Mamoon Hamid
speaker
146 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Mamoon Hamid’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
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 over invested 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
Would you agree with that statement? 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, 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.
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.
Okay, so we just talked about how everyone's over-investing right now into the 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, its lawyers, and its 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've backed companies that help doctors, lawyers, and developers, co-pilots. So Harvey, Ambience, Codium.
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 all three of these examples I cited are started by founders who are extremely technical. And they've been at it. It's not just like some tourist AI engineer.
It is like sort of deep ML experts have been doing this before they started these companies and paired up with a very domain expert co-founder who understood the market that they're going after.
No different than anything else in venture capital. Our job is to invest in early stage companies that make history and are 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.
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 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 $5 to $10 million for 15 to 20% 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.
Yeah, I think I heard from someone many years ago, you know, 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.
So in the age of AI, we 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 do 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, you know, four or five million in revenue.
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