The Transformation Principles: How to Create Enduring Change

USA Today Bestseller

Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller

Featured in Bloomberg's Top Books of 2025

Whether you’re investing, leading a company, or building a career, this guide from the CEO of global investment and transformation company General Catalyst offers powerful principles essential to long-term success.

In a world rapidly being reshaped by technological revolutions and geopolitical realignments, businesses can no longer afford to operate with outdated frameworks. The companies that will thrive in an economic system under both strain and skepticism will be those that reimagine their role in society while harnessing emerging technologies. This new reality needs a new set of guidelines—transformation principles—to guide decision-making for investors, company builders, and anyone navigating a career as they venture beyond.

General Catalyst CEO and eight-time Forbes Midas List recipient Hemant Taneja has developed these principles throughout his life, and they have helped General Catalyst fund, found, and nurture some of the most exciting companies of the past two decades, such as Airbnb, Stripe, Livongo, Anduril, Kayak, Snap, Gusto, and Canva, while having a powerful positive and enduring impact on society.

In The Transformation Principles, Taneja explains in detail the nine principles behind his company’s outsize success in investing and industry transformation. These principles will help readers:

• Understand the critical importance of a company’s soul
• Navigate through the inevitable twists and turns when creating a new future
• See through trends that don’t matter and focus on what truly matters for enduring success
• Help build companies that solve society’s hardest problems, making capitalism a force for good
• Confidently lead with curiosity and generosity for extraordinary success

Moving forward, the most enduring successes will come from those companies whose tangible benefits to the world naturally result in compounding returns. Equipped with these nine principles, any individual or organization will be able to see beyond trends and short-term thinking and instead focus on long-term success that lasts for generations.

Hemant Taneja is the CEO  of the global investment and transformation company General Catalyst. He is a multi-year Midas List investor, a best-selling author, and a founder. His career includes early investments in market-leading companies like Stripe, Samsara (NYSE: IOT), Snap (NYSE: SNAP), ClassDojo, Grammarly, Gusto, Applied Intuition, and Anduril. He has also hatched numerous companies like Commure, Tendo and Livongo, which was acquired by Teladoc in an $18.5B merger, the largest in digital health history.

Kevin Maney is a veteran journalist, essayist, bestselling author, and TV commentator, focusing on the technology industry and its history. His firm, Category Design Advisors, has helped company leadership teams all over the world identify and design new market categories.