The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 104 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 6 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Stebbings: Mercor Crosses $2B ARR and Raises at $20B Valuation
“I'm an investor in McCaw. I never thought this would be as big as it has got as quickly as hit, as it has done. It's crossing out two, two and a half billion ARR. They're doing a new round led by General Catalyst at twenty billion.”
Randle: Capital deployment velocity drives promotions at mega funds like General Catalyst
“If you were to say, well, our GC or Lightspeed or some of these mega funds is the strategy investment velocity as a north star. To answer that question, I would have you go talk to the principals, the junior partners and the associates at those firms. You inte…”
Taneja: Stripe will become a $1 trillion company in 10 years
“I think Stripe's gonna be a trillion dollar company. He's gotta give it 10 years, you know, so I'm, we're, it's a compounding business that, you know, Patrick and John always say infrastructure is hard, but it also compounds, and they're sort of steadily just …”
Taneja: Exercising default pro-rata in follow-ons is a lazy posture
“And my general posture is that when you're looking at a follow-on investment in a company, you should either have the bias to do more than your parata, or you should have a bias to do less than your parata for whatever the reasons are. I think parata is a lazy…”
Stebbings: VC Winners Will Be Mega-Platforms or Specialized Boutiques
“To me, I think it's like a specialization in leadership that's kind of correlated to actually the winners and losers in venture in the next 10 years, and I think the winners are Walmart, which is your mega platforms, it's your Thrive, it's your Lightspeed, it'…”
Stebbings: Top mega-fund partners will make over $1B in distributions
“Well, I think if you are one of the top one to three carry participants in one of the large mega platforms, be it Andreessen, be it Thrive, be it GC, I would argue that you will have more than that in distributions in the next few decades.”
Taneja: Current tech shift is as consequential as electricity 100 years ago
“Cause I do think we are building the future. It's an amazing time. We will shape what this You know, society is going to look like for probably a hundred years. I mean, this shift is as big as what electricity was, you know, a hundred, 150 years ago.”
General Catalyst will cap venture fund sizes to preserve elite performance
“So what we have done is if you look at our overall you know, assets under management, we've basically said we're not gonna make our venture funds bigger. What we're going to do is actually keep the size of the venture fund where we think it can be to create el…”
Taneja: Offshored labor will be brought onshore via AI productivity
“Our whole thesis around AI rollups was everywhere you offshored for labor benefit, you're going to onshore for AI productivity.”
Taneja: Mid-growth tech companies are trapped between venture capital and IPOs
“And then there is the, as I said, this bloated, set of companies that are good companies, that'll compound at 20, 25%, maybe, maybe forever, that have no access to public market because they're too small. They're not a billion dollar company growing 30% a year…”
Taneja: VC win rate above 30% signals proper deal competition
“If I'm not losing, I'm not winning. Because the very best founders go meet all the five to seven great firms and they pick one. So theoretically, your win rate, as long as it's over, over 30%, you're actually maybe in the right fight.”
General Catalyst's top early fund expected to return 13x to 15x
“Yeah, that fund is one of our Two or three best funds, and just to tell you what was in it was Livongo was in that, Snap was in that, Circle was in that, Gusto I think I'm missing a few others. It's probably gonna end up being a, you know, 13 to 15 X fund.”
Taneja: General Catalyst regrets passing on OpenAI over corporate structure concerns
“I look, that structure, many people overthought it, and I overthought it as well, and there's a lot going on on that platform that's changing the world, and I don't have a front row seat. So, yeah, I do regret that a little bit.”
Taneja: General Catalyst will participate in products expanding retail tech access
“So I fully expect That you will start seeing products that give retail access to the best companies in in technology, and we will definitely engage in that because it's the right thing to do.”
Taneja: General Catalyst will evolve into a strategic conglomerate for founders
“I think GC you know, is gonna look like the most diversified solutions for founders to build enduring companies. That's the lens which would justify everything that's on it, and if you looked at it, GC as a business is gonna feel like a strategic conglomerate,…”
General Catalyst reinvests all management fees instead of distributing them
“By the way, we, we're not, just to say, like, in our business, we don't distribute any fees. We invest everything back in the business, and that's a deep belief that we don't want to be in the game where the partners of the funds at General Catalyst Want bigge…”
Owning 10% of a $20B Company Returns 0.2x for a $7B Fund
“If you're a GC, their last fundraiser, seven billion, say you own 10% of a Figma, which is a generational company, two billion, you know, they're going to take 20% of that. I mean, you've returned what? Point zero point two X. You need 15 Figma's.”
Akhund: Multi-stage venture capital funds will inevitably go public
“It seems inevitable that a few of these multi-stage funds will IPO and be public companies, right? Like we had some stuff about GC doing it. Yeah. I think that's just going to happen.”
Fialkow: Founders should ignore TAM and CAC/LTV in early pitches
“So the first thing I would say is forget about markets. Forget about TAM. Forget about CAC LTV. Forget about all the things you think traditional people are going to ask you. Paint a picture for me. What do you want to build?”
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.”
Elad Gil: SoftBank Has Had the Greatest Impact of All VC Mega Funds
“I think that the sort of mega fund that's mattered the most in terms of impact is probably SoftBank, Simply because at a hundred billion dollars, SoftBank is the equivalent of a hundred general catalysts or 12 Sequoia funds. So just the sheer scale of capital …”
Taneja: Price sensitivity is an excuse for missing out on great companies
“Price is an excuse that makes you rationalize not getting into great companies in my experience.”
