The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
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
Mon, 21 Oct 2024
Mamoon Hamid is a General Partner @ Kleiner Perkins and one of the greatest venture investors of our time. In the past, Mamoon has led rounds in Figma, Slack, Rippling, Intercom, Glean and Box. Prior to joining Kleiner Perkins, Mamoon was a Co-Founder of Social Capital, and prior to that a Partner at U.S. Venture Partners (USVP). In Today’s Episode with Mamoon Hamid We Discuss: 1. The Greatest Venture Deal of All Time: Figma or Slack: What is Mamoon’s highest returning deal? What did Mamoon see in Dylan and Figma when they had no revenue and very little user data? What compelled Mamoon to write Stewart the check with Slack? What did he not see with Slack that he should have seen? 2. Taking Control of the Great Brand in Venture: Kleiner Perkins: Is it true that Kleiner approached Mamoon and gave him the keys to the Kleiner kingdom? How did it go down? Will Kleiner go back to having multiple products, large growth funds, international funds? What does Mamoon want Kleiner to be in 5 years? What was the hardest element of the transition into Kleiner? What did Mamoon not know that he wishes he had known? 3. Becoming a Generational Defining Investor: Market, founder, product, how does Mamoon rank them 1-3? How has Mamoon changed most significantly as an investor? What does he know now that he wishes he had known when he became a VC 19 years ago? What is his biggest loss? How did it shape his mindset and go forward investing approach? 4. AI Supercycle: The Greatest Time to Invest Where does Mamoon believe the value will accrue in this wave of AI? Where are many investors spending a lot of time but Mamoon believes is not worthy of that time? Will scaling laws continue? Have we ever seen an incumbent set spend like this incumbent class? How does that change the game for VCs?
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
This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and today we are joined by one of the greatest venture investors of our time, Mahmoud Hamid, general partner at Kleiner Perkins. I will tell you why he's the best. He is able to consistently see greatness at moments in a company's lifetime when it is not clear. He did Figma when it had almost no revenue at a $100 million valuation.
Similarly, he did Slack when it had almost no revenue at a $250 million valuation. The company ultimately sold for $27 billion. He also did Rippling pre-inflection point. The man is a master picker. He's also been a dear friend. I met him at SASTA nine years ago, and he's been a mentor to me ever since. This was such a special show to do.
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Mamoun, I am so excited for this, man. I can't believe it. You just reminded me that Sasta nine years ago was our first show. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you so much, Harry, for having me. It's so great to be here. Listen, I wanted to start. I started an LP update the other day that I did with, it is the most exciting time to be in venture.
It's also the hardest time to be in venture.
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 the world's not going to be the same anymore the thing that's seismically different for me when i look at the two and i don't mean to age you i was four in that kind of period we didn't have the incumbent spending a hundred billion dollars on frontier models larry allison said the other day it's gonna be a hundred billion dollars to enter the frontier model race and you're looking at that going christ that is a different level of incumbent spend than we've ever seen before how do we think about that as it is a fundamentally different edition
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.
Does that make it harder for us as venture investors with the rise of corporate investors who maybe have different motives or different incentive structures? Does that make it harder for us?
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.
I hate kind of broad and generous questions because they're generally for crap interviewers. But as I said, I've done 2,700, so hopefully I have some skills. But when you think about kind of the AI landscape today, how do you think about where the most value will accrue and you want to concentrate most of your time and capital?
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.
I completely understand that rationale. My question to you when I look at those is fantastic. Trouble is, there's 10 alternatives going off to every category. Yeah. How do you think about differentiation in this world when there are 10 transcribers note-taking apps for doctors?
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.
It's really interesting. You said that it's very much like investing of old, really backing incredible teams in the right markets, building incredible products. So many people said, listen, Mamuna is one of the greatest investors of the last decade. When we look at some of the picks from Rippling to Figma, the list goes on. It's insane. Is AI investing different to traditional SaaS investing?
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.
It's also challenging from a pricing perspective. I saw three companies, Mamoun, last week that raised it over $750 million pre-product. How do you think about navigating the pricing environment when there is such further pitch excitement for these companies?
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.
My question is then, how do you think about breaking the rules and letting the one that got away not become the norm?
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.
Have we ever seen revenue scaling like this either? I'm brought up in the days of like 18 months, 10 million ARR was amazing. This was like the gold standard. And now we're in 11x, which is insane revenue scaling. And you're seeing this across the board. How do you think about determining sugar high revenues, unsustainable but very fast, versus sustainable value creating?
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.
