WATCH TERMINAL VALUE

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 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.”

“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.”

“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.”