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
You know, I've just gone through my first sort of bigger loss in terms of capital loss. For a while, a company just shut down, a company called Tally and the founder, Jason Brown, who I've known for 15 years. I had him on the show. Yeah. And how much did you lose? 30 million or so. Multiples of the largest loss prior to that. So I don't wear this badge of honor of like losing a lot.
I mean, there's a whole thing in venture, like you need to lose like so many million dollars before you made it kind of thing. And I think there's a lot more precision one can apply even at the early stage to not put more money in to lose more. Because our job is to invest 5, 10, 15 upfront. And if you lose five on a seed check, all good. That's your job. Is there anything you learned from Tally?
That lending businesses are really hard. Consumer lending is very hard. Did you do reserves there? Yes. And that was where it went wrong? Well, the first check was back to the 60-40. It was like 60-40, but there's more along the way that went in because they raised subsequent up rounds from great investors.
The round after us, Angela at Andreessen Horowitz did it, and it was a great round, great time for the company. And then it did one in 2022 with one of our seed investors, Sway, led the growth round because things were going really well. And then consumer lending just turned. This is when interest rates went up from 0% to 5%. And that really made that business really difficult.
How have you changed most significantly as an investor over time? I mean, obviously, there's more experience, but I actually try not to let that weigh me down because I think a job is to stay open-minded and have naivete and dream the dream. And too many scars aren't necessarily a good thing for being open-minded and thinking about what the next Figma or Rippling will be.
Where do you most need to improve as an investor? I think I'm a dreamer and I want to just believe in the people that I back. I heard this.
I agree. I agree with that. That is fair criticism. But I think that's just part of the package. That is who I am. I believe in the people and I want to be on that journey with them.
Yeah, I don't disagree with Vinod that there's destruction of value that happens with the wrong advice. But I think if with the right advice and the right help, we can help supercharge your companies. What makes the, I'm not asking for the name, but what makes the worst board the worst board? The worst board, it starts with how a CEO runs a board. How do the best CEOs run a board?
They start off with a high level view of how the company is doing, and then they give a chance for their leaders. They're very capable leaders to go dive in deep and share and ask questions. And there's a fair bit of cheerleading, but a fair bit of like asking the hard questions. And I like board meetings where there's one or two things that are talked about in detail.
You go deep dive into one or two things because at any given point in time in a company's juncture, that moment in time, one or two things that really matter, we can help change the trajectory on. And so if we're talking about seven different things that matter, we're probably missing the point. And so I love board meetings where that's sort of the structure.
Two more questions and then we'll do a quick five.
Personally? Yeah. Those are not my kind of businesses. I like more capital efficiency, but I can get behind them.
Yeah.
No, I don't. I don't think we want that at all. We love where we are today. We really do. And I don't try to not BSing you, your longtime friend. And I believe in venture, early stage venture being a beautiful asset class, especially if you can follow the power law and being the few companies that matter. And then you can invest in the very few companies that really matter out of your select fund.
And then call it a day. I totally agree.
Venture is an easy job. It's glamorous. It's all of that except glamorous.
It has to be Aaron Levy when I first met him. Why? He brought along with him a wonderful person, Karen Page, because he thought he had to bring on an executive or bring an executive to the first meeting. It was just, he was like hyper nervous, I felt, coming to a VC firm office like in a coat and shirt.
But I could tell from that meeting that he had thought about the problem of cloud storage more than, and this is 2007, so like cloud storage was not a thing. more than anyone else. And so for me, it was like an instant I need to invest in this founder, like right away. But it was also just memorable from the other things that were going around.
A billion in revenue. A billion in revenue. Four and a half billion market cap. Yeah. Yeah, I think growth and profitability. So to my point, do we need to see the reflation for venture to be sustainable or not? I think just getting back to sort of normal historical levels would be good enough.
You know, one of my favorite investors is Matt Kohler from Benchmark, who I got to see yesterday. I wish he and I were on more boards together.
Showing 121–140 of 146 · page 7 of 8
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