You've seen companies like, we said about kind of replacing labor there. We've seen companies like Klarna say, you know, we're going to replace Salesforce and Workday in that specific case. And we're going to build it with, you know, our own AI tooling. To what extent do you think we'll see the next generation of companies build their own custom tooling and replace existing SaaS solutions?
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 called... We could just get Affinity. Exactly. We use Affinity. It's great, okay?
For like $3,000.
And, you know, like, we had four engineers on it, like, working... Why? Why? Exactly. Why? 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 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 two and a half percent, okay, rather than billing it all myself. So the question will be, well, how many companies will go down the path of Klarna? 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 all this cool stuff that's come into existence in the last two years and seeing what can I do with it? And every CIO at every large company is spending real money doing POCs. In many cases, you realize like, you know, it's hard actually to build this custom thing inside POC.
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.
What today do we do or not do that in 10 years time we will look back and go, that's crazy. So some examples is you would never put your credit card on the internet, one. Two, you would never find your partner on the internet.
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 with my flight and get upgraded or I need to change my seat or can you cancel it because I can't go. You know, 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 have a way better customer support experience. Please hold.
It's when you're waiting on insurance lines and it's like, please hold. And like 30 minutes later, it's like, they put the phone down on you like, what?
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. I got hold music from my CEO. You got hold music? From one of my CEOs.
I was deeply offended. I love the balls though to have the professionalization of like hold music. Where do you think a lot of people are spending time today in the investing world that you don't understand or don't think they should be?
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, you know, pyramid.
In the middle, you've got middle layer. There's a lot of new technologies emerging that allowed it, for example, to capture vector databases or waits for fine tuning of models inside of vector databases and things of that ilk. There's just a lot going on there. At the same time, some of the value seems fleeting in nature.
I think in early innings, when things are in such high degree of change, so the rate of change is so high, there is a lot of that investing that happens. I feel like perhaps it's a little over invested.
I do have to ask, you know, when we look at a lot of potential use cases, a lot could be subsumed by the foundational model companies if they are big enough. An example could be talking translators, talking avatars that you could talk to in a friendly enough way.
How do you do you worry about application layer companies being potentially subsumed by foundation model layer if they are such a core competency?
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 hour or the kilowatt hour. That's a pretty darn good business model for the hyperscalers that provide the models and opening eye.
I was at opening eye maybe a month ago and we're going through all these demos of cool products that are coming out like O1 and Strawberry. and realize 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.
Is there really a great business to be had in the LLM layer? When you look at the price dumping that's occurring right now, it relatively, and the commoditization that we're seeing occurring, you know, you get people like Sarah Tanville, who we love, is like the fastest depreciating asset in history. Every week is like, Anthropic is better than OpenAI. Now, yeah, OpenAI is better than Anthropic.
And bluntly, the price dumps are real. Is it actually a good business?
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 draw the difference between there's all the folks who are providing those GPUs, there's people providing data centers, there's people who've now built LLMs on top of all this compute infrastructure that's there. So 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. 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. Do you think the scaling laws will continue?
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 chat GPT. 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 the 20x better model is going to be pretty insane for all of us?
David Kahn at Sequoia wrote this article, the $600 billion AI question, pointing out the chasm, as you know, between, bluntly, the costs and the capex, and then the revenues that are incredibly lagging from AI companies, and essentially being the $600 billion question of AI. Do you share his concern with that, or do you have a different view?
I'd say if I look at the... Do you know what the world's GDP is? No. 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'll 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 spent on CapEx or $600 billion spent, I think the question is really the $200 billion should result in $600 billion of revenue.
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 our 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.
Listen, when we spoke before, you said to me that the nature of the landscape is changing so fast and it's kind of all the same but different in terms of the venture landscape.
What's the same then? The same is we're in the business of backing incredible founders who are... perseverating 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. So what's different? 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. What
When we look at the venture landscape, you have like, in my mind, boutiques, USV benchmark boutique, and you have like capital accumulators, which is Tiger, Co2, Andreessen, General Capitalist, Lightspeed, Sequoia now. Where does Kleiner sit in that? Because you kind of sat in the middle in my mind.
How 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.
What have been your biggest lessons? I suck at doing reserves. I think it's a very hard thing to get good at. Please give me your wisdom. What have been your biggest lessons in how to do reserves management and concentration of capital well?
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 the series B and beyond. And it's generally worked out pretty well. So you're 60% initial, 40% for subsequent two rounds? That's a rough, rough math.
And then we move dollars around, you know, a company may get acquired early or a company might shut down and we'll rejigger those dollars around. It's an art and a science. When you don't do it, how do you communicate that to founders as well?
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 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 prerata, 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.
Have you ever had a pay-to-play turnaround? I said this the other day to an investor and they said, okay, I bet you, if you never participate, you will do better off. You have? Wow. That's good to hear.
