General Catalyst’s Post

The AI-powered legal assistant platform is here, thanks to Wordsmith AI. Ross, Volodymyr, and Robbie combined their collective experiences as exited founders, lawyers, and technologists to build Wordsmith, the secure AI platform for legal and compliance operations. Wordsmith handles the overload of routine tasks — from reviewing contracts to processing questionnaires — empowering legal teams to prioritize the high-value work that inspired them to enter the profession in the first place. We’re proud to invest in their $5M seed round and welcome Ross, Volodymry, Robbie, and the entire team to the GC family.  More from TechCrunch (full piece linked in comments) ↓

Ready to go live? We believe Gen-Z is creating the future of livestreaming. In their latest piece that’s part of our ‘The Consumer Internet is Dated’ series, Niko and Jonny detail the shifts in this ecosystem including… 1. Evolving the livestreaming business model “As livestreaming continues to advance, we believe that platforms will find new ways to evolve their business model to focus on niche verticals, expand the formats they offer, and create opportunities for offline monetization.” 2. Changing how viewers and streamers engage “We see additional opportunity in interactivity, and we believe future livestreaming platforms will lean into this area to expand their reach.” 3. The role of AI in viewer engagement “We believe that AI has the potential to fundamentally improve livestreaming across the engagement stack…AI may also be able to improve personalization in livestreaming. For example, as AI inputs become increasingly multimodal, they may be able to better understand streams, and enhance the viewer experience by providing additional context based on what streamers do.” And much more. Explore the future of livestreaming (full post in comments) ↓

Today, we’re pleased to announce that Teresa Carlson and Maryam Mujica are joining GC full-time to lead our efforts to strengthen governments’ resilience through radical collaboration. In the wake of burgeoning power competition, our global resilience thesis underscores the need for dynamic, resilient systems across critical industries, like energy, industrials, defense & intelligence. Public policy is instrumental in facilitating innovation and ensuring this work is executed effectively with societal good at the core. As a firm, we know that going beyond the traditional remit of venture capital and working across these different ecosystems is the only way to create transformational change. That goal is at the center of this mission.  Teresa has been at GC for over a year as a Catalyst Advisor and will spearhead this work. She previously led Amazon Web Services public sector business to innovate the government with cloud computing, and her impressive work there demonstrated that leveraging government partnerships can yield transformation at scale. Maryam is joining GC as Global Head of Public Policy, and her wide-ranging experience at institutions and enterprises, including the White House National Security Council, Google, Twitter, and Booking Holdings, will help drive the kind of transformation we are striving to create. We’re homing in on the opportunities to bridge and bolster the interests of the US, Europe, India, and their allies. Together, Teresa and Maryam will help shape the policies for a more globally resilient world. Stay tuned, as there’s much more to come this Fall. Learn more (full post in comments) ↓

Behind the scenes, much of the secure internet is a coordinated dance of point-to-point user-driven sharing. For example, we’ve all experienced attempting to open a Google Doc and being told permission is needed to access it. This is Google’s authorization as a centralized service in action — a concept elucidated in its landmark Zanzibar paper. When AuthZed co-founders, Jacob, Joseph S., and Jimmy dove into this paper, they immediately recognized managing authorization with scale and flexibility is an idea worth exploring and expanding. SpiceDB is their open-source, fine-grained permissions database that underlies AuthZed, which empowers customers like Canva (also part of the GC family) and many more. "Authorization stands as the bedrock of any application, and its complexity continues to grow alongside the evolution of software. Jake, Joey, and Jimmy have created what we believe is a powerful solution for permissions management that is evident in AuthZed's growing enterprise customer base." -GC’s Mark Crane We’re proud to lead AuthZed’s $12M Series A and welcome Jake, Joey, Jimmy, and the entire team to the portfolio. More from SiliconANGLE & theCUBE (full piece linked in comments) ↓

“How do you build a business designed for the future without knowing what the future holds?” In the latest feature of McKinsey & Company’s The Exchange with Asutosh Padhi, GC’s CEO, Hemant Taneja engages in an expansive conversation covering… 1. An ‘exit to endurance’ mindset “Over the last 20 years, the role of technology in business has profoundly changed. We've gone from building software companies that bring efficiency into the world to redefining critical industries, whether it's healthcare, finance, education, defense, you name it. In turn, the level of responsibility for these technology companies has increased a lot. Similarly, so has the scope of what these companies get to do because now, you're not just a technology vendor going after the technology budget of a company, you’re going after the health care spend or the finance spend in a country or the markets that you care about. So, much, much bigger TAMs. For that reason, leadership in those situations is about going from a mindset of exit to endurance.” 2. Transformation time horizons “If the role [of AI] is around transformation, then, again, the time scales you have to think about when you go in and say, "We're going to transform these businesses in these large industries," has to be much, much longer. So, it's forcing us and others in the industry to think about, "What is the capital solutions format, and how do we help these founders really go from inception to endurance in these long journeys around the transformation of these major industries?” 3. Embracing ambiguity “In this dynamic world where so much is changing (technology shifts, geopolitical shifts, short-term perturbations, long-term perturbations), it's important to understand and embrace ambiguity. What happens to most leaders is they lean towards, "The world is black or white," and they become dogmatic about that being their raison d'être.” And much more. Full interview (video link in comments) ↓