Taneja: VC expansion requires relocating existing partners over hiring local networks
Hemant Taneja · 20VC: General Catalyst's Hemant Taneja on Why We Are In A Golden Age For VC, Why Pro-Rata Is A Lazy Posture and Why He Does Not Focus On Price · Jun 18, 2018 · at 6:58
Hemant Taneja, Managing Director at General Catalyst, explains how the firm avoided past failures of East Coast VC firms expanding to Silicon Valley.
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“Everybody would try to find a couple of emerging investors on the West Coast that were well-connected and give them a little bit of latitude to try to build a practice. And we decided that was not what we're going to do just given the failure of that approach. Instead, what we decided was we will take myself and others from the team and ship them out so that we can replicate our culture and the trust on both coasts would be at the same level because I'd already been with the firm for almost a decade. So replicating culture and trust versus trying to buy network and connectivity was a core insight that we operated from.”
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