I've had companies that are one week away from cash out become public companies. Wow. Yeah. Can you say? Yeah, sure. Box. Really? Yes. Wow. There was a point in time where we had to do three bridges at Box back in 2008, 2009. Why? What was not working? The market sucked. Nobody wanted to invest in a cloud storage business that would get eaten up live by a Google or a Microsoft.
So I mean this respectfully. Yeah. When Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger would say, you know, Mr. Market, don't try and be smart on the market. Yeah. When the market is giving you signal like that, why do you do it? And how do you get comfortable doing that when the market is giving you such?
Harry, 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 like 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. Every incremental dollar, two, three million dollars in bridge that was being done, done at that valuation.
What are the biggest reasons breakout companies plateau in your mind? You've seen some absolute monsters and you mentioned that Box struggled in those times. What are the reasons why breakouts plateau?
They don't innovate anymore or fast enough. They are what big companies become, which is, you know, you're trying to protect your turf and you're not disrupting yourself. And someone else comes in to disrupt you and starts taking away revenue from you. You mentioned Box there. Box, obviously, IPOs.
A liquidity event is always welcomed by LPs and investors. How do you think about when's the right time to sell? It's the age old thing. You look at all of, you know, Bessemer's memos. You always underestimate the size of your winners. How do you think about when to sell?
Great question. Well, I wish there was a bit more selling happening right now or opportunities to sell. As you know, the M&A markets have been pretty, pretty slow. But to answer your question, Harry, there's a local maxima that I think about sometimes with companies where this is sort of the local maximum in terms of perceived value by the market for a company. And that's a great time to sell.
And so now you have to figure out when is the local maximum for a company. And I would say it's like the markets are riding high, but it's also like where people believe that this company is the leader. But there's questions around whether there's a standalone company we built and it's way better off being acquired by a strategic who can do even better things with the company.
That is, again, doesn't happen as much anymore. Have you done well selling? There's one particular example that I think ended up working out pretty well. This is when Yammer got acquired by Microsoft. It was a $1.2 billion acquisition. At the time, it felt like, man, we've got so much ahead of us. Yammer can become the next Slack.
And fortunately for us, Yammer got acquired and a year later we had a chance to invest in Slack. And so it almost like you had a great outcome and then you weren't conflicted out of investing in the future Slack.
Also, you don't have the challenge when it's acquired of like, do I hold, do I distribute, do I not? And that awful choice, it's almost easier when the choice is removed. Do you know what I mean?
Yeah. Yeah. In that case, when you get just cash, you just distribute the cash and you move on. And, you know, generally speaking, I would say even when companies go public for us, we've been pretty good about distributing stock. It's tough when you think Shopify went public at 700 million though.
Yeah. It's one way, either way, you're going to get criticised.
Yeah. And I would say just, Harry, again, we have a lot of friends in the industry. In almost all scenarios, when you're returning 10x the fund on a great outcome, or 5x plus, let's say, of a fund through a legendary company, your LPs are happy. You're happy. You wish you would have held on and generate another few multiples on that fund. But you have an option of holding it.
The LPs do, as do you as a GP. You can hold on to your Google stock forever as John Doerr has done over the last 25 years. And that's a great choice you have. What has been your best performing investment on a pure multiples basis? It's probably Slack, I would say, even at the 250 post with all the dilution over time and take the 27 billion or some other number. That's a great multiple.
Figma, the initial investment was done at about 100 post. Rippling was also in the 250 post when we did it. There's one investment I remember doing early days of USVP where we did it at, I think, 10 post. It was a $3 million check for like 30% of the company. That company, about a year and a half ago, the founder, CEO, Steve Flagg, they sold it to Siemens for $700 million.
And that ended up being 70X. Crazy multiple, right? Some ridiculous multiple. But you know, when you hold on to something for 15 years, guess what the IRR on that investment was? If you still owned, let's say, 25% of that company at 700 million, so like 100 and something, 170 million, 3 million becomes 170 million or something like that, or that's a great multiple.
But the IR over 15 years looked more like, I think it was like 15%. We're in the multiple business still at the end of the day. But IRRs do take a hit when you hold on to something for 15 years.
But liquidity is tough. And liquidity is tough because M&A is not what it used to be. Mamoun, are M&A markets dead?
They're in slow, man. Yeah, slow. A lot of the big companies are just gun-shy. I hear this all the time. Just like not ready. Too much going on in the regulatory space. Why would you bother if you're them? Exactly. You're like, why create headaches?
