Hemant Taneja

Second mover advantage has always been powerful. AltaVista, Google. Myspace, Facebook. AppDynamics, Datadog. OpenAI, Anthropic. We're seeing this at GC with @WeAreLegora in legal and @parloa_ai in CX. Every tech era has a different source of 2nd mover advantage. internet era = distribution and reaching users at scale. cloud era = design and building workflows that got people to use tech. Today we are in the AI era. Intelligence is an ever improving input. Do you have the right models, infra, and capability to build products that deliver what AI unlocks for customers? founders shouldn’t be afraid if someone is currently the leader. Most industries have not yet seen the dominant stack.

@ChristosTzamos Wait this is so awesome!! Both 1) the C compiler to LLM weights and 2) the logarithmic complexity hard-max attention and its potential generalizations. Inspiring!

8/ Builders in AI, consumer, healthcare, fintech, defense, and infra - DMs open. Let’s build durable companies for India and from India for the world.

7/ What’s hard to copy: global customer/intros, EU/US/India policy know‑how, creation muscle, and patience from day 0 to IPO. Single platform, many ways to help.

6/ We’re convening the India AI Champions Initiative to move from AI pilots to production - anchoring value (compute, models, jobs) in India.

5/ We’re in Delhi this month at the India AI Summit to engage directly with operators and policymakers. More soon.

4/ Focus areas where India leads: applied AI and real‑economy resilience - consumer, healthcare, defense/industrial, fintech, and critical infra.

3/ Our edge is a full stack: capital + company creation + distribution. We invest, we build, and we help unlock adoption via the transformation companies and the GC Institute.

2/ What that means: one team across US–EU–India, shared conviction and standards, and support from seed to public company.

1/ We’ve been long India. Not as a side bet - but as a core market on a single global platform.

This is not politics as usual. As investors, innovators, leaders, and citizens, we need to come together to preserve our democracy, the rights set forth in our country's Constitution, and our shared humanity. All of these serve as the foundation for our modern society, human progress, and innovation. What we are seeing in Minnesota is a threat to those core tenets and to the promise of America. Without confidence in the fundamentals -- human rights, the legal process, and the privilege and responsibility of our government and its leaders to protect all people -- the future is at stake. That impacts all of us here in the U.S., and globally.

@HipCityReg welcome to the team. Excited for you to tell our story with the same creativity we build our businesses with.

A Decade of Reflection on Meesho It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly 10 years since we, at Venture Highway, signed that first seed check for @Meesho_Official in 2016. With the news of their upcoming IPO, I’ve been looking back at the email threads, the early product demos, and the "aha" moments that started it all. What that decade has really reinforced for me is that Meesho’s journey was anything but linear: the company evolved through multiple product iterations—from the early Fashnear experiment in late 2015, to reseller-led commerce, and ultimately to the direct-to-consumer marketplace Meesho is today—while the core insight and our conviction in the founders stayed constant. For me, the conviction to partner with @viditaatrey and @barnwalSanjeev wasn't just about e-commerce. It was about a behavior I had witnessed firsthand while building WhatsApp. The "WhatsApp" Insight During my time at WhatsApp, I saw something fascinating happening in India. Small business owners—boutique owners, home chefs, local artisans—were "hacking" WhatsApp to run their businesses. They were creating groups, sharing photos of inventory, and closing deals via chat. There was no shopping cart, no payment gateway, just trust and conversation. When I met Vidit and Sanjeev, they weren't trying to force a Western e-commerce model onto India. They had noticed the same behavior. They understood that for the next 500 million Indians, commerce wouldn't look like a catalog; it would look like a chat. The "TAM" Trap & The Valley of Death But the path wasn't a straight line. After Y Combinator, Meesho hit a wall. They struggled to raise capital. Investors were passing left and right. I distinctly remember a call from Ravi at Elevation Capital. He asked me, "Neeraj, why is no one funding this company? These are good guys, they are executing, and they are making progress. What am I missing?" I told him the truth: "Investors are getting stuck on TAM (Total Addressable Market). They are looking at this through a Western lens where transaction values need to be high to make sense. But that is the wrong way to look at this deal. This isn't about basket size; it's about frequency and behavior." Most people saw a small market; we saw a massive, unorganized economy waiting to be digitized. These were also the moments when founder conviction mattered most. Even as the product evolved, Vidit and Sanjeev stayed anchored to their core user insight, and our job as early investors was to lean in through that ambiguity rather than step back and “wait for the final form” of the company. Shared Roots Vidit and Sanjeev being from IIT Delhi (where I also studied) gave us a shared starting point, but what really built our conviction was their resilience during those tough months. They were technical and data-driven, yet remarkably humble and willing to pivot. They were building for India, not just in India. The Thesis that Built Venture Highway Investing in Meesho in 2016—and doubling down in subsequent rounds—was more than just a portfolio decision. In many ways, Meesho was the thesis that led me to scale Venture Highway. Back then, the narrative was often that Indian startups were copycats. Meesho proved that India could produce category-creating, world-class companies that solve uniquely Indian problems at scale. That conviction drove us to build Venture Highway to support founders capable of building enduring institutions, a mission the entire VH team has worked hard to support. Going Global with General Catalyst It is fitting that as Meesho steps onto the public stage, Venture Highway has also evolved. Our conviction in Indian founders is what led us to join forces with General Catalyst. What drew us to GC was how closely their seed philosophy mirrors what we lived through with Meesho: seeing seed as the unveiling of a hidden truth, backing exceptional people early, and leaning in when the path is still murky. Meesho’s evolution—from its Fashnear beginnings to the scaled direct-to-consumer marketplace it is today—is exactly the kind of non-linear founder journey that GC is set up to support: where others see risk in change, GC sees learning, resilience, and conviction. By merging our local expertise with GC’s global platform, we are now even better equipped to support the next generation of Vidits and Sanjeevs—helping them build world-class companies from India for the world. To the IPO and Beyond Watching this journey from a seed-stage pitch deck to a public listing has been one of the greatest privileges of my investing career. We have been there since the seed round and are proud to remain shareholders today, as the company enters this new chapter. Vidit and Sanjeev, you have validated our belief that India is a cradle for world-class innovation. You’ve also reminded us that the most enduring companies are rarely built in a straight line - and that the real test of partnership is in those lows (and not the highs). Here’s to the next decade of building.

