YouSaid · the spoken record

Quentin Clark

lines on the record: 34
first: 2020-12-28
most recent: 2020-12-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The most recent that's been announced, I think, is Sprout. Sprout therapy. So Hemath and I invested in this company that's providing a solution for autistic children. Amazing founder, incredible inroads in what he's doing for families that he serves is just unbelievable. We said yes because it aligned how we think about healthcare. Building a big persona-based company like Lavango was, and Yuri, the founder, is just astonishing.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't get a lot of FOMO in real time. I do look back at some things and say, gosh, I wish we had seen that or I wish we had had the right judgment for that. So I'm much more in the learning part of it. And that's where I get anxious as opposed to in the moment believing that, well, we're just not making the right decision because all these other people see this this way. I trust my judgment, I trust our judgment as a firm.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The Fomodynamics, seeing valuations go basically to insolvency because the assumption that the collective judgment, that really comes out of fear. And I think we need to kind of move past that.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, the list is really long. Look, businesses are so full of people that are brand over substance. There's just a lot of that going around. So I don't really want to push the pieces of that around the board. But if you made me pick one, I might pick Hasso Plattner. He's one of the founders of SAP. SAP's core ERP, I believe, is going to outlast everything of that generation. And he really did this incredible job, not just with that, but also outside that, with things like the design school at Stanford.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know how contrary this really is, but I actually think that luck factor is into things way more than people are usually one to give credence to.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think we're going to invent new ways of working terminology. There'll be things like how many in person days are there for this department, at this company? It's a kind of a new interview question in a way, right? And I think what's going to happen is we're going to use more collaborative space, bring people together for the team building, for the problem solving, for the strategy setting, and then let people kind of fan out and do their jobs. And they'll go on for, I don't know, like a week, two weeks, a month, a quarter, and then bring people back. So we're going to use bigger spaces with more people in them, ironically, to do that kind of team building collaboration, but then let kind of people fan out and go do the heavy lifting.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because we realize that we don't need to spend 40, 50 hours a week in an office to do the day-to-day job. You do need some in-person time together. So we will see like one to two days a week people go in and collaborate. But a lot of the time people will be spending independently working.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The book I've reread over and over again is Highland Stranger in a Strange Land. It's just written with such talents that it's enjoyable. But this mix of science fiction and social commentary and commentaries and latent human potential I always just find super thought provoking.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“New to this job and I'm learning. And one of the things I like to do when I'm learning something new is surround myself with people who are good at those jobs and are willing to teach. And so I feel pretty”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More of a passenger in their thing that they've set up for you, as opposed to being really an actor in the story. And so the thing I would suggest to founders is think about your boards as your partners and how do you enroll them in the play. And given they're not there every day, they're not in rehearsal every day, et cetera. But how do you enroll them and give them the space to think, to collaborate with you, and to contribute more like improv? And that takes a little bit of vulnerability. It takes some openness. It takes making sure that there's no surprises. And it takes really being willing to treat them like someone you want to engage with in more of that thought partnership way.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The number one piece of advice I can give founders is around managing their boards is don't surprise anybody. Just no surprises. Even good surprises erode trust. I've seen situations where you walk up a couple months later and you've been engaged with them. You've been talking about other things and then they pop up with this, hey, we've actually like beat these revenue targets by this massive amount. And you're kind of like, whoa, how'd that happen? Because we were still wrong about something. So it's worth reflecting on why we weren't correct. Even if it's a good thing, you always want to know why, why, why, why, why, why, right? So no surprises. That's kind of number one. Board members don't really like feeling like they're being corralled. So board members don't like the sense of being kind of like led around by a bridle. And yet we have to be to a large extent. That's a little bit of the dichotomy that founders face dealing with their boards. But I think when this is done well for the board member, it feels like you have the space to think, to collaborate, to contribute, more like improv. If you want to compare this to different kinds of bands, right? It's more like jazz, less like orchestra. When it's not done well, you feel like you're on an amusement park ride and you really kind of have no control over what's going on.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To really weigh in on and agree to, but I would argue that those are fairly rare things. For the most part, the job is mentoring, coaching guidance, challenging posing questions, and again, taking that kind of Socratic method.