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Former GE CEO: Talent is flocking to the start-up world and the innovation is real

In an interview with Yahoo Finance's Julie Hyman, former GE CEO Jeff Immelt discusses the state of venture capital, Silicon Valley, and what elements he thinks are important for building competitiveness in the future.

Video transcript

- And Jeff, speaking of the future of various industries, that was a passion of yours at GE. And now you're looking at that more full time, right? You are at a venture capital firm. And when we spoke in advance of this conversation, you said you could talk about how much of Silicon Valley is magical, and how much is BS. And I can't really put it better than that. So talk to us about your experience there, coming from a big, traditional company. Yeah.

- Yeah, Julie. You know, I wanted to work with innovation. And I wanted to work with entrepreneurs. I convinced my wife to move to California so that we could kind of see it up close. I love what I'm doing with respect to the venture firm I work with now. I'd say to all my colleagues from legacy businesses, there's an infinite amount of money. The talent is flocking to the startup world. And the innovation is real, whether it's artificial intelligence, automation, I could go down the list.

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So to a certain extent, all of us need to be as paranoid as possible. I think what's yet to be determined, Julie, is what does the culture of the future really look like? I mean, so much of it still, in Silicon Valley, is economic. It's stock options. It's every company being worth a lot.

But I think the staying power of legacy companies-- the ability to do hard things, like jet engines and things like that-- is kind of what we bring. And I think the future is going to be some mash up of the talent and innovation and technology with cultures that can recruit and train and build teams over the long term and through cycles.

You know, one of the things that makes Microsoft such a great company today-- one of the things that makes Satya such a great leader is, their stock price was flat for 12 years. Right? So from 2001 to, let's say, 2015, everybody who was at Microsoft had to be there because they loved the company.

And I still believe there's some element of that that's critical for building competitiveness in the future that isn't always captured in Silicon Valley. It isn't always captured with all the startup craze.