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Mamoon Hamid

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2024-10-21
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2024-10-21
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  1. “Carrie, you and I, we're in the risk business, my friend. You believe in the people, it goes back to like these are incredible people. Aaron Levy, Dylan Smith, incredible founders, like legendary to me. And it was just a dislocation in the market where the market did not understand how to, well, one, it was just afraid. It was a global financial crisis and nobody wanted to invest in anything because back to your point of reserves, everyone was trying to save money for their own companies. In the same vein, we had to take our reserves and put it in the box and we weren't investing in new companies at the time. And that happens in every sort of cycle down cycle like this. I think we all know some of the best investments come out of that cycle. And so we got to invest more dollars in the box at a $25 million valuation. Incremental dollar, two, three million dollars in bridge that was being done, done at that valuation.”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “The market sucked. Nobody wanted to invest in a cloud storage business that would get eaten up live by a Google or a Microsoft.”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “It is a tough if you're not giving someone, well, I think because we're on the board and there's so much signaling involved in us doing, let's say, nothing, we generally do something. And I think that's allowed us to get away with like doing a small amount in a follow-on round. In many cases, if it's a really attractive round where folks want as much as possible and we're doing a little bit less than parada, everyone's happy. But if it's the we need the money and you're not going to invest in this round these days, there's pay to play. So if you don't invest, you get wiped out. Okay, so don't want that. So there are different scenarios here.”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “That's a rough math. And then we move dollars around. A company may get acquired early or a company may shut down and we'll rejigger those dollars around. It's an art and a science.”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Yeah, so reserves is one. It's like when you have an early stage fund and we typically invest in about 35 companies per fund. So how much do you reserve for each one of those investments? We try to invest and we've looked at the math more than half in that first check. So let's say you're doing over the life of the company, you're investing $25 million in that early stage company, but you're starting out with a $15 million check and then you're reserving another 10 for”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Do you think about that? We are primarily early stage focused. We have an $800 million fund for that. And then we have a $1.2 billion growth fund. This team of seven folks invests out of both of those funds. I would characterize us as boutique because we're kind of a small team that believes in the craft of venture capital. We think it's a business that doesn't scale, actually. We're not scaling through people, but we have the scale of capital. Our growth fund even half of the dollars are invested in our best companies from our early stage funds. So it doesn't require us to have a large team, so to say, because we're already involved with some of these companies like Rippling and Glean and Figma that we're doubling down into out of our growth fund.”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “What's different is that there is more capital in our industry than ever before, that capital at times thinks that everything will be a deck of corn. You're overfunding some companies. Maybe they deserve it because they're the far and away leaders. But at the same time, there's another half a dozen dozen competitors that get funded.”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Same as we're in the business of backing incredible founders. Who are persevering on a problem set that may be a hair on fire problem for lots of folks and they're building the right product at the right time? That's the same. We're in the business of finding those people who are doing that job and trying to build a business. And hopefully we can help them a little bit in building their business.”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I think the revenue will be there because, again, we're not just tackling software, linear software, as I call it. We're tackling labor, labor shortages and things that humans can do, but it's the worst part of their job. Or we don't have enough people who can do the job. Again, I go back to the example of doctors. We're not producing enough doctors. We're not producing enough developers. We're not producing enough lawyers. Those types of jobs where we're going to see the immediate, more near-term impact.”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Say if I look at the, do you know what the world's GDP is? It's about $100 trillion. Of that, 50 to 60% is in labor. Technology is roughly like 15% of it. And over the next decade, if we grow at the more traditional GDP growth rates, it will be anywhere from 125 to 130. What if technology grows from 15% to 20%? That's like 25 trillion in technology companies up from, say, 15 trillion today. So 10 trillion of annual spend will get created for technology companies over the next decade. When you think about 200 billion dollars spent on CapEx or $600 billion spent, I think the question is really the $200 billion should result in $600 billion of revenue.”