We already have multiple legal things that we're pursuing, and we don't need yet another thing we're questioned about or used as an example in this other thing. So yeah, why bother? The question is, are there a next tier of companies that will buy? And we thought, obviously, with Adobe Figma, Adobe is that next tier. And even that, the story has been told.
Well, I think the thing that you are seeing is actually like incredibly high priced companies. Yeah. I'm not going to name names because they are too high priced, but they are actually acquiring much smaller companies in only stock deals. And, you know, I've had quite a few deals back where, you know, I'm getting like shares at $10 billion in this company. I'm like, well, it's worth two.
And that is the kind of acquisition currency that they're going for. And they're small enough that regulatory wise, they're not getting any done. That's the only thing I'm seeing.
Yeah, you're right. Yeah, there are big private companies looking to buy small private companies. That's happening. And I think small, that was never part of the playbook. What would change the M&A market today? You know, it's easy to say like, you know, regulatory environment, like the people running these organizations.
Yeah, is it? I mean, being blunt, is it like, hey, Lena Kong gets replaced and then we get right M&A back?
I don't think so. I don't think a lot of the blame on Lina Khan, poor Lina Khan. In our own experience, that was not the issue for Adobe Figma. It wasn't Lina or the FTC. There were other issues here in the UK. There was a CMA that was really involved there.
IPO markets are also, like, bluntly not easy. Cerebrus, I think I'm pronouncing it right. Yeah, I think Cerebrus. Cerebrus, there we go. Filed recently. But that's kind of been it recently. Are you concerned by IPO markets being closed?
Yeah. Yeah, I think everyone's just waiting until after the election. You know, I think we all thought there's a window of like eight weeks before the election or this year to go out and just not a lot of activity. I do think that we're going to have a good year next year.
You do? I do. I think we need to see one of the big ones go out for it to open. It needs to be a Databricks, a Stripe, a Starlink. You're not going to make it on Cerebrus.
I'm really hopeful. I think next year will be a good year for IPOs.
You mentioned the $100 million thing around, for example. I spoke to quite a few of our mutual friends and they said, you've got to ask him about this. Respectfully to Dylan and team, this was pre any revenue scaling, really. This was pre any real inflection point in the company. Cash had been in before. Greylock were in already. Index were in already.
He saw something that no one else in the market saw. This was like a real pick.
What did you see that no one else saw in this round and why did you? Credit goes first and foremost to Dylan and Evan who'd built an incredible product. It was just, it took a while to build. We've heard sort of famously the story around like WebGL advancing and finally by 2017 Figma had a product that could work multiplayer inside the browser as a design tool.
And that just wasn't the case in 15, 16. It just wasn't didn't have the latency for people like designers are very high end in terms of like their needs for product naturally. Right. And so lucky for us that we got to see the company when the product started to work and in the metrics for the product, even though the numbers of
number of users was small, the amount of use, you look at something like a Dao Mao or look at an L28, you just saw that designers were using the product 15, 16, 17, 18 days out of a month. So effectively every workday, a designer was going in and collaborating inside of Figma or using it to design inside of Figma.
And so you saw early indications that the product that had just launched and it was just in a few hundred K revenue, it was working. Yeah, lucky for us that we got to catch it before it. Can I ask, what did you get wrong in your assumptions on Figma? I have to share my memo with you. I would love that. Yeah, I know. I'll share it with you.
Sometimes it's eerie how right you can get it in terms of talking about the adjacencies to product people, so designers to then marketers and to engineers, not just the growth in designers driving the number of seats that you can sell at Figma, but also adjacent seats.
and doing the math behind what was potentially possible in terms of Figma's TAM, which one would have said, well, it's just like the Envision TAM or the Sketch TAM, which is not that exciting. Sometimes you can play this out in diligence or play this out in your head around building a real prepared mind around an investment. And in the case of Figma, sometimes you get it right.
Do you like competitive markets?
You mentioned Envision, you mentioned Sketch. Envision was bigger than Sketch for quite a while, actually. Both Sketch and Envision were way bigger than Figma for a while. And a lot of investors were like, this market's competitive. Do you like competitive markets and say, yes, it's competitive because that's where there's enterprise value?
Or do you actually prefer my mindset, which is I don't want to be one of 10 going after this?
Yeah, I don't mind competitive markets, but at the same time, I love products that create markets. Slack created a market. In some ways, Figma created a market. There wasn't a notion of collaborative design software. I love companies that create markets. They get to create the playing field, they play on the playing field, and they win the game. That's a beautiful thing.
I spoke to Owen, another one of your founders before, who I love. Intercom's a great story, but he said that you definitely have a type. You have... It's young and it's not where you're going. It's product oriented. And he said it's very much deeper than that. Unpack that with him. So when you think about your founder type, I know we say we don't have one and we have everything. Probably not true.
