Going back to the foundation of Kleiner Perkins with Mamoon Hamid through clear busines model focus and culture

**Samir Kaji** (0:00)
Welcome to another episode of Venture Unlocked, the podcast that takes you behind the scenes of the business of venture capital. I'm your host, Samir Kaji, and today we're thrilled to be joined by Mamoon Hamid, partner of Kleiner Perkins. As so many people know, Kleiner Perkins, which was founded 50 years ago, is one of the most storied franchises in the history of venture capital, having backed companies such as Genentech, Sun Microsystems, Amazon, Google, Twitter, and Uber. After stints at USVP and Social Capital, which he co-founded, Mamoon joined the firm in 2017 as part of a restructuring process to return the firm to being a boutique venture capital fund focused on early stage investing.
Since then, they've backed companies such as Rippling and Figma.
Mamoon and I spoke about how he and the team have executed on the mission of bringing Kleiner to what they have coined as going back to the future. While we covered a number of different topics, we really dug deep into the importance of culture and focus in building a long-term firm. This episode is a real treat to record, and I really hope you'll enjoy my conversation with Mamoon. So let's get right into the episode now.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:03)
Samir Kaji is the CEO and co-founder of Allocate. Allocate and Venture Unlocked are independent of each other. Any statements or references made by Sameer or his guests regarding third parties, investments or securities are solely their views and opinions and are not intended as investment advice or an endorsement of such parties or securities by Sameer, his guests or Allocate.
Allocate or its clients may maintain relationships with or investment positions in guests, third parties or securities mentioned in this podcast. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.

**Samir Kaji** (1:38)
Mamoon, it's so great to see you. Thanks for being on the show.

**Mamoon Hamid** (1:41)
So good to be here Sameer. Thanks for making some time for me.

**Samir Kaji** (1:45)
I want to go back a little bit and I usually don't spend too much time on our guest history, but you've had such an interesting ride and I think it'll paint a nice mosaic of what you've been doing over the last six years at Kleiner. Maybe a good place to start is just let's go back into your background of how you got into tech, how you got into venture and what led up to you starting with Kleiner in 2017

**Mamoon Hamid** (2:09)
I started in tech in 1997 I was a newly minted electrical engineer from Purdue.
Moved to Silicon Valley to start my first job at a company called Xilinx. Turns out my first day on the job, I go to my cubicle. I'm presented with my own SunSpark workstation, which is a kind of a jaw dropping thing because we had to share one of those amongst hundreds if not thousands of engineering students at Purdue where I went to college to have my own. And then, you know, at the time you're using the Netscape browser and there's things like Amazon to buy books. And it turns out actually all those companies, I sort of wanted to understand like who's behind all these companies. And it turns out it's like great founders and venture capitalists and the commonality across all of those companies, Xilinx, Sun Microsystems, Netscape, Amazon was Kleiner Perkins having like the Series A for all of those companies. And so for me, it was sort of a lightbulb moment of, whoa, wait a second, there are these folks called venture capitalists who get to really back the future of what the world really is and what a cool job that is. And so I got pretty interested in what are the backgrounds of the people. I think naturally, I think that you go towards trying to understand the people who do these jobs. And it turns out like, wait, wait a second, they were, many of them were electrical engineers like me and they'd worked in the semiconductor world or in the networking world. But they went to business school and I hadn't gone to business school.
So I got into tech, I was really just an engineer, of all things, I was doing technical support engineering at the time when I joined Xilinx in 1997

**Samir Kaji** (3:53)
Being on the engineering side, of course, working within a company, seeing how companies are built is obviously really interesting. And a lot of people stay on that direct line, go from company to company, maybe start their own companies.
What actually catalyzed the inspiration to go into the investing world?

**Mamoon Hamid** (4:11)