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, so just the rough math is that in the last 18 months, the price of a token has gone down by 200x. But that's just the super early innings, right? We're talking about the first two years ago, we didn't have ChatGPT. Today we have so many different applications that are utilizing this technology. So will it go down 200x over the next two years? I don't know, but it will probably go down by 10x or 20x. Do we expect to see 10x better models or 20x better models? That'd be pretty insane, right? Don't you think that those 20x better model is going to be pretty insane for all of us?”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Same with Google Cloud. So that's a great business over time. And then you look at the LLMs. So if you're just providing tokens, is that a great business? Right now, given the public profile of OpenAI and financials that we've all seen, today it's not a great business, but they're smart enough to figure out how they can get to a gross margin that will allow them to be a highly profitable business over time.”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “The beautiful thing about just the GPUs getting better and the infrastructure being more performant, models getting better. Sure, the models are getting bigger too at the same time. So let's maybe like draw the difference between there's all the folks who are providing there's GPUs, there's the people providing data centers, there's people who've now built LLMs on top of all this compute infrastructure that's there. So what's a clearly NVIDIA is a great business hyperscalers are investing today for the future and I think ultimately the margins just like if you look at 20 years later of AWS how great of a business that is that standalone basis would be a top four enterprise software company”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “I don't, it's a bit like the hyperscalers thinking they can do everything and they've decided that that's a great business model is to own the electricity and then just charge for by the by the hour or the kilowatt hour. That's a pretty darn good business model for the hyperscalers that provide the models and opening AI. I was at OpenAI maybe a month ago and we're going through all these demos of cool products that are coming out like 01 and Strawberry and realized that their positioning is we can't do everything. We're a 1600 person company. We can't build the application layer stuff that we want you guys to build or your companies to build. And so there's a great business to be had in LLMs and in providing the compute and the electricity. And there's a great business to be had by being very vertically focused around applications.”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “There's a lot of time being spent on a lot of the middle layer between the foundation models and the applications. And I think in the middle layers, middleware, things that allow you to use those models better, faster, cheaper, and build applications on top. So if you think the application at the top of the pyramid, the foundation model at the bottom of the pyramid pyramid.”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “You know, I was on a call yesterday with one of my CEOs, and he said, Hey, can you hold on for a second? I said, Sure, got to hold music for my CEO.”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Yeah, I think we will hopefully never talk to a customer support agent ever again. Like someone you call for the airlines, like, you know, help me my flight. I need to upgrade it or I need to change my seat or can you cancel it because I can't go or the bank, things of that ilk that you still scratch your head. Why am I still doing this? And it will happen, you know, hopefully just like you provide a text message and it gets resolved on the back end and it's all being done by agents talking to agents and stuff like that happening. I hopefully think the world will not have a way better customer support experience”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “All this cool stuff that's coming into existence in the last two years, and seeing what can I do with it? And every CIO, every large company is spending real money doing POCs. In many cases, we realize like, you know, it's hard actually to build this custom thing inside. And this reminds me of like 25 years ago during the internet, everyone's spending a lot of money internally to do things on the internet. And then you hired all these consultants from razor efficient sapient and other companies that came in and tried to help you with the internet. And I think that same thing is happening right now. And history repeats itself.”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Why exactly? And now I think it's actually maybe slightly different. That's too broad of a brush to paint with is if you think of the people you'd hire for customer support as labor that you would spend money on, now how about you hire developers to do the labor work for you in the form of AI? So I get the rationale perhaps that Sebastian has around doing that internally, but I also get like there will be a company that's going to do it really well for you and you will have to pay for outcomes and you will have to pay for the number of tickets resolved by that software or that AI. So the question is, are you not willing to pay that? And in most cases, at the end of the day, you're like, you know, I should just pay Stripe 2.5%. Okay, rather than billing it all myself. So the question will be, well, how many companies will go down the path of Karna? The other side of it is that right now we're in this area, you talked about sugar rush. We're in this era of you're doing a bunch of proof of concepts. You're just trying out.”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Exactly. We use affinity. It's great. Okay. All right. And you know, like we had four engineers on it, like working. Why?”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, well, hats off to Klarna for undertaking this. I just remember the time when we built an internal CRM at Kleiner Perkins and it sort of cost us many millions of dollars and then ongoing millions of dollars a year to just upkeep. And at some point, we realized like there's a great tool.”