MD+court jester @generalcatalyst running the customer value fund | Sold cos to @palantirtech, @meta | Studied comedy @stanford
San Francisco, CA
Joined May 2012
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kvm retweeted
One of the most common things we heard from undergrads while visiting campuses is that they have no shortage of ideas to explore but access to compute has been a huge constraint.
So we partnered with the team at @Modal to create a Research Fellowship! For this first run we will be supporting approximately 20 undergraduate builders who want to explore AI research ideas. Each fellow will receive up to $25K in compute for a 90-day project of their own.
Applications are open. Tell us what you want to build! generalcatalyst.com/research…
Introducing @generalcatalyst Research Fellows - a program for undergraduates ready to pursue their most ambitious ideas.
We’re supporting approximately 20 exceptional undergraduate builders from leading schools. In partnership with @Modal, each fellow will receive up to $25K in compute for a 90-day project of their own.
For the bold, the curious, and those building what they wish existed: applications are open now. Tell us what you want to build! generalcatalyst.com/research…
kvm retweeted
So excited to help launch @generalcatalyst Research Fellows
Being a student partner at Rough Draft was the most formative college experience getting me into tech
This program couldn't be better timed to support ambitious students
generalcatalyst.com/research…
kvm retweeted
Introducing @generalcatalyst Research Fellows - a program for undergraduates ready to pursue their most ambitious ideas.
We’re supporting approximately 20 exceptional undergraduate builders from leading schools. In partnership with @Modal, each fellow will receive up to $25K in compute for a 90-day project of their own.
For the bold, the curious, and those building what they wish existed: applications are open now. Tell us what you want to build! generalcatalyst.com/research…
kvm retweeted
never have I felt more patriotic than listening to @__kvm talk about how ozempic is a truly american invention
yay go me and go cvf
Note-taking tool Otter․ai raised $320M in non-dilutive capital from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund; PitchBook says it raised $50M prior to this round (@indianidle / TechCrunch)
(Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)
kvm retweeted
Our short film started with one line: "I want to ride my bike on the moon."
When it comes to the creative case for investing in space, imagination precedes ambition. What looks naive in scientific progress is remembered as inevitable, but only if someone funds the gap in between.
kvm retweeted
I just talked to @max_rimpel about building a new kind of cloud from scratch and why building AI applications forces us to rethink infrastructure.
"If you're not tackling hard problems, why are you creating a startup?"
@bernhardsson was told to use Kubernetes. Instead he built @modal's file system and container runtime from the ground up, tuned for the speed AI workloads demand. With Modal, containers boot in under a second, and workloads burst from zero to thousands of CPUs or GPUs in a few lines of code.
Watch @max_rimpel in conversation with Erik.
Chapters
00:00 — Learning to Code on a Mac Plus
04:38 — Building the Engine Behind Spotify’s Discover Weekly
09:17 — The Pandemic Project That Became Modal
10:14 — The 1 to 2 Year Rule for Picking Startup Problems
12:36 — Broke Until Stable Diffusion Hit
15:42 — Architecting a New Cloud for AI
17:41 — Agents Want the Same Things Developers Do
kvm retweeted
First equation I’ve seen in a fund letter!
As startups become more technical, the funds adapt as well.
(h/t @generalcatalyst)
kvm retweeted
praying is anti-agency.
getting your capital back is agency. buying back your company so you own more and control more is agency.
this is about agency.
Another great post by my partner @andrewziperski. Stop praying for exits
kvm retweeted
I’m speaking at AIE SF World’s Fair on July 1st in the Sandbox & Platform Engineering track.
My talk is called "From fork() to Fleet: Designing an Agent Sandbox Cloud".
I’ll cover the OS and Infrastructure ideas behind Agent Sandboxes in depth: Runtime isolation options such as Containers, MicroVMs, and related tradeoffs; Storage as the next unlock for agent capabilities; and Orchestration at scale for fleets of sandboxes.
