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.
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Appearances
But if you've seen the engagement data on a product that you think can apply to 10,000, 100,000 companies, then... The entire workforce. Yeah, then why not? I think it's really a mistake to look at revenue multiples at like half a million, a million. What do you think is nuts that VCs do today that they shouldn't do? There's just a big echo chamber and a lot of people live in the echo chamber.
Folks think that's information and information is knowledge and knowledge is arbitrage. But when everyone has the same knowledge, then it's no longer arbitrage. Do you think everyone does have the same knowledge?
I think it's mostly BS. Many have tried and failed at using the very data-oriented approach to investing in startups, when at the end of the day, it's about the founders. And the founders wanting to work with you. Exactly.
It means shit. Oh, 100%. It's about how do you position yourself so that the founders are choosing us. It's based on reputation of our body of work, our firm's body of work, what the firm represents, what we can offer them once we get involved or even before we're involved. What are people saying about you? What's the folks who you worked with before?
Yeah, I don't believe in voting structures for early stage venture capital. I think you have to allow every partner to put themselves on the line with their conviction that they've built up over a year sometimes, weeks sometimes, but you have to give into the conviction of the person wanting to lead.
And so the way we work is that because we sit around the table, we literally get to see each other's body language. how someone goes from excitement to less excitement. When one of our partners, like, you know, Ilya asked me a question about why I'm so excited about a company, and then he asked another question, and then I just go, well, that's a good question that I don't have a good answer for.
Maybe my excitement wanes, and then I come back a few days later when we see each other again. It's like, you know what, like, we talked about that, and, you know, I'm sort of leaning out on the opportunity. And so I think that's also the magic of being around the same table in the same room. You get to really test each other's conviction. So you don't have a vote, right?
We have a discussion, but there's no vote.
Yeah.
But that hasn't happened.
I'd say it's when questions get asked around, or is this a fleeting cycle of adoption for this sort of product? Or this is going to be gnarly dogfight because there are too many competitors, or this is the wrong time. The risk reward isn't great for this round. That's when your excitement tends to wane. Do you do outcome scenario planning? We used to, and haven't done it more recently.
We used to do like, what is the probability of this company being a zero, a $500 million exit, a $250 million exit, a billion dollar exit, and a $10 billion exit. You do the percentages. It's such false precision. I always do 25, 25, 25. Thank you so much. It's such false precision that I think it feels like busy work, actually. Who's the best picker in the team? Josh is a very precise picker.
I would say that Ilya and I, we're almost always on the same page. We're like too similar, actually. Is that too dangerous, actually? Because you can almost encourage each other. Well, it's actually great because if I meet someone and then I say, you know, Ilya, come over, you know, like I'll see him in the hallway. Can you meet this person for like five or ten minutes?
And he did that to me recently, actually. And he'll come in and he's like, oh, yeah, I see the same thing you do. So we are in some ways quite similar, which is awesome. I think we may miss some of the same things then too because of it. But I think it's a good lock to get, especially when we're trying to build conviction or at least quickly get to, am I seeing the same thing that you're seeing?
What was the most contentious deal that you did? You know, actually Figma was quite contentious. Because to your point around like half a million of AR at 110, 15 posts or whatever it was at the time. The same thing, there's Envision, there's Sketch. This company's been around for five years. It's not obvious to us. It was contentious that there's a lot of questions around the investment.
I think the view is, hey, we'd love to deploy over a two and a half to three year period of time. When we got to KP, I came in 2017, a bunch of the team joined in 2018. So Bucky, Ilya, Annie joined that year. Josh joined the same week I did. So there was a period of time in 2019. So we just raised our first fund as a team together where we deployed that fund within like 15 months.
Was that more the root plan fund? It was. Rippling, Glean, a bunch of other stuff in there. We just were a new team. Didn't have board seats. We had a fund ready to deploy, and so we deployed it fairly quickly. And I would say mostly Series A, like real ownership Series As, the core of the business. And so if I look at that fund, I think it'll be an amazing fund, actually. Unbelievable. Right?
And so you could have said like, well, wait a second, you guys didn't do time diversify. If you would have deployed over a two and a half year period, you would have missed... a high valuation environment into a lower and yada yada. And so I would say that that would be the counterpoint to fast deployment. Like, no, you can actually work.
Which side do you take? I think generally speaking, it's hard to have the neuroplasticity to one day think about 10 years ahead and a new infrastructure company that's building on a new open source framework. And the next day, think about pre-IPO stage consumer company.
While we all have one meeting, one pipeline meeting, one investment team meeting for both early stage and venture, all of us do venture investing and a few of us will do more of that select investing because we don't want to burden everyone to bring neuroplasticity to the job every day.
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