| We're a couple weeks away from our Financing the AI Revolution event. Join us on the afternoon of April 28 for debates and discussions with investment leaders from General Catalyst, KKR, Benchmark and Goldman Sachs about the future of data centers, chips and AI apps. You can find more details here and purchase tickets here. Space is limited.
Welcome back! Venture capitalists typically aren't macroeconomic or geopolitical experts, despite what you may read on X or hear on podcasts. But they do need to have a sufficient worldview to understand where markets are growing, where to put investment dollars and how to raise money. In that way, it's become clear that General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja was onto something as the U.S. and China face off in a trade war. In recent years, General Catalyst started to invest its growing pile of money in industries like energy, defense and industrial technology that the U.S. and Europe would need to expand domestically as they confronted China. Taneja has branded this investment ethos "global resilience," which seems more fitting for a think tank. (It's also not exactly American dynamism, the Andreessen Horowitz slogan fit for a bumper sticker—or a MAGA hat.) The current policy picture, in a way, supports a shift in thinking that Taneja saw coming—that companies need to depend less on growing their businesses in other countries. "Businesses are being forced to be more insular into the core markets that they are based," he told me in a recent interview. But Taneja isn't taking a victory lap. The more insular shift also undercuts a core premise that has been driving venture capital firms—that their investments would seed corporate growth around the world, creating scale and increasing profits, as well as spreading the influence of American business leadership. "The worry I have is [that] at the end of the day, American companies create American prosperity because they are well positioned to win globally," Taneja said. "And will this disadvantage them in the long term to be global market leaders?" "That's the unknown to me," he added. Many of the startup investments that made Taneja's career, for example, trace their successes around the globe. There is Stripe, the global payments provider founded by two Irish brothers in San Francisco. Samsara has used a global supply chain in China and Taiwan to create a publicly held "internet of things" business. And Snap counted on global expansion (and money from Tencent) to fan out its app around the globe. Taneja said he wished the Trump administration had taken a more nuanced approach to trade policy. He would have preferred export controls on technologies important to national security, like advanced chips, but then "let globalization play out" with other goods. "I was a fan of reglobalize the world to accelerate America's leadership. And I think we're in some ways kind of deglobalizing the world," he said. (We spoke Friday, before Trump announced a pause on some tariff hikes.) However, Taneja tends to lean toward political neutrality. "I'm not going to judge the [Trump administration's] thesis. There's a method to the madness" of Trump's policies, he said. I wondered what Taneja, who moved with his family from India to Boston in high school, thought on a personal level. Doesn't his own life story contradict Trump's push against American elite universities, immigration and globalization? "I was an immigrant. We moved here, lived in somebody's basement, and the American education system created an opportunity for me, allowed me to become an entrepreneur and do business globally," he said. Then he deadpanned: "What part of that is changing? I'm not sure what you're talking about." He added: "All of that is changing. I feel like we're trying to change everything. And I'm not even passing judgment on it. I'm just saying the conditions that we created to have America win—at least, if I'm a data point of that sort of success—are changing." | 
0 comentários:
Postar um comentário