I like explaining systems from first principles, so we’ll go down to the metal, to build design intuition around these topics. Hope to see you there. It's a 2 part talk.
kvm retweeted
Huge congrats to the @factorialapp team on announcing their $150M Series D at a $2.5B valuation!
Ten years after being founded in Barcelona, Factorial has reset from a SaaS company into an AI Workforce Operations Platform, serving 16,000+ businesses across 90+ countries and becoming one of the most valuable scale-ups in Europe.
Having supported the company since the Seed round, it’s been incredible to watch this journey unfold.
Congrats to @jordiromero ,@bernatfarrero and the entire Factorial team. Onwards! 🚀
kvm retweeted
🚀Factorial has raised $150 million in Series D funding at a $2.5 billion valuation, becoming one of the most valuable scale-ups in Europe.
The round will support @FactorialEs's expansion and product development across Europe.
Congrats @jordiromero, @bernatfarrero & team!
tech.eu/2026/06/03/factorial…
kvm retweeted
BREAKING: Spanish @factorialapp has JUST raised a WHOPPING $150m Series D at $2.5bn valuation! 🇪🇸
The round was led by @generalcatalyst (@pranavsinghvi), who have also committed an additional $540m through its Customer Value Fund.
This is AMAZING news for one of the top companies coming out of Spain.
I spoke to Founder and CEO Jordi and discussed:
0:00 - Introduction
0:21 - General Catalyst invests $150m in Factorial
1:10 - Why raise capital now?
2:28 - The relationship with General Catalyst
3:55 - How the Customer Value Fund works
5:24 - From HR software to AI-native workforce operations
9:00 - Leading AI transformation inside a company
11:18 - Why Europe is a great place to build
13:16 - Barcelona’s startup ecosystem
15:52 - Lessons from Silicon Valley
18:21 - Building a company for the long term
19:57 - What Factorial looks for when hiring
Congrats @jordiromero, @bernatfarrero, Pau Ramon Revilla, and the rest of the Factorial team!
Another great post
The Silicon Valley I came to in 2016 -- once a low-status refuge for weirdos, naive tinkerers, and missionaries -- has been overrun by input-maxxing Kumon striver types.
Company-building for this class of “entrepreneurs” is an exercise in performative escalations between startups touting their inputs: who can burn the most tokens, who can work the most hours, who can get the most views on an over-produced launch video.
This is why even “ARR,” which should be (and once was) an output of an excellent product and sales engine, has become a noisy, somewhat fake input -- into a machine designed to capture the zeitgeist for 15 minutes, dupe VCs, and maximize fundamentals-agnostic capital flows into a business. Actual company-building is a sideshow for the “cracked” YC-backed founder-striver.
When you talk to many of these people, they have no idea why they’re building what they’re building in the same way that a 16 year old doesn’t really know why he joined 12 clubs or took 15 AP classes -- only that they desperately want to maximize their visible, measurable inputs, tell you about it, and collect their gold star.
It’s easy to place the blame on YC, and they surely deserve plenty of it, but YC’s turn towards performative, low-stakes, incrementalist entrepreneurship is really just another symptom of the broader problems plaguing Silicon Valley: the inevitability of industry maturation and the playbook-ization of startups, demographic change, financial nihilism downstream of bad policy and psychopathic rhetoric coming from some leaders, etc.
The real progress being made amidst all of this is astounding, but the increasingly absurd shenanigans won’t stop until the culture punishes bad behavior and we prosecute, literally, some of the criminals running these companies.
kvm retweeted
I've said it before, but CVF is one of the most interesting financials products that we offer founders at GC.
Musely secures $360M from General Catalyst without giving up equity techcrunch.com/2026/05/01/mu…
kvm retweeted
Thrilled to welcome @nikesharora as @generalcatalyst's first lead independent director. Nikesh brings the rare combination of investor thinking and operator execution and has led some of the most consequential tech orgs in the world. I've long admired the clarity and ambition he brings to everything he does. Nikesh joins me and our chairman @ChenaultKen on the board.
Look forward to our work together building GC and supporting the founders we back.