When I stepped into the role of Managing Partner earlier this year, it was with a clear mandate from the partnership to ensure General Catalyst was set up for its next chapter of growth and impact. We knew instinctively that, to fulfill our mission of investing in powerful positive change that endures, and to meet the new needs of the next generation of entrepreneurs and LPs, GC had to evolve to become an enduring business ourselves. We needed to lean into our core values and competitive points of difference — our ‘maker’s mentality’, our belief in radical collaboration, and an unwavering commitment to responsible innovation.
In Deep Nishar we have found an ‘N of 1’ investor who embodies all of the above and strengthens our team’s ability to execute our mission.
I have known and admired Deep since 2014 when we first met in our Palo Alto offices. I realized immediately that he shared the maker’s mentality that is a defining trait of our GC partnership. He had already developed a great reputation as a product and company-builder, having been an impactful player at Google Mobile and LinkedIn during their early meteoric days. Deep was pondering his next move, eager to bring his penchant for innovation to the healthcare and life sciences space, with the intent of having a more positive impact on the world. He considered joining Glen and me when we were launching Livongo for a brief minute but his journey eventually brought him to SoftBank, where he has had exceptional success as a growth stage, early biotech and enterprise software investor. He has built an impressive track record working with high growth companies like 10X Genomics, Cohesity, Eightfold.ai, Guardant Health, OSIsoft, Slack, and Vir Bio to help them to scale and become market leaders in their categories.
Deep also embraces our mantra of radical collaboration — with founders, with colleagues, and with entire ecosystems. Deep has a strong belief in multidisciplinary innovation and spent the last few years working with the companies that bring the technology and bio/pharma worlds together — and that is essential for the next phase of our health assurance work as we bring forth the radical collaboration between tech, healthcare and bio/pharma as one ecosystem. He will supercharge our already formidable health assurance team as they expand their focus into pharma and biotech investments.
And most importantly, Deep is a true believer in GC’s mission and motives: to build the next generation of enduring companies with responsible innovation at their core. For all the fanfare the technology sector gets, much of its accomplishments are fleeting. As Deep once noted, 95% of all the tech companies that were listed on the NASDAQ 20 years ago no longer exist as independent companies today. We share an understanding that if we and our founders want to build something that lasts, it has to be in the best interests of society and serve all stakeholders. We need to create businesses that are engineered for spectacular financial and societal returns. And we need to ensure our innovations benefit people everywhere and anticipate and avoid unintended consequences. That is the key to becoming an enduring business, and Deep along with the entire GC team is committed to leading the way forward.
We are all excited for what comes next.