Yeah. What is your founder type?
One of the founder types that I love is the first time founder, hyper obsessed about building a product in a sort of newish market where it's not obvious and the market doesn't necessarily exist. And that would, I'd put Owen from Intercom in that bucket. I'd put Dylan from Figma in the bucket. Owen's alluding to young product centric founder.
And the other bucket for me is actually the repeat founder who had an okay outcome or even a pretty good outcome and is doing it again. And I would put Stuart Butterfield from Slack in that bucket. I would put Parker from Rippling in that bucket. He was a repeat founder, as you know. So there's the first time founder going into a market that they're hyper obsessed about.
They're building a beautiful product. Taste is on. The level of grind and grit is there. And then there's a second time founder who wants to surpass anything they've done before. What founder profile don't you like? I don't like the, we looked at the landscape and we discovered this is a great place to build a business.
We did a whole market mapping exercise and the TAM is going to be X billion dollars. It is that sort of like the top down approach to building a company versus the bottoms up approach to building a company.
Are you okay paying a premium for the experience? I'm doing a seed now at Mamoon and I so appreciate you being our PM, my funds. Price is slightly up. It's like a 40 million for a pre-seed, pre-product, pre-anything. Yeah. The founders are unbelievable from one of the best companies in the world and exceptional and paying a premium for experience. Right. You're always happy to do that.
Yeah. So, I mean, I'll just give hard numbers. We'll be back to Arvind Gleen. Yeah. We did it, co-led it with Lightspeed at 35 post. And Arvind is a G. You know, he started Rubrik. He's like... How much did he raise? He raised a lot. He's like 15 million at 35 post. So gave up a lot of the company in that round. A 35 post? Yeah.
Yeah, and because... That's not crazy for someone to evolve in his profile, actually. It's not. I don't think it's high. Yeah. I think, but in today's environment, that would be like, oh, it needs to be 200 posts. So... Would you do that at 200 posts? Probably not. That's a hard thing. So I think... It's not that I'm trying to get a deal.
I'm trying to work with people who see the world the way I see it. And they're willing to be partners together and creating a bigger pie for all of us. They're not so short-term oriented around like, well, I need to have this crazy pricing. Or another example is Syed Ali at Aleph. We did that also at like 35 posts. And Syed had come off of a company just sold for $6 billion.
And do you think he could have raised at a higher price? Probably. But he's just that this is feels fair. It feels right. And so I'm sure a lot of people listening are here thinking, oh, wow, like we really jammed them. Or no, these are adults making decisions together around what the right pricing of a company should be at that stage.
A lot of times founders are told, listen, your job is to raise as much money as possible at the highest price. Yeah. Agree or disagree? Disagree.
At that series A seed, it's about the people you're surrounding yourself with.
I also think, bluntly, it can damage you incredibly for the next round. When you don't actually scale into it and suddenly you have to do a bridge or whatever it is, it makes it so much harder when you've got a hugely high watermark that you have to fill.
Do you think you should always be raising? For the CEO, founder CEO or CEO, your job is to make sure your company never rounds out of money. If you have $300 million sitting on your balance sheet, I'm not sure you should be raising at all. So if you're well capitalized, heads down, go build. When you've got a founder pick wrong, what do you get wrong?
Generally, I would say you get the markets wrong.
I would say that... Can a great founder overcome a bad market?
Hard. Yeah, hard. Bad markets, the structure of industries where margins are compressed and customers are bad. Life's just too hard that way.
So will you back a really great founder if they're in a shit market? Probably not. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. Because like for me, it's like I'm precedency generally speaking. We use series as well. But like generally precedency. I'm like, you know what? Great founders find their way to great markets. And if they're truly great, honestly, they'll pivot. They'll change. They'll make their way.
I mean, I think one could have said that about like you would have maybe would have missed the seat at Uber because what probably not so great economics early on, right? Customer acquisition and like trying to pay the drivers, et cetera. So I think Slack an obvious home run when you did it. None of these are obvious home runs when you do them, right? No, it wasn't. It was 500K of ARR at the time.
What price did you do that? 250 million post. You did it at 500X ARR. Yeah, and I think we weren't thinking in those terms. Why? Was it usage patterns again? Yeah, I think there were enough, at that time there were 10,000 or so users, like a third of them were using the product every day for multiple hours a day.
And like, okay, well, we all need something like Slack and you can scale this by a thousand X because there are lots of companies that look like this, that use it like this today.
Do you think that's the wrong mindset to approach it with? A lot of investors do approach it on a revenue multiple basis.
