General Catalyst Fmr MD: How I Picked Snapchat, Discord and Mercor | Builders Series

Thank you, Yosi. Thank you, Jacob. Excited to be with you today. And yeah, it's like day five for me of being unemployed because you see, on January 1st, 2026, and it was an amazing run while it lasted. They are some of the best in the business, very grateful, and their best days are in the future. That's always look up to the future. And with your investments, don't forget us in the future.

I would say that investing is a journey to self-awareness, or being able to collect a number of personal experiences that broaden the way you think. Being able to read and be perceived as trustworthy with founders or potential founders that come from all different backgrounds and walks of life matters a lot, because the vast majority of what I've done in my career as an investor is to meet mostly underappreciated, mostly first-time founders, mostly immigrant founders that, you know, some of them go the distance and create a category-defining business. And after a few more years, everyone canonizes them and thinks they're like able to walk on water. So yeah, having had the privilege of growing up in Greece, humble beginnings, having worked in Tokyo, having studied in the UK, having studied in the US, it gives you a perspective about how to interact with different types of people and in some instances see the future or the version of the future that a founder pitches you from a different point of view. So been very blessed in that regard.

Right. Before being an investor, I was a founder of a failed social networking company because back in 2009, 2010 at Stanford, everyone and their mother were building a mobile app, social network. And prior to that, I was a perpetual student researcher. So like as an engineer, you have that mindset that, oh man, I'll build it and they will come. So I had to basically, you know, park that on the side, especially when I met amazing technical talent where many of them were friends of mine or I had seen them and knew how smart they were academically. And it's like, oh, we have to invest in that person because they are so gifted, you know, academically. However, that doesn't always work in practice. I had to shed that, okay, if we build the perfect product, they will come. If the team only has very strong engineers but no real ability to get in front of customers, have curiosity to really do the company building side of things beyond just building product, that also probably doesn't work or scale over time. And there are many other things I learned along the way thanks to my fantastic previous partners, and I've made a ton of mistakes too. That's all about learning from mistakes.

Of course, I have. Because as I mentioned before, investing is a journey to self-awareness. So I was not as smart back in the day evaluating the potential of future founders. I was more eager to anchor in something else like, oh my god, you know, this is a hot market, or wow, look at the early metrics that they have. Yeah, the TAM is so big, or the early metrics of that company are so insane. And only to find out that, you know what, if you're not a thousand percent sure that the founders are freaking awesome and the team is really clicking together, if those folks are not going to scale, then a better team that's doing the same thing probably will eat their lunch. So I've learned to take a lot of risk when it comes to product or like, oh, is this market going to be big enough because it's a new market. I've learned to take a lot of risk on these two, but I don't want to take any risk, especially if you know something or feel something going in about the co-founders and the initial team. The other thing I've learned is that timing matters a lot. And that's where I get it often wrong because we invest in a team, we think they're freaking awesome, but they might be two, three, four years too early. And if they're like so stubborn, which often is good, but sometimes if you're stubborn for too long...

Exactly. Exactly. You have to be stubborn for too long, you know, it's okay to be two years early, but to be five years too early, not okay.

Yeah, I'm a huge, huge proponent of cold emails, especially for folks who are young and they're getting started in their career, or folks who don't have credibility, they're out of network, they're immigrants, all of that stuff, because you've nothing to lose. Like what's the craziest thing that can happen if you send out a cold email? You get ignored. Okay, no problem. Nobody will remember you tomorrow. Exactly. So, and in a week you can repackage it a little bit, and now with AI, oh my god, you know, you don't even need to do that. It can happen automatically and maybe the second time you get lucky, right? So, huge proponent of cold emails. You ask what is the anatomy? It should be short. It should be straight into the point. And if you're targeting, meaning cold emailing another founder or a senior executive at a company or an investor, just give them a little bit of feedback for whatever they do. Because anyone who's like ambitious, well-intentioned, obsessed with what they do, they're always curious about what others think about my product or an investment of mine or my team. Especially if you are somebody, you know, who is a user or a customer of that product. So I would read that email. Of course, if it's like, you know, seven paragraphs long or it has, hey, here's my executive summary and it's like 53 pages long, probably you're not going to read that. So short, sweet, straight into the point, like a few sentences of what your feedback might be and one sentence of what your ask is.

Yeah. And the other thing to note is most people check their email on their mobile phone, right? So for whatever reason you send them an attachment and you can't open it or it needs a password to take a look at it or it takes a long time to load and all the things, immediately, you know, delete. Or if you make crazy claims, if you say, let's say you're cold emailing an investor like, we're going to be the first $20 trillion company. Sure. Thank you guys. Delete. Or our founding team has 275 years of work experience. Great. I'm not looking to talk to museum artifacts. If you make stupid claims like that, that doesn't work well. Having a little bit of sense of humor or being a bit elaborate, okay, but straight into the point with some good feedback, too.

