BUILD CULTURE

“I deeply care about making sure we're kind. One of the things I write about in this review is that kindness and ambition are not at odds with each other. I think in Silicon Valley, we try to glorify the asshole symptom of founders, thinking that's almost a necessary ingredient to succeed, and I don't think it has to be that way. And so we're creating a culture where we can have a team where everybody feels like they're doing their life's work.”

“I think that culture actually might be the most important bottleneck of all time.”

“When we talk about the different pieces that we have in our business, they all come together towards that true north of meeting founders where they are, helping them build power law companies, and then do it in a way that creates an inclusive world. We have our creation strategy... all the AI roll-ups you've heard of, a lot of the hands-on building work gets done in the creation strategy. I view us as just another startup that's trying to be an important institution in this next phase.”

“The fastest way to build an unforgettable personal brand isn't creating more content. It's creating more presence. And the highest leveraged form of presence is speaking. Am I speaking? I do not mean by creating video content. I mean speaking live either on camera or directly to an audience full of people. Your post can get you known. But your speaking voice, the way you show up when there's nowhere to hide, that's what makes people trust you. Your voice creates presence. Presence leads to trust.”

“To be any type of professional athlete, that's a very selfish endeavor, you can still love and care for other people. But to be one of the best in the world, you have to really sacrifice a lot of things. And she was bearing, I guess, the burden of that in our business, in our relationship. And she just said, hey, I don't know if this is the best decision for us moving forward if you continue to chase this dream of making the CrossFit Games. I'd just spent four years trying to build there... it made me reevaluate one of my priorities.”

“The commitment that Nersh and I made was to invest $5 billion over the next five years in India's resilience opportunity. And that's where we're working on building a hospital chain in India. We've got defense. We're working on manufacturing. We're in companies, great companies like Zepto, which is sort of the e-commerce infrastructure. Look, India's got a tremendous opportunity out of it, and it is a very entrepreneurial country.”

“One of the hot topics around Silicon Valley is General Catalyst's potentially rumored IPO. Do you have any comment on this? HT: We're not going public. Molly: You're not going public? HT: No, I've said it many times. Molly: Why do people think that? HT: I don't know.”

“Wherever there are some unique context feedback loops that are missing today, that's where you probably have the biggest bottlenecks”

“throwing more compute at the problem is probably having, yeah, super exponential gains right now per iteration.”

“the way we solve that at Periodic was, you know, set up a physical lab with robots doing all that.”

“It's something that we've always valued the quality over the quantity. And there's this saying that you can have control, or you can have growth, but you can't necessarily have both. And that's something I'm still grappling with, of how much control do you have? How much do you delegate and trust your team members? And I guess like, yeah, we're still learning that every day. And we're taking steps to build a team like you've got here at BPN to help you run this business, where right now me and Matty are very hands-on. But we understand if we want to grow, we can't always have a finger on the pulse.”

“How much are the models going to do versus what a big part of the Valley startups have been traditionally, which is enterprise infrastructure? The model is going to gobble up a lot of those capabilities. And so I think when you fast forward, it's a lot clearer. Way in the end, the founders have led us is a pretty interesting stack that becomes the next generation AI native stack for how we're going to diffuse intelligence.”

“I deeply care about making sure we're kind. One of the things I write about in this review is that kindness and ambition are not at odds with each other. I think in Silicon Valley, we try to glorify the asshole symptom of founders, thinking that's almost a necessary ingredient to succeed, and I don't think it has to be that way. And so we're creating a culture where we can have a team where everybody feels like they're doing their life's work.”

“One of the hot topics around Silicon Valley is General Catalyst's potentially rumored IPO. Do you have any comment on this? HT: We're not going public. Molly: You're not going public? HT: No, I've said it many times. Molly: Why do people think that? HT: I don't know.”

“How much are the models going to do versus what a big part of the Valley startups have been traditionally, which is enterprise infrastructure? The model is going to gobble up a lot of those capabilities. And so I think when you fast forward, it's a lot clearer. Way in the end, the founders have led us is a pretty interesting stack that becomes the next generation AI native stack for how we're going to diffuse intelligence.”

“As you rise in leadership, your responsibilities increase as your rights decrease. A leader must give up to go up. And I thought a lot about that over the years because a lot of athletes, founders, business owners, people who are striving towards achievement and success, that is guided by purpose, it can become a very lonely journey. The heart of good leadership is sacrifice, not personal gain. I think a lot of people think that being a leader comes with all this personal guaranteed success... it's more gain. But no, it's actually at the heart of good leadership, it's sacrifice, it's giving up more, not gain.”

