Investors are always encouraging startups to push the innovation envelope. General Catalyst\u2019s Hemant Taneja is applying that advice to his own firm.<\/p>\n
Sitting in the offices <\/strong>of General Catalyst, overlooking Oracle Park\u2014where the San Francisco Giants play\u2014and the sweeping bay stretching beyond it, CEO Hemant Taneja explains how his venture capital firm is going to transform how Americans access health care: by buying and running a hospital.<\/p>\n Last year, the firm announced its $485 million purchase of Summa Health<\/a>, an 8,000-employee hospital system based in Akron, Ohio, with the aim of plugging it into Silicon Valley\u2019s innovation engine. That means injecting tech and artificial intelligence into almost every step of the health care process, from checkups to insurance. No hospital system was going to do this on its own, so the thinking was simple: \u201cWe have to go buy one and do it ourselves,\u201d Taneja says. \u201cAnd live it.\u201d<\/p>\n CODY PICKENS for forbes<\/p>\n That ballpark view is fitting because Taneja, No. 8 on this year\u2019s Midas List, Forbes\u2019 annual ranking of America\u2019s top venture capitalists, is no stranger to proverbial big swings (even if the India-born Taneja prefers cricket). Buying a hospital is jaw-dropping for a VC. Tech investors preach disruption, but they are deeply conservative when it comes to running their own funds. Little has changed since venture\u2019s grandfather, Arthur Rock, started cutting funding checks to the likes of Intel and Apple. Entrepreneurs such as Gordon Moore and Steve Jobs might \u201cthink different,\u201d but Rock himself was a buttoned-down Harvard MBA who started his career on 1950s Wall Street.<\/p>\n General Catalyst wants to break that mold. Since 2018, it has morphed from a typical VC partnership to a multi-hyphenate investment house: There\u2019s the firm\u2019s \u201ccreation\u201d fund, which spins up new AI companies aimed at remaking dusty industries like accounting or customer service. Then there\u2019s the General Catalyst Institute, a think tank looking to shape technology policy around the world, and GC Wealth, a white-glove broker meant to woo well-heeled founders away from private banks.<\/p>\n That makes Taneja, 50, one of the champions of a new class of venture capitalist. \u201cMega funds\u201d are the sometimes-sniffy label for General Catalyst and peers like Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed and <\/strong>Thrive Capital, Josh Kushner\u2019s outfit. Managing tens of billions of dollars, they are still minnows compared to Blackstone ($1 trillion in assets) and KKR ($660 billion), but Taneja\u2019s ambition isn\u2019t to be the biggest investor. Instead, he wants General Catalyst to be a \u201cstrategic conglomerate.\u201d Says Neil Sequeira, a former General Catalyst managing director: \u201cIt\u2019s an exciting new animal.\u201d<\/p>\n Cody Pickens for Forbes<\/p>\n Midas List 2025<\/strong> Taneja has his critics, too. General Catalyst\u2019s industrial-scale investing barely resembles venture capital, some say. Others snipe, discreetly, about General Catalyst\u2019s focus shifting from generating returns from financing startups to \u201cfarming fees\u201d from ever-multiplying funds.<\/p>\n Taneja\u2019s supporters are willing to back his bold vision thanks to a near-15-year winning streak. Since moving to Silicon Valley from Boston in 2011, Taneja has backed payment giant Stripe (last valued at $91 billion), defense startup Anduril (in funding talks at a $28 billion valuation) and a string of health care unicorns like Commure (valued at $6 billion).<\/p>\n General Catalyst tapped its backers for $8 billion last year\u2014more than some Midas List veterans have raised in a lifetime, cementing its status as a venture powerhouse. Assets have ballooned to over $36 billion from $3.8 billion just 10 years ago. And the scaling is accelerating: General Catalyst, along with archrival Andreessen Horowitz, claimed around 20 cents of every dollar invested with U.S. VCs last year, according to Pitchbook data.<\/p>\n Silicon Valley gossip normally focuses on which startup will go public next, but recently chatter has circulated that General Catalyst itself will have an IPO. Taneja flatly denies the rumors. \u201cIt\u2019s not even on the agenda,\u201d he says. \u201cWe\u2019ve never discussed it.