Rarely I would have them walk me through their deck. I would try to understand them, like what motivates them? What was their upbringing like? Why are they building that particular idea? What is in it for them? Do they have any chips on their shoulders? How do they think of their co-founders? Why do they think they and their co-founders are the absolute best team in the world? What is their rate of learning and the rate of making progress? So they treat every meeting, every decision-making opportunity as a learning opportunity. How do they think about hiring? And then have them talk to me a bit about how their space has developed and what is their point of view about where they want to be in 5 to 10 years. And the folks who are really obsessed and have been thinking about a specific problem and specific market for a long time, they can talk in extreme detail. And if you ask them a few times the question why what you're saying is the case or why what you're talking about might happen, those folks who are the very sophisticated, elaborate thinkers have good answers. Everyone else is trying to make things up, you know. And there are few individuals that you come across, you're like, oh my god, if like a few percent of what you just said comes through, I absolutely want to be part of that.

So for Snap, I would say a few things. One, the founder wanted everyone to smile whenever they opened up the app. Like he wanted to deliver happiness. Second thing, he wanted to build the fastest camera app out there, even faster than the native camera app. So like there was like three taps and your snap goes to one of your friends. Pretty freaking awesome. Third thing, it was controversial because any guy in particular, you would talk about it, they'll be like, oh, that sucks. Think why would you want to send disappearing photos? But then, you know, you quickly figured out that 80% of the users were girls, like women, and you know, it's unlikely that they were using it for sexting with their other female friends, right? And then fourth thing that was very controversial at the time, kind of obvious of course many years later, everyone back then was building on top of Facebook because you could be building it on top of Facebook so that your user could easily sign up. They wouldn't need to create a new password, all that stuff. And they could spam everyone else on Facebook. And the Snap folks from day one, they're like, we don't want to do that. We want to be privacy-focused. Yeah. And we want to own the data. And data disappears. And we're going to create our own graph. And everyone else is like, dude, why? That's so hard. Why would you even bother to attempt to try to find product-market fit? And he was contrarian in that regard and clearly got it right.

It starts with the founders, and this is where understanding what really motivates them very well matters a ton. Like what is the core reason for doing what they're doing, and they're willing to obsess 24/7 for the next many moons and be the most incredible salesperson, recruiter with infectious enthusiasm to convert others to the cause. So like that's the thing, like understanding what motivates people, because if you get that one right, then it's up to you to make the judgment call. Okay, I think that person can walk through the desert, find an oasis, and probably survive, right? Yeah, we'll find the water, and in some instances maybe actually even walk back. But if you're not sure about somebody's motivation, and now it's very noisy, for example, like now you're a young founder, you're doing something in the AI boom, you raise the first round, like at times when things are frothy or in hot spaces, that is the hardest thing. Okay, in a world where everyone gets funded, how do you pick the folks who, when the times are hard, will keep going? Because any company, as you mentioned, Yosi, will go through a journey of like, you know, 5, 10, 15 years. Takes longer now for companies to go public, so it's pretty unlikely that it's going to be straight up and to the right for the entire time.

I would say a few things, right? First off, it's not about what all this AI stuff can do for you today. It's more about the rate of improvement and where things are heading towards. The same way that we've been talking about founders and their potential and their learning ability and their momentum as learning machines, it applies to technology and market. So any of the tools out there, like if they're getting to improve so much, oh my god, you know, over time they could make a dent. Now I do try to understand, is this company building real technology? Do they own the IP? Is there any scarcity value? Are they unique in that regard? Are they the only people in the world that can do that stuff? Do they hire incredible technical people to do that stuff? Or is it, okay, they're just using a bunch of other open-source libraries or like they're using other people's software? They're very short-term thinkers. And then the other thing is I'm trying to be very informed about what's going on at the larger labs and what is really core to them and they will do themselves versus, oh, this is one of the 15 other things we're trying but we don't have a core team and we're not putting a lot of resources over there.

I mean, robotics, I would say is tech, right? So like the fact that we have like a new form of intelligence out there that over time could get much smarter than us for more and more tasks, that's pretty amazing, right? And this could do a lot of wonderful things. This could potentially have some adverse effects as well. But there are a number of other things that could be incredible, transforming the human mind and society outside of tech. And they're more around culture. For example, what if we can figure out how to have more babies again, right? And we can stop having this fear about demographics collapse that is really hard to reverse and many decades in. That's a cultural, I would argue. What if we as a human society try to figure out how to deal with the constant overflow of so much information, a lot of it fake, that makes us hate ourselves, or our information diet is not as good, or we stop trusting each other. So in other words, how can we teach ourselves when we're young or as we go through life outside of the traditional education system, how we inform ourselves and how we have critical thinking to interact with more and more information out there and go through life. That's important. So these are some areas that I think can have profound effects, like how we think about like having more or fewer kids in the future, or how do we deal with all this information that we were not genetically programmed to deal with that kind of information until, of course, Elon does his trick and he and others let us do the brain implants that can let us have a computer next to our brain too.