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's funny as an operator, many senior operators will tell you that they all have this similar experience, which is you're into being with a team, you make an offhand comment, you come back with this team like a month later, and you find out that they've been busy like off doing some crazy thing because of this comment you made, because they took it as direction, right? They took it as gospel. And so at some point in your career as an operator, as you go through this, you kind of learn, oh, I've got to be cautious about being clear when I'm actually giving strong guidance or I'm making a decision versus when I'm just showing curiosity. And one of the things I got very used to as an operating leader that I'm accustomed to is a board member is posing these questions and being really clear like, I am just curious. I don't know this is the right thing to do or not, but I'm curious about the following thing. And let them take that ownership from that point and sort out whether or not it makes any sense or not. There are occasionally times as a senior operator that you are making decisions. It is ultimately accountable. And it is a board member. There are times when there are things that the board has”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Help them sort out their own thinking, not impose your own. It's leading without authority and it's leading through mentorship is sort of the mentality.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's a lot like senior management roles in a way. If I ran 8,000 person division at SAP, a couple thousand people at Dropbox, a couple thousand people at Microsoft, lots of different products, lots of different efforts. You can't be super hands-on on all that stuff, right? It just doesn't scale. So you're not day-to-day involved with these teams. So you have limited interactions. You don't have all the information. So the question is, how do you be helpful? How do you help make sure that they're heading the right direction? How do you help guide them and provide them value? Connecting the dots, guiding decisions, helping them hire. These are all kind of the obvious things. But what I think that I've tried to do more of is what I sort of think of as the Socratic method. Ask questions. Recognize that I don't have the answers. It's up to these leaders and these teams to find those answers. But I've seen a lot of these movies before. If it comes to a team that wants to start building a self-service experience, I've seen that movie a couple of times before. And I can ask the protagonist in this new movie, right? The founders, the leadership teams of these companies I'm working with, how they're thinking about the challenges that are in front of them. Our job is really to help them find their answers by being a focusing factor.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Just now seeing a massive kind of growth unlock, or is it really a different behavior? And if it's a different behavior that's new, why? And is it going to survive the moment when people are let loose again, when people are interacting in a more normal way in their day-to-day lives, and when people go back to work, which by the way, they will not do five days a week.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A call tree, I end up with a human being. They send me up on a schedule four weeks from now. I drive to the place. I sit in the lobby with a bunch of sick people for 40 minutes because, of course, none of these things are ever run on time. I then go to see the doctor for seven minutes. I then leave. So I've burnt like two hours of my time. I've exposed myself to a bunch of sick people. And by the way, it all happened four weeks after I had the initial concern. Nobody's going back to that world. So that is an example. And it's not that telemedicine did not exist before March, you know, whatever it was, 12th or 13th. It's simply that it was not taking traction because people didn't understand. They didn't understand that there was a better way. They didn't see it. It was not such a frequent enough engagement that they really shifted en masse to a different way of working. And it's true in all sorts of walks of life, you know, the consumer space as well. I mean, my grandmother, bless her, she calls me and she's like, did you know they'll deliver groceries to you? And I'm like, yes, grandma. They've been doing that for a while. So, you know, it really takes these moments to kind of help shape and change people's behaviors. But you have to kind of look deeply at it and understand, is this something that was happening anyway?”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that one of the things you can look at is there are evidence of something working before the pandemic hit to distinguish between are we looking at acceleration because of the forced onboarding or are we looking at something that has been created just during this environment? So I'll give you an example. In the healthcare industry, one of the things we've observed is that telemedicine's been taken off like crazy, right? And you may know that we're the largest shareholders in Lavongo. Lavongo is merging now with Teledoc, and there's like a whole thesis behind that. And you could say, okay, is that just a pandemic thing, or is it actually more of an acceleration of something that already was coming into its own? And we really believe in the latter. After we've now taught everybody that to go to the doctor, what you do is you get out your phone and the app or you go to a website, you log in with your provider, and you telemedicine somebody in a couple of hours. And if you really need to be hands-on with somebody, then they'll bring you in and get you an appointment, et cetera. After we've been onboarded that experience, nobody's going to go back to the old way. Like the old way of I pick up the phone. I punch a lot of buttons to go through.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. Yeah. I mean, so there's so many things throughout history where there was an attempt made, but somehow it didn't work. And that timing is a combination of there's actually was engineering risk or there was business model, right? Or union economic risk that no one actually understood at the time. And so the business tripped on those speed bumps. Or the world just wasn't really ready for it. And that's kind of really interesting today because”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's right. So for kernel, what we had to evaluate was the key questions really were is it science or is engineering? That actually was a very important question because we're not that interested in investing in science because we don't know how that's going to turn out. I am interested in investing in engineering. That we can sort of discern. Is a science understood as just a bunch of hard engineering problems? And that's what Kernel really was. Is there a market to support it? And is there a latent demand for capability that something creates, in this case, understanding the mind really creates? And are there new markets that can be created around this unlock? And then finally, of course, is the team, the team to go do it. In this case, Brian, was he the founder to go take this on? And as we went through our due diligences, we got to know the company. Obviously, we assessed all those risks, right? But ultimately, the timing is difficult. There are lots of things littered in history which were the thing before, but that somehow got the timing wrong and died. Food delivery was not a new concept. We had that back in the dot-com era.