Mamoon Hamid
speaker
146 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Mamoon Hamid’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
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?
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.
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.
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.
At that series A seed, it's about the people you're surrounding yourself with.
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.
Hard. Yeah, hard. Bad markets, the structure of industries where margins are compressed and customers are bad. Life's just too hard that 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.
Is that wrong? For early-stage companies, yeah. You can't take a 500K ARR or a million.
Showing 81–100 of 146 · page 5 of 8
← Previous
Next →