President Joseph Aoun and General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja discuss how business can have a soul
General Catalyst CEO and Northeastern trustee Hemant Taneja sat down with Northeastern President Joseph E. Aoun to talk about his new book, “responsible innovation,” AI and how business can have a soul.
Can business be both profitable and ethical? Can companies pursue technological innovation in a way that doesn’t forgo a positive social impact?
If you ask Hemant Taneja, CEO and managing director of venture capital firm General Catalyst, the answer is “yes.”
As part of Northeastern University’s Presidential Leadership Series, Taneja, also a Northeastern trustee, recently sat down with Northeastern President Joseph E. Aoun to talk about socially responsible investing, his new book, “The Transformation Principles,” and how business can have a soul.
The latter is the first in a set of nine principles Taneja lays out in his book to help people navigate — and hopefully transform — an increasingly complex and ambiguous world defined by artificial intelligence and tenuous geopolitics. Those principles come from a decades-spanning career in venture capital focused on supporting founders with companies that have the potential for positive social impact.
“[It’s about a] mindset and mechanisms to build with that intention, to create an inclusive society, to create a sustainable society,” Taneja said in his conversation with Aoun.
A global investment leader with a focus on transformative technologies such as artificial intelligence, Taneja has spent decades building companies and investing in ideas and people. He was an early investor in Stripe, Snap, Grammarly and Applied Intuition, and is currently active in the tech space that intends to revolutionize healthcare.
Taneja’s approach to investing and driving innovation is notably “a very different concept of capitalism and impact” than the Silicon Valley norm, Aoun admitted. He asked Taneja a question he’s undoubtedly heard many times from fellow founders and venture capitalists: “Why do you think that companies should have a good impact, a positive impact on the world?”
Taneja is adamant that “there is a false choice between profit and purpose.” He has designed General Catalyst and the companies it invests in with an approach he describes as “responsible innovation.”
“What we advocate for is creating more intentionality around how you scale, creating more intentionality around thinking about not just your relationship to your customers and revenue, but all the stakeholders and how is this company really getting adopted in society,” Taneja said.
Aoun asked Taneja what Silicon Valley thinks about this idea, given “what we hear [from Silicon Valley] is something very different.”
Taneja says it takes some explaining and convincing. However, once he can get them past certain ideas that have taken hold in Silicon Valley — the “move fast and break things” mindset — some founders come around to it. It helps that Taneja argues purpose and profit are intrinsically linked.
“I grew up in India with Vedic philosophy: Your soul outlives your body,” Taneja said. “I look at that and say, is a founder going to build a company that’s going to outlive them? If they’re really building with that kind of mindset, it’s not about them; they’re actually building an institution.”
The packed event drew students who spoke to Taneja about their entrepreneurial endeavors and sought the investor’s advice on their future paths, particularly in the age of AI.
“To get ahead of that, to me, is to just get really good at using these technologies to do the higher level work and not shy away from this,” Taneja said in response to Josh Barde, a data science and business student who asked about the skills that those entering the workforce now need to develop in a world with AI. “I tell everybody: lean into it. Lean into just doing higher abstraction work, and that’s the way to flourish in the next phase of this.”
A large portion of Aoun’s conversation with Taneja revolved around AI, specifically how to implement it responsibly. Taneja spoke at length about how he and General Catalyst are investigating ways to leverage AI for use in health care in a way that is ethical and beneficial for patients.
He pointed to one of his companies, Hippocratic AI, an AI call center designed to do the kind of patient outreach that would normally be handled by human nurses.
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“If we can check on our population for free, think about how we can handle the next pandemic because you’re not short on people making phone calls to guide people in what to do,” Taneja said. “Or think about how to take care of our elderly with a very different model. … We’re not trying to end calls in nine minutes every time a nurse calls us.”
However, Taneja acknowledged that there is another side to AI that needs to be considered. In the same breath as Hippocratic AI, he mentioned another AI call center that he and General Catalyst tried to implement, this time in the Philippines. The idea was to onshore white collar jobs that have gone abroad by automating them with AI and adding domestic software jobs, but Taneja quickly realized the impacts that would have on all the people who would be laid off and how it would impact a local economy and middle class built around these jobs.
“There’s abundance on one side if you think about how we apply it and there’s real challenges on the other side if you think about how we take care of people,” Taneja said. “We have to carefully navigate the transformation of this technology.”
For Taneja, the solution to these questions around AI, as well as the biggest problems plaguing a sector like health care, will come from collaboration, not isolation.
“The Amazon of health care is not a $1 trillion company but a $1 trillion ecosystem,” Taneja said.
To that end, General Catalyst recently acquired Summa Health, a major health care network in Ohio, with the intention of using it as a launchpad for this kind of radical collaboration. General Catalyst and about a dozen companies have mapped out 140 projects it will use to “transition that health system into a proactive, affordable, accessible system.”
Aoun later pushed the conversation beyond AI and into superintelligence, an area that “for the last 15 years we’ve heard is going to be with us in the next two years,” Aoun said. Taneja admitted he has skepticism about superintelligence but sees the potential for it to transform the world in ways that no one can yet predict.
“Right now, we’re still doing AI in the context of our own data models that we’ve trained on our own captured data and organized with our understanding of the world,” Taneja said. “What’s post-that?”