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, we can use kernel as an example, right? I think you have to really deeply understand how the market's going to unfold and have conviction that the need is really there and latent in the world, even if it's not well understood or well codified as an existing market that Gartner talk about, for example, right?”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the same thing will come for the brain. So I do believe that there are some things that are truly venture capital in the sense of it's unknown how this is going to play out, which is a little bit different than other work that we do, which is, you said, is a little bit more incremental. But it's still important, right? You invest in something that is a smarter, faster way of doing a thing we already understand. And I'm not going to pick on any particular examples, right? But we all kind of know what they are, right? It's the cloud version of this, or it's the AI-enabled version of that. They're still important. Why? Because you have to better outcomes. It's more fulfilling work for the people around it. You get better agility for business. You have more room to innovate. And it's what I took away a little bit from my work in the database business. The adoption of better tooling creates room for opportunity creation for innovation by those who are using it. It makes creative possible and feasible. And that's super important still. So while we kind of look at some of these investments as, yeah, it's good, there'll be good business, it's a good outcome, but did it really like rearrange the world? Some of the answers, well, didn't really rearrange the world except that it made all this room for new creative.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Speaking of kernel, it's worth pausing on that for a second. Kernel is truly venture capital, right? In the sense that the market that makes it really interesting, not only as an investment, but as an impact or a species, come as it creates that market. Ultimately, venture capital, we get paid to underwrite risk. Otherwise, we'd be retail stock traders, I guess. And the risks are different, different stages. For something like Kernel, the insight that Brian had around we do not really understand the brain. And I mean that in really both senses. As an organ, we don't understand it as an organ, like physically. Like if some harm comes to it, we don't really understand it physically and we don't understand it as a collection of software. We understand neither of these things very well. But what if we knew how the brain actually worked? And what if you could understand how the software was running? Imagine what you could do, right? You could manage your emotions better. You could learn better. You could develop better. You could recover better. Like all this unlock can happen as big as an opportunity as in genomics, right? When we started to understand genes, to this day, we're still learning how to take advantage of that knowledge day to day in the medical industry, in the medical research industry.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a question that's actually relevant in the operating arena as well. How do you feather that throttle on being involved and being super hands-on versus like mentoring, guiding, coaching, et cetera? I think a lot of it has to do with understanding what the outcomes are really looking for are. And if you believe that a person or team really understands the outcomes that you're after and they just need a little help with a system put in place to help push that forward, then you can very often let go. I mean, I've been in situations where I've set up a way of engaging on a problem and being very hands-on in the beginning, every meeting, every discussion, right? helping like set the framework, do the math, whatever it is, but then over the course of a number of weeks just slowly letting go. You give more and more room to the people who are picking up the mantle. And very often you can find yourself working your way out of being relevant in a lot of these engagements. Which is good.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a great question. And Kamir is a uniqueish example in the sense that Kamir is a company that Hamanth and I started within General Catalyst. It's a quote, what we call Hatch, right? It's an incubation from within the firm. And so there's typically a little bit more hands-on in those scenarios. But this comment applies really to everybody. Like, do they need a thought partner, a coach, a guide, or do they need someone to roll up their sleeves and help them do some of the digging? At any given time, there's a couple of companies I'm working pretty closely with. I'm working on customer development or I'm helping guide product and technical strategy or I'm helping doing hiring, right? And it's just what they need. And I'm fortunate to have the experience to be helpful, so I'm privileged enough to be able to dive in. And I actually see being asked to help as a sign of this ultimate trust and partnership. And it's very fulfilling when you can do it, but you have to kind of really know when to let go, right? Ultimately, again, it's their company, it's their decisions to make. So I sort of tuned into, are they looking for advice or do they really need someone to pick up a shovel and help out?”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm just super lucky, right? I'm fortunate to have known people like John Lilly or Bill Corrin who'd been operators, who then joined Venture and get some perspective in mentoring from them. And Ken, here's what I distilled. The two spots are kind of six months in and two years in. At the six-month-in markets, kind of, what am I doing exactly? Especially for a lot of people that come into Venture, they show up for their first Monday or whatever, and they literally have nothing to do. There's no portfolio. There's no deal you're already pursuing. Like it's kind of strange to go from operating roles where 30 hours of your week is programmatic. It's managing the system and operating the system. It's like this regular.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time, but we've also found ways to actually sit down in person with some of the founders, right? We can do that in the backyard for doing kernel. I drove down to LA. I'm actually leaving tonight to go back down to LA to spend some time with them. And so we have found some ways to cover them.