Venture Capital During the AI Revolution with Mamoon Hamid

**Mamoon Hamid** (0:02)
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**Barry Ritholtz** (0:08)
This week on the podcast, another banger, Mamoon Hamid is partner at Kleiner Perkins, where he's been focusing on early stage AI investments for nine years. He's got a fascinating background, early investor in Slack, Figma, Glean, Box, etc. Previously, he co-founded Social Capital with Chamath and worked for a number of other venture firms, including US Venture Partners. I thought this conversation was fascinating. And I think you will also with no further ado, my conversation with Kleiner Perkins, Mamoon Hamid.
Mamoon Hamid, welcome to Bloomberg.

**Mamoon Hamid** (0:57)
Thank you so much for having me, Barry.

**Barry Ritholtz** (1:00)
So I'm fascinated by your background. You grow up in Frankfurt, Germany. You come to the US to go to college at Purdue, bachelor's in electrical and computer engineering, master's at Stanford, MBA from Harvard.
What was the original career plan?

**Mamoon Hamid** (1:18)
So let's go back to, I think, 1986
Do you remember the Challenger explosion? Every kid growing up, remember that. And one of my teachers was actually supposed to go on the space shuttle because there was a teacher.

**Barry Ritholtz** (1:34)
That's right. Christy, that's right.

**Mamoon Hamid** (1:36)
Yeah. And every kid got fascinated by, especially if you had a teacher going to space, so followed the whole journey of the Challenger space shuttle and the teachers and all that. But with that also came this desire to learn more about space. And I instantly wanted to become an astronaut naturally.
I think I was seven or eight years old. And as I thought about high school, liking science and math, thinking about where to go to college. And I was, as you mentioned, I was in Frankfurt, Germany growing up.
And one of my uncles, he'd given me this list of colleges, the top 10 engineering schools. And I just applied to all 10 And one of them happened to be Purdue, where, actually, to this day, the most number of astronauts have graduated from.

**Barry Ritholtz** (2:30)
Really? Oh, that's fascinating.

**Mamoon Hamid** (2:31)
Yeah, so my path was aeronautical engineering and trying to figure out a way to get into space.
I've yet to do that. But that is what let me down the path of applying to Purdue in the first place and the association with space and NASA. And then actually going from something so massive and big space to something so small, chips and semiconductors and transistors.

**Barry Ritholtz** (2:56)
Which are enabling space, so there's definitely a connection. Is it true that when you went to business school, you were thinking about already being a venture capitalist?

**Mamoon Hamid** (3:06)
I actually, when I applied to business school, so I'd worked for a good six years after undergrad, so studied electrical engineering, computer engineering, and that naturally made me think about a career in Silicon Valley designing chips, which is what I did for the first six years of my career, working in the semiconductor industry. But what really got pretty interesting for me was the notion of startups and founding companies, and how these so-called venture capitalists were behind some of the most iconic companies that I was coming across, and so I actually wanted to get into venture capital, and that's actually why I applied to business school, and specifically only applied to one business school, Harvard, because I naively thought that if you wanted to get into venture capital, you had to go to Harvard or Stanford, and I'd already gone to Stanford for grad school, so I thought, okay, well, it'd be nice to get a change of scenery.

**Barry Ritholtz** (3:56)
Just round it out a little bit.

**Mamoon Hamid** (3:57)
And move to Boston.

**Barry Ritholtz** (3:58)
Yeah. Give up the nice weather.

**Mamoon Hamid** (4:00)
Yeah.

**Barry Ritholtz** (4:01)
And so you started in between college and grad school, you spent how many years? You were at Xilinx, you lived in six years?

**Mamoon Hamid** (4:10)
Yeah. So the story actually goes is, I was 19 when I graduated from college, so from Purdue, and I thought, okay, the best thing for a young kid is to continue to go to grad school. So I applied to grad school and ended up getting in at Stanford, but I also got a number of job offers. This is 1997, the.com boom. I think it's a bit like this time where should you opt out of the job market and get extremely valuable experience, or continue on with grad school.
So I did the best of both worlds, which is like I went to Stanford, took a few classes every quarter, and then worked full time at Xilinx. And this is back in 1997 We're talking about sort of the middle of the.com boom.