E2: Kleiner Perkins Makes the Case for Craftsman VC, with Mamoon Hamid and Ilya Fushman

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
Hey, everyone, Erik here. I'm excited to announce our newest show on investing at Turpentine, Sorcery by Molly O'Shea. Sorcery brings the conversations investors and founders have behind closed doors to light. Past episodes have featured Alex Kolitsich of AVC, Xander Oltman of Commodity Capital, and David Weisburd of 10X Capital, whom you might know from another Turpentine show. This is the show for investors by investors. We dive deep into topics like the significance of LPGP dynamics, portfolio construction, if SaaS is really dead, AI theses and predictions, and more.
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Welcome to Turpentine VC, a podcast where we discuss the art and science of building successful venture firms, investor to investor. I'm your host, Erik Torenberg, entrepreneur, investor and co-founder of Village Global, OnDeck and Turpentine. This week, I'm joined by Mamood Hamid and Ilya Fushman, general partners at Kleiner Perkins, the storied 51-year-old venture firm. Prior to teaming up at KP, Mamoon co-founded Social Capital and was a partner at USVP, and Ilya served 10 years at Index, Kosla and Dropbox. Mamoon and Ilya joined the firm in 2017 and 2018 respectively, receiving and carrying forward the torch of the iconic brand, helping drive the next chapter of its history. In this conversation, we uncover new ground and insights as to how KP functions as a firm and partnership, including how they go about decision-making, the majors and minors framework, the craftsman approach to venture, and the value of discipline. We also deep dive into the topics of how to evaluate and still agency into rising investment talent, what the NBA draft of venture might look like, and more. If you like what you hear, please subscribe and leave us review. Now, let's hear from Mamoon and Ilya.
Mamoon, Ilya, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for joining.

**Mamoon Hamid** (2:01)
Thank you, Erik.

**Erik Torenberg** (2:03)
So take us to, I don't know if it's 2015, or at some point where people are realizing, hey, we need to take a different track. Maybe we need some new blood in who's making these decisions and take us through what happened.
It's also an insight into how venture firms work and how partner transitions work.

**Mamoon Hamid** (2:21)
Yeah, yeah. So there, at the time, there were a number of partners, so general partners, some who were dedicated to specific funds and some who were across different funds.
But I would say the person who I owe a lot of credit in terms of recruiting me is Touchline. Got it.

**Erik Torenberg** (2:40)
And does he make the decision or is there a committee who makes it?

**Mamoon Hamid** (2:42)
No, it's a team. It's a partnership, and that's the beauty of Kleiner Perkins, the 51-year-old partnership. There is no CEO. There is no one person who makes the decision. And I think that is the beauty of a feature of a partnership. It's like you have a group of smart individuals who get to make decisions. And so Ted was really the person who recruited me.
And there's lots of other folks in the background who I spent time with and who were really important to the decision making. I would say it's like if they're just like a company, if there are two people who just don't want to support hiring a person, you're not going to hire a senior hire, right? And so that's sort of how things work over here as well.
But in terms of folks, Ted Schlein had been helping sort of figure out what the future of the firm would look like and what the team that could help him enable in accomplishing that would look like. And that's where some of the young blood came in.

**Erik Torenberg** (3:44)
So you guys were having conversations many years ago about what building a firm from the ground up could look like. Talk about what that vision was and what some of the conversations about what that could look like.

**Ilya Fushman** (3:58)
I mean, I think it's kind of like what we are building here, which is Craftsman approach. I mean, we've both been apprenticed in venture, working for others for a while, absorbing the business, learning how it's really done. Because it's not a business you can learn from a textbook. You kind of have to have reps on companies. You have to spend time. You have to really be in it to understand it.
But generally speaking, it is kind of what Kleiner Perkins used to look like in that golden era, which is a small team of people who really understand what company building is about, who've ideally practiced the craft of building or being in a company, whether it's early stage or late stage. And you have empathy for what it takes to really do that and really what matters at every stage of company, what's critical at any given juncture. And you can be a great advisor to an entrepreneur who's trying to do that. And you can actually discern what's a good idea and what's a good entrepreneur and what's a good market and what's not.