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Using the phone more than I did before this whole thing started. And it's because something about Zoom, while you get some visual cues, it also kind of creates this sense of like we have to be like working on this topic and whatever. Yeah. And something about being on the phone puts people more concentrated, more focused on that person in a way and what they're saying. I actually find it to be a little bit more intimate. So as soon as I'm comfortable with people, I start to try to, hey, can we just take this as a phone call? Can we take this as a phone call? Can we do this later? Can we do it at like five or six knowing that maybe it could bleed over a little bit? And so let's just get through whatever we need to talk about, but then be like, tell me more about where you live and like what are you looking at as you're sitting down taking this phone call? It lets you start to get a little bit of sense of who people are. I've done seven or eight investments, I guess, since I started four or five of those or during the pandemic, right? That ballpark. And I've done three or four of these now without ever meeting the founder. And it's easier at earlier stages because stakes are different, right? And you can get a lot of that.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a tough one. I think the pandemic has really changed a little bit about the cadence that we're in. If you think about the way things used to be, we get in touch with someone, we'd have them come by the office, we spent a little time, we'd get interested, we schedule another meeting, maybe we go to their site, right? Maybe we go to their offices. It takes a little time to schedule, maybe bring a partner, so there's like kind of a multi-body scheduling problem. You get more interested. You want to spend more time. Maybe you have dinner. Like this whole thing would take weeks and weeks and weeks. And you have a lot of these in-person encounters along the way to sort of build that trust. With a pandemic going on and everyone kind of sheltering in place still and travel not really being a norm and whatever, you have to kind of rethink a lot of this, right? So you have to think about how do I get enough just one-on-one time with that founder because the little moments have been robbed, right? Like they greet you down the lobby of their building and your 10 minutes early for a meeting. You're sitting there. You're kind of getting to know them, right? Before the meeting content starts, right? So how do you create those moments? And I think one of the things that I've learned to do is use the phone more. I am.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be partners to their founders and so builders. That was important to me as an exoperator. So GC just felt very much right.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm very fortunate. I had options, and Joan Callas felt really right. Part of it's a little bit unfair. I had been working with them 2016, 2017, spent a lot of time with them. Himathai hash a company together in the healthcare space, Steve Hared and I worked on a deal together. So I knew that team pretty well. But like I say, I had options and my calculation was basically the following. I was looking for a firm on the rise. And if you look at General Catal's book, Lavango, Stripe, BCommerce, Samsara, Gusto, Oscar, Lemonade, Anderol, Plied Intuition, Canva, Grammarly, I mean, do I have to go on? Like, it is clear it is affirmed that in the last several years, let's call it like between now and the past five years or so, has really come into its own in terms of making great, great investments, great bets. And has real leaders in the industry, right? Joel Cutler, David Fialco, these amazingly humble, high-value human beings that founded, of course, General Catalyst, Himontanaja, one of the very best now in the game really coming into his own. And I knew them well. And the final thing really was about culture and what they stand for and this notion of responsible innovation really wanted to.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can actually learn to create good systems that function and operate them. But to lead, that takes practice. And it takes hours and hours and years and years and people and people and people.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It can be learned I definitely think it can be learned. I think that most things can be learned. I think there is some, like I'll give you an example. If you put me from a piano and told me to do something interesting, I would struggle. My brain is not naturally wired to do it. Now, is that because of some innate thing or is it because I wasn't exposed to the right kind of neural network development when I was young enough or what? I don't really know. But I do believe that most skills can be learned. And if you think about leadership and management, that followership is park charisma, it's part having the ability to communicate and communicate an aspirational vision. By the way, that doesn't come in real time. It doesn't come just because people are talking. It takes deep thought, takes quiet thought to sort of understand where to go, but then to be able to communicate it and to be able to get people to trust you. These are skills that can be developed, but it definitely takes time, takes practice. And management is definitely something that more can be taught, like at school. You know what I mean? Like, there's books to read, there's techniques to put in play, there's things that work for people. You can go learn those things. It's much more of a book learning exercise.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it's pretty simple. Leadership is about followership. Leadership is really about if there comes a moment when a group of people need to head in some direction. Do you have the followership to lead those people to literally guide those people in that direction, push in that direction? Management is about all the stuff that it takes to have a function cohesive system of people. And ultimately, so the very best people that I've worked with over the years, that includes Gates, it includes McDermott, it includes Satya, it includes so many people are both great leaders and great managers. And yeah, they spike a little bit one or the other, but saying that direction, getting the followership versus just setting up a system that is capable of doing great work is also a different discipline, different art.”
2020-12-28 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Difference Between Leadership and Management & How Fundraising Changes In A COVID World with Quentin Clark, Managing Director @ General Catalyst · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source