Is that wrong? For early-stage companies, yeah. You can't take a 500K ARR or a million.
But when you're paying 250, it's kind of like a seed.
But if you've seen the engagement data on a product that you think can apply to 10,000, 100,000 companies, then... The entire workforce. Yeah, then why not? I think it's really a mistake to look at revenue multiples at like half a million, a million. What do you think is nuts that VCs do today that they shouldn't do? There's just a big echo chamber and a lot of people live in the echo chamber.
Folks think that's information and information is knowledge and knowledge is arbitrage. But when everyone has the same knowledge, then it's no longer arbitrage. Do you think everyone does have the same knowledge?
A lot of big firms say, we built out these amazing data platforms and that's why we're operating off this proprietary information.
I think it's mostly BS. Many have tried and failed at using the very data-oriented approach to investing in startups, when at the end of the day, it's about the founders. And the founders wanting to work with you. Exactly.
Yeah, no, I think... It's what I tell a lot of LPs, though, which is like, you know, I remember speaking to an LP actually about you. And I was like, the thing that you've got to understand with Mamoon is like, everyone in the Valley respectfully probably sees the same deals. But you have to be aspirational capital to the best founders in the world where they say, yeah, I've got 12 term sheets, but
I want for that one. And that's the only thing that matters. It doesn't matter that you saw it.
It means shit. Oh, 100%. It's about how do you position yourself so that the founders are choosing us. It's based on reputation of our body of work, our firm's body of work, what the firm represents, what we can offer them once we get involved or even before we're involved. What are people saying about you? What's the folks who you worked with before?
How do you think about decision-making? One of the things I think is crazy is voting structures in venture firms. I get asked this by a lot of LPs, which is like, what is your voting structure? And they kind of seem quite upset when I say, well, there's only four of us and so anyone can write a check. And I believe that the best deals are often non-consensus and right.
So we don't have like four out of 10 or six out of 10. They look quite upset with me when I say this. I think that's nuts. How do you feel about voting structures in decision-making?
Yeah, I don't believe in voting structures for early stage venture capital. I think you have to allow every partner to put themselves on the line with their conviction that they've built up over a year sometimes, weeks sometimes, but you have to give into the conviction of the person wanting to lead.
And so the way we work is that because we sit around the table, we literally get to see each other's body language. how someone goes from excitement to less excitement. When one of our partners, like, you know, Ilya asked me a question about why I'm so excited about a company, and then he asked another question, and then I just go, well, that's a good question that I don't have a good answer for.
Maybe my excitement wanes, and then I come back a few days later when we see each other again. It's like, you know what, like, we talked about that, and, you know, I'm sort of leaning out on the opportunity. And so I think that's also the magic of being around the same table in the same room. You get to really test each other's conviction. So you don't have a vote, right?
We have a discussion, but there's no vote.
If I disagree with you and I say, Mamoun, I don't think we should do this deal.
Yeah.
I do not see the market. I don't see the upside. The entry price is too high. If you wanted to veto me, you could veto me.
But that hasn't happened.
No one's ever vetoed. Why do deals get crushed mostly?
I'd say it's when questions get asked around, or is this a fleeting cycle of adoption for this sort of product? Or this is going to be gnarly dogfight because there are too many competitors, or this is the wrong time. The risk reward isn't great for this round. That's when your excitement tends to wane. Do you do outcome scenario planning? We used to, and haven't done it more recently.
We used to do like, what is the probability of this company being a zero, a $500 million exit, a $250 million exit, a billion dollar exit, and a $10 billion exit. You do the percentages. It's such false precision. I always do 25, 25, 25. Thank you so much. It's such false precision that I think it feels like busy work, actually. Who's the best picker in the team? Josh is a very precise picker.
I would say that Ilya and I, we're almost always on the same page. We're like too similar, actually. Is that too dangerous, actually? Because you can almost encourage each other. Well, it's actually great because if I meet someone and then I say, you know, Ilya, come over, you know, like I'll see him in the hallway. Can you meet this person for like five or ten minutes?
And he did that to me recently, actually. And he'll come in and he's like, oh, yeah, I see the same thing you do. So we are in some ways quite similar, which is awesome. I think we may miss some of the same things then too because of it. But I think it's a good lock to get, especially when we're trying to build conviction or at least quickly get to, am I seeing the same thing that you're seeing?
What was the most contentious deal that you did? You know, actually Figma was quite contentious. Because to your point around like half a million of AR at 110, 15 posts or whatever it was at the time. The same thing, there's Envision, there's Sketch. This company's been around for five years. It's not obvious to us. It was contentious that there's a lot of questions around the investment.