\u201d For a VC firm, Taneja has loads of money on tap, but his grand strategy may require even larger amounts. Blackstone, KKR and Apollo grew more than tenfold after going public as they used their freshly minted shares to fuel growth, fund takeovers and cash out old partners. But there\u2019s still a taboo around venture funds going public: Valley graybeards still remember dot-com bomb Internet Capital Group listing on Nasdaq in 1999. The VC shop\u2019s valuation ballooned to nearly $60 billion before plunging 99.5% in less than two years.<\/p>\n Taneja now rubs shoulders with business leaders, prime ministers and royalty (he cohosts an annual ball at new hire Jeannette zu F\u00fcrstenberg\u2019s family castle in Germany). It\u2019s a long way from the aisles of the suburban Massachusetts CVS where he worked in high school to help his parents make ends meet. When he was 15, his parents moved to Boston from New Delhi. During the recession of the early 1990s, his father wound up managing a KFC. \u201cI probably ate that almost every day,\u201d he says. \u201cI can\u2019t look at a KFC anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n After high school, he landed at MIT. He cofounded and sold a mobile software startup after graduating, landing him on the radar of General Catalyst cofounders Joel Cutler and David Fialkow in 2001. The pair were looking for a founder to kickstart new business ideas. \u201cHe was the full package. We knew early on that Hemant could be a tremendous leader,\u201d Fialkow says.<\/p>\n General Catalyst had a handful of early wins like travel booking site Kayak (which went public for $1 billion in 2012), but its East Coast base was away from the entrepreneurial center of Silicon Valley. So in 2011, the firm\u2019s founders tapped Taneja, along with a handful of other partners, to build a beachhead in Palo Alto.<\/p>\n He had his work cut out for him. Taneja\u2019s outsider status was apparent when he was elbowed out of an early Snap investment by Valley vets. His fortunes changed after an early Stripe hire sat in on a guest lecture Taneja gave at MIT and connected him with the startup\u2019s cofounder brothers, Patrick and John Collison. He first invested in 2010, then led the startup\u2019s Series B two years later. While Stripe\u2019s cofounders initially saw the company as a \u201clittle developer-oriented credit card payment thing,\u201d Taneja saw the bigger opportunity in simplifying digital transactions more generally, CEO Patrick Collison says. \u201cHe perceived more in Stripe than we did.\u201d (Taneja got into one of Snap\u2019s later rounds, too.)<\/p>\n Taneja\u2019s new path was set over a bottle of Brunello during a 2017 dinner at Vicolina, a now-shuttered Manhattan trattoria, with Ken Chenault. The former Amex CEO had just been hired as General Catalyst\u2019s chairman, partly to help manage the handover from the fund\u2019s cofounders to heir apparent Taneja. As they dined, Chenault, who was one of the first Black executives to run an S&P 500 company, leaned across the table and pressed Taneja on what he wanted his impact to be. \u201cI want to be a leader, not just in business,\u201d Chenault recalls Taneja telling him.<\/p>\n To some, General Catalyst\u2019s strategy looks like private equity with a coat of shiny AI paint.\u00a0\n<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Taneja took over as CEO in 2021 and began transforming General Catalyst from a clubby partnership into a firm that could address social problems. Goodbye to Mark Zuckerberg\u2019s motto of \u201cmove fast and break things.\u201d Hello \u201cresponsible innovation.\u201d It\u2019s not as catchy, and it hasn\u2019t always earned Taneja a warm reception from some of the Valley\u2019s loudest voices and deepest pockets. General Catalyst\u2019s advocating for guardrails on new AI systems was met with hoots of disapproval, notably from Andreessen Horowitz billionaire cofounder Marc Andreessen.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re very smart, they\u2019re very opinionated. All that is positive in my book,\u201d Taneja says of the rival firm. \u201cThey\u2019re playing a different game than us.\u201d (Behind closed doors, Andreessen and Taneja played nice when they both sat on the board of now-public logistics software company Samsara, says CEO Sanjit Biswas.)