Taneja: Tech VC is a decade into a 30-year golden age
“I think we're in the golden age of venture capital, and we're probably a decade into a 30 year secular shift as opposed to being in another cycle.”
Altman: Mid-sized $700M VC funds face severe structural challenges
“I think it's really challenging to be like a seven hundred million dollar fund. Now I think you're either a really massive, powerful platform like an Andreessen or a GC Or you just have the legacy cachet, like a Sequoia or a Kleiner, or you have to be a boutiq…”
Stebbings: Coatue has raised $3B in retail venture funds
“We've got Code Two with three billion dollars now in retail funds, and we're seeing GC be very aggressive in opening up retail funds.”
Taneja: General Catalyst loses right to exist without early-stage excellence
“But if we don't do early stage investing well, we will lose the right to exist, and we're paranoid about that.”
General Catalyst missed $1B in returns by not doubling down on a decacorn
“We have a company that's, you know, a Decacorn now and actually called the investor who led it at GC saying congratulations. You're gonna make over a billion dollars on this investment. And you're an idiot because you gave up not making the second billion. You…”
Taneja: General Catalyst has invested $1B across funds into Stripe
“Stripe. You know, it's about a billion dollars.”
Taneja: General Catalyst will hold Stripe for 25 years
“You know, we'll, we'll have a 25 year kind of hold probably on, on Stripe in some form or the other.”
Taneja: General Catalyst expects to invest $300B-$500B over 20 years
“Over the next 20 years, if I look at GC, we'll probably invest, what, 300,000,000,500 billion dollars into the world sort of helping shape what AI does for society.”
Taneja: Technical debt in AI now accumulates in one year, not ten
“Even though technical debt used to be on the order of a decade of coding, not a year of coding, can you actually overcome that and make sure you remain well positioned on the new sort of technology stacks or not?”
Taneja: Venture firms scale capital to double down on winning companies
“If you're in the best companies, You really should be buying into them constantly. In fact, that's the reason to scale capital. The reason to scale capital isn't, ah, to be a low margin business, it's because you want to have capital for the very best ones and…”
Taneja: Newer AI model capabilities outweigh a year of GTM head start
“So the go to market advantage you may have created in a year having started on GPT versus five might be anemic compared to the technology advantage that you have. If you start in the GPT five or the choices you make and how fast you can move because the models…”
Taneja: General Catalyst's best returns come from seeding and creating companies
“I mean, look, our best returns have come from seeding companies like Stripe and Andurl or Creating companies like Kayak and Livongo and Camille and others, and so.”
Taneja: Iconic VC firms require leaders to be both investors and CEOs
“I carry the title of CEO and managing director for a very intentional reason, which is General Catalyst is a business but it wouldn't be a business if it wasn't venture capital at its core. So, I am a managing director and a partner just like everybody else in…”
Taneja: Stripe remains General Catalyst's best-performing investment of all time
“I think you would have to give that to Stripe still.”
Kanji: VC Employees Optimize for Fast Markups Over Real Returns
“If you're the general employee, you optimize for getting to the next career ladder, and how do you show that you can get to the next career ladder? You do a deal, and then General Catalyst, or Index, or Kleiner, or Sequoia, or Andreessen, I mean, there are so …”
Kaden: General Catalyst bought a hospital system to expand its platform
“You see that with General Catalyst buying a hospital system, right?”
General Catalyst and True Ventures accept pre-seed terms set by Besvinick
“In fact, I've had general catalyst, true ventures, tribe, lower carbon that have come in after me after I've said yes and have not altered the terms of those rounds.”
Fialkow: Co-founders must prioritize business needs over protecting their friendship
“Most people who start business with their friends, I think, can make a mistake. They say, let the business never get in the way of the friendship. We said the exact opposite. Let the friendship never get in the way of business.”
Fialkow: Great early-stage startup teams operate like cults
“Great early stage companies are like cults. They all believe, they believe with a capital B.”
Fialkow: Great founders do not need to be well-rounded
“Building a business is not like playing tennis. To be a tennis player, you have to learn how to head back in. You can't get away with it. Business is not like that. You don't have to be well-rounded. I mean, obviously, I'm a good example of that, right? What y…”
Andreessen: General Catalyst Is Built to Potentially Go Public
“He's certainly building a firm that could go public.”
General Catalyst acquired three seed funds to maintain early-stage focus
“And if you think about the last two years, you know, bringing on Jeanette and La Familia, Yuri and Wayfinder and Neeraj and Venture Highway, we've tried to really make sure at our core, we remain very Committed to doing the seed work with the same intensity an…”
General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund backs profitable, moderate-growth SaaS startups
“And that's where we actually, you know have also sort of made sure our customer value fund supports those types of founders as well. We obviously want to support the fastest growing companies in venture, but also the ones that are fundamentally good businesses…”
General Catalyst claims unique portfolio of US, European, and Indian defense primes
“I think we're the only firm that's invested in a defense prime in US, Europe, and India. We did Andrel, we did, you know, invested in Helsing, and we invested in a company called Rafi in India.”