You had a fund that I can't remember the exact vintage, and it was a fast deployment. It was like 12 or 18 months. It was a time when everyone was deploying fast, but it was fast. How do you think about deployment pace? Is it a play the game on the field or do you take a much more structured discipline view towards it?
I think the view is, hey, we'd love to deploy over a two and a half to three year period of time. When we got to KP, I came in 2017, a bunch of the team joined in 2018. So Bucky, Ilya, Annie joined that year. Josh joined the same week I did. So there was a period of time in 2019. So we just raised our first fund as a team together where we deployed that fund within like 15 months.
Was that more the root plan fund? It was. Rippling, Glean, a bunch of other stuff in there. We just were a new team. Didn't have board seats. We had a fund ready to deploy, and so we deployed it fairly quickly. And I would say mostly Series A, like real ownership Series As, the core of the business. And so if I look at that fund, I think it'll be an amazing fund, actually. Unbelievable. Right?
And so you could have said like, well, wait a second, you guys didn't do time diversify. If you would have deployed over a two and a half year period, you would have missed... a high valuation environment into a lower and yada yada. And so I would say that that would be the counterpoint to fast deployment. Like, no, you can actually work.
Very dear mutual friend of both of ours is Kirsch. Kirsch and Thrive think that bluntly everyone has the plasticity to move between stages in their firm. I don't think everyone, but their investors do. I think that is just really hard to do.
Which side do you take? I think generally speaking, it's hard to have the neuroplasticity to one day think about 10 years ahead and a new infrastructure company that's building on a new open source framework. And the next day, think about pre-IPO stage consumer company.
While we all have one meeting, one pipeline meeting, one investment team meeting for both early stage and venture, all of us do venture investing and a few of us will do more of that select investing because we don't want to burden everyone to bring neuroplasticity to the job every day.
You said about kind of putting your name on the line and really believing. When have you put your name on the line most and been wrong?
You know, I've just gone through my first sort of bigger loss in terms of capital loss. For a while, a company just shut down, a company called Tally and the founder, Jason Brown, who I've known for 15 years. I had him on the show. Yeah. And how much did you lose? 30 million or so. Multiples of the largest loss prior to that. So I don't wear this badge of honor of like losing a lot.
I mean, there's a whole thing in venture, like you need to lose like so many million dollars before you made it kind of thing. And I think there's a lot more precision one can apply even at the early stage to not put more money in to lose more. Because our job is to invest 5, 10, 15 upfront. And if you lose five on a seed check, all good. That's your job. Is there anything you learned from Tally?
That lending businesses are really hard. Consumer lending is very hard. Did you do reserves there? Yes. And that was where it went wrong? Well, the first check was back to the 60-40. It was like 60-40, but there's more along the way that went in because they raised subsequent up rounds from great investors.
The round after us, Angela at Andreessen Horowitz did it, and it was a great round, great time for the company. And then it did one in 2022 with one of our seed investors, Sway, led the growth round because things were going really well. And then consumer lending just turned. This is when interest rates went up from 0% to 5%. And that really made that business really difficult.
How have you changed most significantly as an investor over time? I mean, obviously, there's more experience, but I actually try not to let that weigh me down because I think a job is to stay open-minded and have naivete and dream the dream. And too many scars aren't necessarily a good thing for being open-minded and thinking about what the next Figma or Rippling will be.
Where do you most need to improve as an investor? I think I'm a dreamer and I want to just believe in the people that I back. I heard this.
I heard that you are such a dreamer that sometimes you believe for too long and you should cut things before. Yeah. How do you think about knowing when is the right time to cut the belief and actually we've had enough time?
I agree. I agree with that. That is fair criticism. But I think that's just part of the package. That is who I am. I believe in the people and I want to be on that journey with them.
Do you believe in VC value, Admamun? Vinod Kose has famously said, you know, 90% of VC is actually just trying to find you.
Yeah, I don't disagree with Vinod that there's destruction of value that happens with the wrong advice. But I think if with the right advice and the right help, we can help supercharge your companies. What makes the, I'm not asking for the name, but what makes the worst board the worst board? The worst board, it starts with how a CEO runs a board. How do the best CEOs run a board?
They start off with a high level view of how the company is doing, and then they give a chance for their leaders. They're very capable leaders to go dive in deep and share and ask questions. And there's a fair bit of cheerleading, but a fair bit of like asking the hard questions. And I like board meetings where there's one or two things that are talked about in detail.
You go deep dive into one or two things because at any given point in time in a company's juncture, that moment in time, one or two things that really matter, we can help change the trajectory on. And so if we're talking about seven different things that matter, we're probably missing the point. And so I love board meetings where that's sort of the structure.
Two more questions and then we'll do a quick five.
