GV

Um, investors tend to specialize in one area.

And so I'm the common investor in these three companies, or the common founder, uh, co-founder, and the others have, let's say Khosla Ventures, Google Ventures, Insight Ventures, uh, top VCs, uh, but not the same ones.

I imagine, yeah, they have pretty different KPIs requirements and time horizons, all of these businesses.

Yes, exactly.

I love the GRC space.

We recently raised some money from Google Ventures.

And I remember that the partner on the team who was excited about compliance basically said after the deal was done, she kind of told me like, look, it's rare to find such founder market fit.

Like you love compliance and you know GRC inside and out.

But we were very thorough.

We said, hey, is there a place in Alphabet where this would work the best? And it turned out the group that raised their hand the highest and the fastest was GV or Google Ventures.

And they said, hey, You could do this however you want, but we think this is a company.

And when we talked it through, it was pretty clear.

It was acquired, it was born out of MIT.

It was Google Ventures.

It was JP Morgan.

It was Goldman Sachs.

So one was Sky Gregg at Box Group, which is a seed stage fund.

Another was Eric at GV, who I know you talked to.

And so I would say I did most of it.

And the way it would work would be like, kind of spend the week like prototyping or thinking of ideas.

It took a decade of iteration.

From there, ClassPass raised roughly $550 million across 10 rounds from General Catalyst, Thrive Capital, Google Ventures, and Elle Catterton.

Finally, in 2020, ClassPass hit a billion-dollar valuation, making Payal one of the first women of color to found a unicorn.

She was nearly nine months pregnant at the time.

I think we see it across the board.

You said you came from Google Ventures.

Even Google buys startups because some things a startup could do that a corporate just can't do for whatever reason, speed and agility and things like that.

And You know, ultimately there needs to be that combination of the, you know, scale of ability and cloud behind a prime, but still have some of that nimbleness that a startup could breathe to the table that, you know, they can't do eternally.

But I just met...

I was in Silicon Valley with my mastermind group, and we met with the CEO of ven- uh, Google Ventures.

One of my takeaways was, like, they invest in people, and they expect a level of, I'll use the word failure.

I hate that word because it's, it's, it's learning opportunities.

Martin Peers of the Information compared Jensen's approach to that of John Malone, who built up a giant cable TV empire in the 1980s.

Another rough comparison point might be Google's approach with their holding company Alphabet in the mid-2010s when Google restructured the company and created their Other Bets division to house moonshot investments in Waymo as well as Google Ventures.

The basic idea was to reinvest their massive earnings from internet advertising into the broader tech ecosystem, and of course, subsequently, a lot of those bets have now paid off.

NVIDIA's approach is obviously different.