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Quentin Clark

Managing Director, General Catalyst · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

investorexecutiveoperatorengineer@quentinclark ↗LinkedIn ↗

Quentin Clark is a Managing Director at General Catalyst, where he leads early-stage enterprise infrastructure and AI investments. He previously served as CTO at Dropbox, Chief Business Officer and CTO at SAP, and spent twenty years at Microsoft.

20statements → 5claims → 2claims resolved → 4.05/5average certainty → 2/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 12said about them ↓

1 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 3 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

4 predictions · 1 assertion · 2 opinions · 10 insights · 3 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertion are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 3 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Quentin argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Prediction Held up
Clark: Healthcare consumers will not return to pre-pandemic in-person visits
“After we've been on board in that experience, nobody's going back to the old way. Like the old way of, I pick up the phone. I punch a lot of buttons to go through a call tree. I finally end up with a human being. They send me up on a schedule four weeks from n…”
Quentin Clark Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 24:20 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

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
50% certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

299 words/min while actually speaking · 0 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Quentin Clark: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 29 exchanges on the produced feed is ≈4.5/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small and produced tape scores higher.

Measured by listening to 6,553 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Quentin Clark is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 2/10
pushed back at the host 1/10
setup questions received 75%

Everything Quentin Clark said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Clark: Venture capital should underwrite engineering risk, not science risk
“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.”
Quentin Clark Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 21:54 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
Prediction Held up
Clark: Healthcare consumers will not return to pre-pandemic in-person visits
“After we've been on board in that experience, nobody's going back to the old way. Like the old way of, I pick up the phone. I punch a lot of buttons to go through a call tree. I finally end up with a human being. They send me up on a schedule four weeks from n…”
Quentin Clark Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 24:20 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
Prediction Partly held up
Clark: Post-pandemic employees will spend one to two days weekly in offices
“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.”
Quentin Clark Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 31:44 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
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Clark: SAP's core ERP will outlast all software from its generation
“SAP's core ERP, I believe, is going to outlast everything of that generation”
Quentin Clark Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 33:08 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
Insight
Clark: A manager's primary job is continuously developing team capabilities
“The job as a manager is to develop The capabilities underneath you at all times.”
Quentin Clark Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 8:18 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
Insight
Clark: Management can be taught, but leadership requires real-world practice
“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 lear…”
Quentin Clark Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 10:46 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
Insight
Clark: Phone calls build more intimacy with founders than Zoom
“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,…”
Quentin Clark Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 13:25 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
Disclosure
Clark: General Catalyst closed multiple deals without meeting founders in person
“I've done seven or eight investments, I guess, since I started. Four or five of those are during the pandemic, right? That ballpark. And I've done three or four of these now without ever meeting the founder.”
Quentin Clark Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 14:05 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
Insight
Clark: Former operators face schedule shock six months into venture capital
“The two spots are kind of six months in and two years in. At the six month in mark, it's 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 t…”
Quentin Clark Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 15:06 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
Insight
Clark: Former operators in VC miss operational control after two years
“The other hump comes around two years in where most people after, you know, long operating careers, it's kind of a relief not to have to like drive and make decisions every day and be in that machine. But after a couple of years for a lot of people, that charm…”
Quentin Clark Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 16:01 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
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Clark: The neurotech market unlock will rival the scale of genomics
“When we start 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, and the same thing will come for the brain.”
Quentin Clark Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 20:03 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
Insight
Clark: Check pre-pandemic traction to identify durable consumer demand
“I think that one of the things you can look at is there 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 duri…”
Quentin Clark Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 23:32 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
Disclosure
Clark: General Catalyst is Livongo's largest shareholder during Teladoc merger
“And you may know that we're the largest shareholders in Livongo. Livongo is merging now with Teladoc, and there's like a whole thesis behind that.”
Quentin Clark Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 23:52 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
Insight
Clark: Board members should guide founders via mentorship, not authority
“Our job is really to help them find their answers by being a focusing factor, right? 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.”
Quentin Clark Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 26:46 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
Insight
Clark: Even positive unexpected surprises erode board trust
“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.”
Quentin Clark Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 28:38 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
Insight
Clark: Board management should feel like jazz improv, not an orchestra
“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.”
Quentin Clark Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 29:18 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
Opinion
Clark: Microsoft's culture was insular and disconnected before Satya Nadella
“Microsoft before Satya was a little insular. Like, we're up there in the woods in Seattle, and we didn't really kind of get down to the valley very much, right?”
Quentin Clark Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 3:22 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
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Clark: Winning a debate against Bill Gates was a Microsoft rite of passage
“And it was a rite of passage to be in a conference room with Bill and in a debate with him and win a point. Like, just to win a debate, right, was this major rite of passage.”
Quentin Clark Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 5:15 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
Disclosure
Clark: General Catalyst incubated healthcare startup Commure in-house
“Yeah, that's a great question, and Commure is a unique-ish example in the sense that Commure is a company that Hamath and I started within General Catalyst. It's a quote, what we call hatch, Right. It's an incubation from within the firm.”
Quentin Clark Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 16:58 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
Opinion
Clark: The SAP CTO title opened every door in Silicon Valley
“SAP was a great job, because everyone took the call from the CTO of SAP, right?”
Quentin Clark Dec 28, 2020 ▶ 3:54 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

The other half of the tape: Quentin Clark's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 12 times in 3 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 10Shishir Mehrotra 2

Every mention by year

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20VC: Lessons From Working with Bill Gates, How To Lead Without Authority and The Differen Dec 28, 2020 24m
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