“When we buy a hospital, if you go to Summa today in Akron, Ohio, we have seven of our companies and the Percepta team and our own investment team that's literally there all the time trying to figure out how to take this community hospital... to become an AI-native hospital, to drive abundance, to actually be economically viable so that we can take care of that community where it's been for over 100 years. If that's not the way to create the best enterprise value in our companies, I don't know what is.”

“If you look at Anthropic, adding $10 billion of revenue a month, when was the last time our industry was dealing with that? Or if you look at NVIDIA adding $1 trillion of market cap in 100 days... We're going to have companies that are routinely $1 trillion companies. The natural gravitational pull is that a lot of that scale is going to get concentrated in a handful of companies. At General Catalyst, we don't believe that's ultimately what's going to create the most inclusive world.”

“In the world of AI today, where code is self-writing, to say that a piece of software in a company that has been existing, let's say five years, the free cash flow on that is worth 30 times, means you're going to have 30 years of generating that free cash flow. How can you ever make that assumption when technology is changing so fast? When you start saying these existing pieces of software are not going to be worth that much, then that exit math of terminal value as the way to make an investment and make money completely goes away.”

“In the world of AI today, where code is self-writing, to say that a piece of software in a company that has been existing, let's say five years, the free cash flow on that is worth 30 times, means you're going to have 30 years of generating that free cash flow. How can you ever make that assumption when technology is changing so fast? When you start saying these existing pieces of software are not going to be worth that much, then that exit math of terminal value as the way to make an investment and make money completely goes away.”

“When we talk about the different pieces that we have in our business, they all come together towards that true north of meeting founders where they are, helping them build power law companies, and then do it in a way that creates an inclusive world. We have our creation strategy... all the AI roll-ups you've heard of, a lot of the hands-on building work gets done in the creation strategy. I view us as just another startup that's trying to be an important institution in this next phase.”

“The commitment that Nersh and I made was to invest $5 billion over the next five years in India's resilience opportunity. And that's where we're working on building a hospital chain in India. We've got defense. We're working on manufacturing. We're in companies, great companies like Zepto, which is sort of the e-commerce infrastructure. Look, India's got a tremendous opportunity out of it, and it is a very entrepreneurial country.”

“The main reason we haven't franchised, opened multiple facilities when potentially the demand was there, is because bigger is not always better, and it's hard to find good people who are brought into the vision, who are committed to it, and who have more of an owner's mentality rather than a renter's mentality. And finding those people are hard, but when you find them, you've got to hold on to them with everything you got. We keep our team pretty small, keep our circle small, but we've now got a group that are basically your best friends.”

“they were just missing a lot of the the physics and chemistry data you need to reason about the physical world.”

“If you look at Anthropic, adding $10 billion of revenue a month, when was the last time our industry was dealing with that? Or if you look at NVIDIA adding $1 trillion of market cap in 100 days... We're going to have companies that are routinely $1 trillion companies. The natural gravitational pull is that a lot of that scale is going to get concentrated in a handful of companies. At General Catalyst, we don't believe that's ultimately what's going to create the most inclusive world.”

“When we buy a hospital, if you go to Summa today in Akron, Ohio, we have seven of our companies and the Percepta team and our own investment team that's literally there all the time trying to figure out how to take this community hospital... to become an AI-native hospital, to drive abundance, to actually be economically viable so that we can take care of that community where it's been for over 100 years. If that's not the way to create the best enterprise value in our companies, I don't know what is.”

“The only reason you're able to achieve some sort of level of success is the commitment and consistency. And just because of when you finally do achieve some sort of win, it doesn't just stop. It compounds. You keep practicing those rhythms and routines because it's what works. So I find that the early days are really challenging because you're trying to build these rhythms and routines of commitment and consistency and discipline in your life. But once it becomes a rhythm, once it becomes a routine, it's just a part of everything that you do. The results, just like investing money into the stock market in a good year, produce positive returns over and over and over again.”

“We speak about the definition for us of be all in is, it's your commitment to give the best to the task at hand, but it's you define your capacity of what you're willing to give, and then you give exactly that. For me, I'm willing to train twice a day... but if I start neglecting or sacrificing other responsibilities that are above those priorities, then I'm becoming all consumed. And we speak about the difference between being all in and being all consumed. And there's been plenty of windows where I have been consumed by the task and often athletic.”