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “So, in the age of AI, you have to think about what are we doing? We're not just providing software, we're providing labor, we're providing capabilities that enable people to 10x the work or 5x the work. And it's helping real labor costs either multiply your abilities as a developer or a doctor, or bring costs down. You're not just getting paid for seat-based pricing anymore. You're getting paid for labor. So we're seeing right now is that you have seat-based pricing that was $30 a month, $40 a month, and now you're getting $300 a month, $400 a month, even $500 a month. So simple math is that if you, you know, you go from start to a thousand seats and you got paid $30, you know, you're getting $30,000 a month if you're getting paid $300, you're getting $300,000 a month, and you're going very quickly from zero to four or five million of revenue.”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, I think I heard from someone many years ago, 20% of the strategy should be to not be on strategy. In some ways, we have what we call like a YOLO bucket in our funds and where you just have this extreme conviction around the founder and the company where you're sort of willing to break the rules.”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “Great question, Harry. And I think we all sort of fall victim to those every once in a while, but that can't be the core part of the business. That can be the one that got away and you have to get into this pre-product company because the founder is so exceptional. That can be, you know, one out of the 20 deals you do this year. It can't be every single one of them because as you know, Harry, we have to get our ownership at the early stages where you're investing five to ten million dollars for 15 to 20 percent for the math to work for our funds. And it can't be done if you're investing 25 million at 750 post out of an early stage fund.”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “No different than anything else in venture capital. Our job is to invest in early stage companies that make history and our generational in nature and our job is to recognize the trends and the tectonic shifts in technology and then invest in the right people and the right markets at the right time. And right now, I would say the entropy in the system is really high. It's crazy out there. It is like things are changing left and right. That makes, I think, the job really fun. I just would say that it's the same as it was 25 years ago.”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Yeah, I think it's like any other space, any other traditional linear software space I call them. It's about teams that will out hustle and will outwork and have, in this case actually, the technology really does matter. The quality of the output of their models really does matter. The tuning of what they've done to the frontier model does matter. You can't have a medical transcriber that's 87% good. It has to be close to like 99% good. That actually requires real technical depth and adeptness. I would say”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Okay, so we just talked about how everyone's overinvesting right now into this cycle. None of us can miss, whether it's the large incumbents or us as venture investors back in companies. And so your question is like, where do we invest as venture investors? And I can tell you we've invested in a lot of application layer companies that are solving very specific pain points. The way we've looked at it pretty simply is we took actually the top 20 jobs in the US who makes the most and it's doctors, it's lawyers and it's developers. How do we help supercharge these people who are highly scarce, highly skilled, and we're not producing enough of them? So you try to build software, AI, that helps them do their job better. So we backed companies that help doctors, lawyers, and developers, co-pilots. So Harvey, ambience, codium.”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “It doesn't because I think the opportunity is still in front of us. I think there are so many things to build on top of this infrastructure, all these frontier models that is going to create so many trillions of value over the next decade.”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Yeah, we have some very strong incumbents, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, Oracle, who can all spend hundreds of billions on these front-end models. So you're absolutely right. And Larry's absolutely right, of course.”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “It is the most exciting time to be alive. We're in the midst of a super cycle like none we've seen before, the AI super cycle, as you know. It reminds me of the time when I first came to Silicon Valley in 1997. I was 19 years old and it was all just roses all around me. It was the rise of the internet. This time feels much like it multiplied by 10. And that obviously puts us in an interesting spot as venture investors who get to invest into this cycle. Yeah, the world's not going to be the same anymore.”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “I love products that create markets. Slack created a market. Figma created a market. They get to create the playing field. They play on the playing field, and they win the game. There is more capital in our industry than ever before. That capital at times thinks that everything will be a deck of corn and you're overfunding some companies. There's a lot of time being spent on a lot of the middle layer between the foundation models and the applications. There's just a lot going on there. I feel like perhaps it's a little overinvested. We've invested in a lot of application layer companies. We took actually the top 20 jobs in the US. And it's doctors, it's lawyers, and it's developers. How do we help supercharge these people who are highly scarce, highly skilled, and we're not producing enough of them?”

    2024-10-21 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source