. It is going to 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 do that today available like would be the right way to do it. I think the whole industry is going to think about that. 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.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Some states can as well, but there is scaled capital in each of these areas. The key is how does your work fit the context of their strategy? And GC is sort of a flexible platform where people can engage in that context. And we were talking about jokingly before, retail is another one that's about to open up, right? There's like 16 trillion dollars of retail capital that's”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“States and pensions, because part of it was going back to your point, I want to 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 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 of us like we're doing the sort of interesting partnerships.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the same time, we also, we had a succession from a leadership standpoint. Ken Chenal came and became our chairman, mentored me, but also had an interesting evolution of RLP base. Because LP, the endowment foundations, which many of them are huge backers 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 because then we'll create alpha. 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.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. Really have natural gas in the US, for example. So what is that arc with which we're going to 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.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We do. Of course, you do. We do. 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 that we will over time experiment with and see we should bring in. We have really three products, right? We have venture capital, starting with seed. We have customer value fund and we have creation, which is where we do the rollups and hatches, building companies from scratch, sort of being really builders. We have three products today.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Annie 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. Play your own game.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Depends on if they're focused on performance as high. I think that to me is a filter. And my commitment is that you go deliver your dream and you'll make more money than anywhere else. But it's got to be aligned. We've got to be focused on performance and value creation versus being rich in fat and happy salaries. That is just not the culture we want.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 want to stay high performance. And if you want to 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, not just to say 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 want to be in the game where the partners of the funds and general catalysts want bigger and bigger funds. Because they can take bigger and bigger distributions, whatever fees we get, we invested back in the business.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think everybody wins in this. You open up large pools of capital for investing in technology, but you also opened up large pools of opportunity for people that don't have it otherwise. So we don't need to look at it as 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 want to 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 this.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the SASA 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 401k changes and some of the FOREC 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. We will definitely engage in that because it's the right thing to do.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 hill or let's take liquidity, your employees can take liquidity, you have access to.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because that's programmatic that in their private sleeve, they're just not going to hold it, and the private team is basically told that once you get stock, you sell. And also, the other thing is you want to, in our lead companies where we lead, where we go public, we have a lot of stock. So you also have to be measured in how you distribute stock because by doing too much at one time, you could also hurt the prices of the stock, which hurts the rest of it. So I think there's also a pacing question of how do you liquidate.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 want to 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 of 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. But we want to 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.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, CrossFund is an important consideration. We do think a lot about it before we Crossfund, but we do cross funds. We want to 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 want to make sure that becomes one of your largest 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.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have invested in, I don't exact number, probably over 200 companies and 60-70% is like 10 companies over 25 years. Capital concentration is the way you drive return. You just got to be right. Which”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think we have time for all my mistakes, but I'll give you a very recent example. We have a company that's a DecoCorn now and actually called the investor who led it at GCC. Congratulations, you're going to make over a billion dollars on this investment. And you're an idiot because 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. 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 want to have capital 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 going to change.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or they're actually great and you're not willing to stretch because you're not willing to believe what the world's going to look like.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Multiples. 100% right. But we say these things as a capped upside company. What does that mean? All the guys that I called that new payments were like, this is a niche thing. Like, why are you doing it? I could you not. I was like, you know, I just don't want to listen to the experts about what they think their industry 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 going to happen in the future. If it's truly a captocyte, then you shouldn't be doing it anyways. It's not a price question. We're in the business of trying to build and back companies that can become enduring very, very large businesses. That's like a precondition. I feel like people get stuck either because the companies are just completely mediocre and they're not even going to be worth two to four billion.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, 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 25 years. We've seen all these models. I am yet to see some investor, at least in our firm ever nailed price in the way they thought it was going to be. It's usually worse than that. And we make all the money when it's better than what we thought. So if money is all made in what's better than we thought, using price to pass, investors use price as a reason to pass because they couldn't gain conviction elsewhere and it 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 going to be. Because if it's going to be destined for greatness, then jump in.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 never regret it. Stop shit.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which should revenue? So it's like you have to be values oriented, you have to have a sense for what. We're trying to take fates in that. And 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 going to look like for probably 100 years. I mean, this shift is as big as what electricity was, you know, 150 years ago, we get to shape it. But I think 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 rescaling 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 else can do. You need a true north.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. And 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, do you have this great revenue growth to lean on, but no durability? And then you have growth.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the world of ambiguity, that's all you can lean on. The way you navigate ambiguity is by having a true north. In the US, we have this enormous movement towards transforming healthcare post-pandemic. And so everything we do in healthcare, we go back to saying, is this decision going to 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 going to make the economy here more resilient? And through this investment decision or this relationship decision,”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, they're good companies, they're durable companies that are going to 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 the hyper growth. Nobody wants to fund them, but there are some founders' life's 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 want to 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. The growing. They're just not in the zeitgeist.”
2025-09-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source