General Catalyst ran a screener of 70 industries for their AI Roll-Up strategy.. they only selected 10. That discipline is paying off: even 20% revenue growth with a flat cost base + 20–30% task automation turns a 10–15% EBITDA business into ~30% margins.. doubling the FCF. Marc Bhargava (@marcbhargava) , Managing Director at General Catalyst explains: "We're already seeing in many of the case studies that if you look at the first couple companies they acquired, even if they've only grown revenue 20%, if they've kept the cost basis flat using AI, but then bring up people to kind of do 20% more tasks, around 10-15% EBITDA-margin businesses can become 30% EBITDA-margin businesses. You can roughly double the free cash flow, and we're seeing that happen in many of our businesses in a one-year period. So for us, at the heart of that is: is the AI automation enough? And obviously we decided not to go forward with 60 of the 70, so we held a really high bar to: is this an industry where AI automation actually can make a meaningful difference? Then, can we actually go and buy and roll up these companies, get their data, improve the models, improve our software, automate 20-plus percent of tasks, free people up to cross-sell, get more revenue? And the result is a higher revenue base with a very similar cost basis, which generally translates to a really large improvement in EBITDA margin." @generalcatalyst

legendary execution by @mansourtarek_ and team. congrats!!

Percepta is hiring for research (RL, modeling, OR), engineering, and product roles in Europe and on the US East Coast. A few of us are at NeurIPS this week. Reach out to me, @EugeneVinitsky, @ChristosTzamos, @justintchiu, or @zzzzgq to learn more!

We're hosting a happy hour on Dec 4th with our friends at @nvidia! Join us. Registration link below:

We believe access to cutting-edge semiconductors is essential for national resilience. @substrate is bringing advanced semiconductor manufacturing capacity back to America—a mission that led us to back its seed round. With its innovative design offering a faster, better, and less expensive alternative to Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography, Substrate is on a path to shift the global competitive landscape. We first partnered with @jamesproud and the Substrate team more than three years ago because of James’s deep hardware expertise, first-principles thinking, and unwavering resolve to address critical national security challenges. His vision to reimagine semiconductor manufacturing is exactly the bold, systems-level approach we think is needed to restore U.S. leadership. We’re looking forward to supporting James and the team as they usher in a new era of American chipmaking. Why we invested by Paul and @htaneja → generalcatalyst.com/stories/our-in…

Rebooting semiconductor supply chains is a moonshot silicon valley needed to take on for US resilience. GC backed Substrate 3+ years ago. Stoked to see this unveiled today. America invented semiconductors. We will lead again.