<\/p>\n Guardrails or not, AI is central to the firm\u2019s strategy of doing rollup mergers in sectors long considered too stodgy for Silicon Valley, like IT services and human resources. Buyout funds have been doing this for decades, cutting costs by moving jobs offshore. Taneja wants to use AI.<\/p>\n Last year, a General Catalyst startup called Crescendo bought PartnerHero, a $80-million-a-year call center company, and automated calls with bots, handing over only tricky cases to human workers. The result is as much as 30% savings for customers, says Crescendo CEO Matt Price. Dwelly, a London-based real estate startup cofounded by General Catalyst, bought a handful of property management companies and added AI tools for managing open houses and maintenance requests. Not only is AI cheaper, but the wait for fixes for leaky taps and other repairs is down 40% to 30 days, says Dwelly CEO Ilia Drozdov.<\/p>\n To some, the strategy looks like private equity with a coat of shiny AI paint. Taneja shrugs off the notion, saying that while private equity is more focused on cost-cutting, General Catalyst\u2019s rollups are about instilling a culture of \u201cinnovation,\u201d albeit the type that also happens to cut costs.<\/p>\n Taneja is the driving force behind these rollups, and he wants General Catalyst to cofound the firms executing them. The lodestar is Livongo, the diabetes management startup he cofounded in 2014. It went public in 2019 for $3.6 billion. That would be a home run for most investors, but Taneja was just warming up. A year later, Livongo was acquired for $18.5 billion by Teladoc, resulting in a paper gain of $3.4 billion for the fund. The outsize return was almost entirely thanks to General Catalyst\u2019s large ownership stake (18.3%) as a cofounder.<\/p>\n Still, Taneja is treading a difficult path. He needs to overcome local protests against his yet-to-close hospital takeover before turning around the $2 billion (2024 revenue) operation. And while Taneja is a savvy investor, he\u2019s by no means infallible. A series of bets on climate startups resulted in a $100 million wipeout, and health insurance claim specialist Olive, once valued at $4 billion, is a total bust. And General Catalyst ended up banking only an estimated $1.8 billion from Livongo, with Teladoc\u2019s share price crashing 97% from its peak.<\/p>\n But perhaps the biggest risk is that General Catalyst is doing too much. \u201cI get that question a lot,\u201d Taneja says. He says it\u2019s a matter of having \u201cleadership bandwidth\u201d and a good operating model, comparing the company to Amazon, which expanded from books to data centers to grocery stores to moviemaking.<\/p>\n Taneja has stretched himself to the brink in the past. At MIT, his counselor warned the triple major (computer science, biology and math)<\/strong> that he might not finish with such a demanding courseload. He not only graduated but went on to earn master\u2019s degrees in engineering and operations research <\/strong>a few years later. It\u2019s a pattern he has carried with him throughout life, Taneja says, laughing. \u201cI\u2019m always trying to do too many things at the same time,\u201d he says. \u201cI push myself to the max.\u201d<\/p>\n Forbes<\/p>\n \nMore from Forbes<\/strong>ForbesFor Midas Newcomers, VC Network Effect Led To Big GainsBy Stephen Pastis<\/a>ForbesRankIng The World\u2019s Top Venture Capitalists In 2025By Iain Martin<\/a>ForbesMeet India\u2019s Self-Made Biologics Brewmaster BillionaireBy Amy Feldman<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Investors are always encouraging startups to push the innovation envelope. General Catalyst\u2019s Hemant Taneja is applying that advice…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":146904,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3094],"tags":[51,3134,13827,63051,63169,59685,63171,63168,63170,63172,16,15,16097,3141],"class_list":{"0":"post-146903","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-entrepreneurship","10":"tag-general-catalyst","11":"tag-hemant-taneja","12":"tag-kayak","13":"tag-midas-list","14":"tag-partnerhero","15":"tag-patrick-collison","16":"tag-stripe","17":"tag-summa-health","18":"tag-uk","19":"tag-united-kingdom","20":"tag-vc","21":"tag-venture-capital"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114602720770337293","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146903\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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