Uncapped #16 | Mamoon Hamid from Kleiner Perkins

**Mamoon Hamid** (0:00)
Kleiner had made history from the days of semiconductors, to then computers, to software, to the internet, those four big technology waves. If you look at the list of companies in each one of those major waves across decades, we pretty much nailed every single dominant company in those waves. And so, how could we make history again?

**Jack Altman** (0:23)
All right, Mamoon, I'm super excited to have this conversation with you. Thanks for making time for it.

**Mamoon Hamid** (0:27)
Thank you for having me, Jack. Really good to see you.

**Jack Altman** (0:29)
So, I want to start by talking about your kind of history over the last couple decades or 25 years in Silicon Valley. And if you could just sort of take us back to when you came to tech in Silicon Valley and maybe sort of the experience you had through the different innovation cycles.

**Mamoon Hamid** (0:47)
I was really fortunate to come to Silicon Valley as a first-time engineer, first job out of college in 1997, working for a semiconductor company of all things that was a company called Xilinx, actually Kleiner Perkins back company, that was the underpinnings of lots of switching and routing equipment that was the backbone of the Internet. And so I got to really see from that lens, the rise and the fall of the Internet, and see my stock appreciate and then depreciate a lot. And so I look back at that sort of first few weeks in my cubicle at Xilinx in San Jose in 1997 I'm 19 years old. I'm very influenced by all the things that were happening around me. And I've got a son workstation and I'm running the Netscape browser, buying books on Amazon for my grad school classes at Stanford. And turns out just that a new search engine has just come out called Google. And so these are the kinds of influences that I had in those early, early years in Silicon Valley. And turns out actually all those companies, Xilinx, Netscape, Sun, Google and Amazon, were all companies backed by Kleiner Perkins at the Series A. So which also got me thinking about, who are these venture capitalists? That seems pretty interesting as a job. 1997, 1998, 1999 were like these boom years. It felt a lot like probably today, but a lot more parties maybe at the time. And people forget that that was a time of like, it felt like a time of excess actually.

**Jack Altman** (2:27)
Was it way different feeling than now? Like on that front?

**Mamoon Hamid** (2:30)
It slightly, because I think we still have mostly builders today. And by 1998, 1999, non-builders had arrived to help monetize the internet. And a lot of interesting business models were sitting on top of, you know, the internet hype bubble. And so I feel like we're still like a few years removed from that today here. So they're still builders.

**Jack Altman** (2:53)
Did it all feel like smaller than, in a sense? Like, I mean, the whole industry, I guess, was smaller. So like, did it feel like more of like an insider club? Or did it feel like everyone's here and this is like a huge deal and the whole world knows?

**Mamoon Hamid** (3:04)
I think it felt like everyone here, actually. It felt like all around, everywhere you went, you know, just like the museums had parties at night and, you know, like the folks were hosting like.com parties and they were a real thing. And then folks were up and down from San Francisco down to San Jose.
It was a palpable feeling of progress, momentum, excess even. And it was, you know, for someone, I had gone to college in the Midwest at Purdue. And so to come from Indiana to Silicon Valley in 97 and be sort of on the periphery of that felt very different for one. But it did feel like a palpable energy of exuberance and excitement.

**Jack Altman** (3:48)
To me, I would think that it was closer to the AI moment than the Zert moment because there was a real thing happening. So I'm but I'm curious if that's how it felt to you and to people who were here during it. Like, was it clear that it was overinflated, but there was something very substantial? Or when the bubble popped, was it like, oh, we were all crazy?

**Mamoon Hamid** (4:08)
Yeah, I think it started to feel pretty crazy. And I think all of us at the time, I was an engineer with a group of 20 other engineers, part of my cohort that got recruited from college. And so, you know, things that we were doing, we were obviously on the internet, but we were also like day trading stocks. Like we were all had day tech accounts, day trade accounts, and Schwab accounts, because some of the stuff was so silly that was going on in the markets. A company would go public, it would have a 10X in that day, and then you sell the next day. And I mean, I learned a lot of hard lessons in trading public equities in those few years as a young person, but it felt silly. I mean, you could not equate what was you're buying and explain what it actually did and what kind of value it provided to people and humanity and to customers. And so these are companies with no revenue and tens of billions of market cap. And so you could not connect reality to the prices for these stocks.