Do you mind super dilutive businesses like your DoorDash? I know Uber and DoorDash have different cash profiles intensely, but still, do you mind them?
Personally? Yeah. Those are not my kind of businesses. I like more capital efficiency, but I can get behind them.
What would you like climate to look like in 10 years? When I hear you there, it feels like actually there is scope for you to go into the capital accumulator bucket.
Yeah.
Do you want that?
No, I don't. I don't think we want that at all. We love where we are today. We really do. And I don't try to not BSing you, your longtime friend. And I believe in venture, early stage venture being a beautiful asset class, especially if you can follow the power law and being the few companies that matter. And then you can invest in the very few companies that really matter out of your select fund.
And then call it a day. I totally agree.
We share the love of venture and we share the kind of love of the boutique-y nature of venture. I want to move into a quick fire. What do you believe that most around you disbelieve?
Venture is an easy job. It's glamorous. It's all of that except glamorous.
My favorite is the amount of friends I have who are operators who are like, this isn't what it said on the tin. This is so fucking hard. Totally. And you're like, yeah. I totally agree with you there. What's the most memorable first founder meeting you've had?
It has to be Aaron Levy when I first met him. Why? He brought along with him a wonderful person, Karen Page, because he thought he had to bring on an executive or bring an executive to the first meeting. It was just, he was like hyper nervous, I felt, coming to a VC firm office like in a coat and shirt.
But I could tell from that meeting that he had thought about the problem of cloud storage more than, and this is 2007, so like cloud storage was not a thing. more than anyone else. And so for me, it was like an instant I need to invest in this founder, like right away. But it was also just memorable from the other things that were going around.
The public market revenue multiples need to reflect for venture to be a sustainable business. You mentioned Box there.
A billion in revenue. A billion in revenue. Four and a half billion market cap. Yeah. Yeah, I think growth and profitability. So to my point, do we need to see the reflation for venture to be sustainable or not? I think just getting back to sort of normal historical levels would be good enough.
Which venture investor do you most respect and learn from outside of Kleiner?
You know, one of my favorite investors is Matt Kohler from Benchmark, who I got to see yesterday. I wish he and I were on more boards together.
You can be CEO for a day, Mamoun, of any company. Which company are you CEO of? Easy, OpenAI. I just want to see what's going on. I just want to see how far AGI really is. What concerns you most in the world? You can be CEO for a day, Mamoun, of any company. Which company are you CEO of? Easy. OpenAI.
Really? I just want to see what's going on. I just want to see how far AGI really is. Geopolitics, polarization, even in our own countries here. We talked about the UK. We talked about the US a little bit before we got going. There's too much of an us versus them, whether it's in our own countries or competing with other countries. Yeah.
This is so unfair of me, but fuck it. I've got you, I can. You can invest in a seed firm, a series A firm, and a growth firm purely on multiples basis. Who do you invest in?
Seed firm, you. Series A firm, us. And growth firm, us.
I was like, he's going to give me a new one here. Come on, hit me. I can tell you mine. You tell me yours first. Well, I mean, like one on the seed, I'd do Gili Ronan at CyberStarts in Israel. Okay. If you want a pure seed play.
Okay.
Unbelievable. It would either be Kleiner or it would either be Benchmark because of the smaller fund size. And then growth, it would have to be either Pat or Kush. I totally agree. Penultimate one, what do you know now that you wish you'd known when you joined USVP 19 years ago?
Just that venture is a grind. Do you still love it as much as you did? Absolutely. I mean, how could you not love living in this super cycle of AI, man? We will not see this at the ground floor level value creation in our lifetimes ever again. Final one, what question are you never asked that you think you should be asked more? Religion and politics are like the taboos, obviously.
And so the question is, how does faith impact the way you work? How does faith impact the way you work? It's everything. It starts, it's the beginning of your day, it's the end of your day, and everything in between is, is how do you, how does your faith inform how you treat people? How do you treat this earth? How do you show up in a meeting with someone?
It's around how much humility do you bring? Empathy, care, love for each other, for the planet. You know, just like it's sort of like deeply embedded in you. And it's at a board meeting, you know, everything.
My deep faith lies in liquidity. That's the most like capitalist way to finish the conversation. I mean, I've loved doing this. Thank you so much for joining me. And this has been so special. Amazing. Thank you so much, Harry. My word, that was so much fun to do. As I said, I met Mamoun at a SASTA conference in 2016.
He's been a dear friend and a mentor ever since, and that was so special to do in person. You can watch the full interview on YouTube by searching for 20VC, that's 20VC. But before we leave you today, this episode is presented by Brex, the financial stack founders can bank on.
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