Venture capitalists once sought entrepreneurs who might buck the established order and take on legacy giants. But in the age of AI, venture capitalists are now just as likely to buy a struggling company to bring it into the modern age.
This shift in how venture capitalists operate was the primary topic of a taping of the popular All-In podcast hosted by former investor Jason Calacanis. Calacanis was joined on the CES 2026 stage by Bob Sternfels, McKinsey & Company’s global managing partner, and Hemant Taneja, CEO of General Catalyst.
“I haven’t met a CEO yet that isn’t talking about how do I get my organization moving faster,” Sternfels reported. “It’s quite frankly less about strategy. It’s more about organizational speed.”
The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 coincided with today’s “peak ambiguity,” offered Teneja, “of massive geopolitical change. You have an incredible amount of change around every country trying to drive strategic economy in different industries, and all those dynamics keep changing. Underneath that, our tool of implementation is technology that keeps changing.”
How AI is speeding technology changes, along with the speed of revenues and value growth in today’s AI-fueled business environment, also presents new challenges.
“What are you building toward as to what the world’s going to look like so you can have enduring value?” Taneja posed. “What does scale really mean? What are we in the business of creating? And then, what are you building with where the technologies you’re using aren’t going to destroy your value proposition over time?”
Long-term viability in the AI age obviously means making organizational changes, such as in data infrastructure, and understanding AI’s ability to do more with less. But one way for companies to cope with long-term corporate viability is to adjust who they hire and especially reskilling employees to adapt and adopt new tech.
“The half-life of skills [is] getting shorter and shorter,” Sternfels asserts. “For an employer, the return on investment that you give an employee in terms of skills has shrunk by about half over the last 30 years. It used to be about seven years return. It’s about 3.6 years now, and that’s only getting shorter and shorter as things change. Are we teaching people to continue to learn? Are you skilling people to actually become superhuman by leveraging agents? That becomes a skill. And I don’t think we’re actually equipping that right now.”
