Venture Capital During the AI Revolution with Mamoon Hamid

Barry sits down with Kleiner Perkins Partner, Mamoon Hamid. They discuss Mamoon's thoughts on the AI revolution and his approach to early AI investing. Mamoon also breaks down how he became an early investor in giants like Slack, Figma, and how Kleiner Perkins assesses the investments they missed. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw, innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting

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• 2:05Barry Ritholtz?

  This week on the podcast, another banger. Mamun 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, et cetera. Previously, he co-founded Social Cathol 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.

• 2:52Barry Ritholtz?

  Mamoon Hamid, welcome to Bloomberg.

• 2:55Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me, Barry.

• 2:57Barry Ritholtz?

  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?

• 3:16Speaker 03

  So, let's go back to, I think, 1986. Do you remember the Challenger explosion?

• 3:22Barry Ritholtz?

  Sure.

• 3:23Speaker 03

  Every kid, growing up, remember that. And one of my teachers was actually supposed to go on the space shuttle, because there's a teacher.

• 3:32Barry Ritholtz?

  That's right.

• 3:32Speaker 03

  Krista McCullough.

• 3:33Barry Ritholtz?

  Kristi, that's right.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  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, you know, 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.

• 4:19Speaker 03

  And one of them happened to be Purdue, where, actually, to this day... Uh, the most number of astronauts have graduated from.

• 4:27Barry Ritholtz?

  Really? Oh, that's fascinating.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, so my path was aeronautical engineering and trying to figure out a way to get into space. I've yet to do that, but, but that is what led me down the path of applying to Purdue in the first place. And the association with space and NASA. And then actually, uh, going from something so massive and big space to something so small. Chips and semiconductors and transistors.

• 4:53Barry Ritholtz?

  Which, 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?

• 5:03Speaker 03

  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, uh, 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 to, pretty interesting for me was, uh, the notion of startups and founding companies and how these so-called venture capitalists were behind some of the most iconic companies that, that I was coming across. And so, I actually, uh, wanted to get into venture capital. And that's actually why I applied to, to, to business school and specifically only applied to one business school, Harvard.

• 5:43Speaker 03

  Cause 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, okay, well, it'd be nice, it'd be nice to get a change of scenery.

• 5:53Barry Ritholtz?

  Just round it out a little bit.

• 5:54Speaker 03

  And move to Boston.

• 5:55Barry Ritholtz?

  Yeah, give up the nice weather.

• 5:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:57Barry Ritholtz?

  Um, and, and, uh, so you started in between college and grad school. You spent how many years that you were at Xilinx, you lived for six years?

• 6:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the, the story actually goes is, I was nineteen when I graduated from college, so from Purdue. And, uh, I thought, okay, the best thing for a young kid is to continue to, to go to grad school. So applied to grad school, uh, and, uh, ended up getting in, uh, at Stanford. But I also got a number of job offers. This is nineteen ninety-seven, the doc, the dot com boom. I'm thinking, it's a bit like this time where should you opt out of the job market? And get like extremely valuable experience or continue on with grad school? So I, I, 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.

• 6:50Speaker 03

  And this is back in 1997. We're talking about sort of the middle of the dot-com boom.

• 6:54Barry Ritholtz?

  Right. Yeah, really, really interesting. You're known today as someone who thinks about software generally and enterprise software in particular. That seems like an unusual transition from semiconductors. What led to that shift? What changed your thinking?

• 7:13Speaker 03

  Great question, Barry. So, in 2005, when I got into venture capital, my full intent was I would like to learn how to invest in great semiconductor companies or founders who build semiconductor companies of the future. And it turns out, after the dot-com bust, there was not a lot of investment in infrastructure. So, data centers and networking and switching and semiconductors broadly. And so, I realized pretty early on that, hey, like, if I want to build a career in investing, you kind of have to go where the puck is going to. And so, skate to where the puck is going. And I sort of skated towards web 2.0 and

• 7:55Speaker 03

  software because I felt like, also in my own firm at US Venture Partners, where I started my venture capital career, where I was an associate, I was hired to go help my, the partners there evaluate semiconductor opportunities. And that's actually why I went there, because there were some legendary semiconductor investors who happened to be there. And some of my mentors, even today, were the folks running the firm there. So, but I realized that all my friends in 2005 were moving to web 2.0, internet. This is the beginning of Facebook, which happened to get, be started at Harvard when I was there. So, you're seeing all these, the people,

• 8:35Speaker 03

  my cohorts, age group, moving into software and web. And I felt like I had to sort of move along with that. And my day job was evaluating semiconductor businesses. But in the evenings, I was in San Francisco, I was going to, you know, the web 2.0 parties and meeting all the founders starting software businesses. And so, I slowly started To just, you know, as a side project, the side project became the main project, which was to move from semis to uh to software and internet uh stuff and uh but in the back of my mind, I always remained a semiconductor guy and uh you know uh semis are back now, as you know.

• 9:15Barry Ritholtz?

  And and AI seems to be uh the application of both semis and software, so you're well prepared. We'll we'll talk about AI in a bit. I want to stay in the 2000s when you were at USVP. Um you had early exposure to companies like Box and Yammer. I don't really remember Yammer. I remember Box.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:35Barry Ritholtz?

  Um big enterprise software deals. What what did you learn from that experience? What have you brought forward with you from from that era?

• 9:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, so uh Box happened to be my first investment uh at at USVP where I joined the board. It was an early stage company. It was, you know, a few hundred K of revenue, uh two very young founders, Dylan and uh and Aaron, uh twenty and twenty-one years old, dropped out of college, sort of like the prototypical founder.

• 10:04Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 10:04Speaker 03

  Uh the archetype of a young founder and uh they were going after uh storing your files in the cloud and sharing them inside of your company.

• 10:14Barry Ritholtz?

  Let let me stop you for a second because I think anybody under forty is perplexed by what you just said. I recall like late nineties, early two thousands, if I'm either at home or at work or on a laptop or at the beach house, whatever I needed was always somewhere else. And the beauty of of early blogging software is I could upload files, I could upload charts, I could upload images, and that was the closest thing to the cloud. It just didn't exist then.

• 10:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:47Barry Ritholtz?

  If you wanted to have something that you can access anywhere you had an internet connection, literally did not exist.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, so so maybe I'll, if I go back to exactly the point I made in my head is that if there is one application that moves into the cloud first, it's going to be file sharing. If you recall, uh, I remember this, when I was on my Windows computer in the eighties and nineties, uh, what's one of the applications we all used a lot? Do you remember the Windows File Explorer? We're constantly clicking in and trying to find the file.

• 11:20Barry Ritholtz?

  Finding something, right. Searching for it.

• 11:22Speaker 03

  Searching for it, or placing it in a folder very nicely.

• 11:25Barry Ritholtz?

  Like, the name you used to have to put on a file was important, because if you couldn't remember the name, you couldn't find it. It wasn't like, here's a phrase that's somewhere in this document, go find it. If you didn't remember exactly where that was nested, or what name you put, good luck.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  Good luck, right? And so, as the world moved from the desktop to the browser, and so by 2006, 07, we all are using, uh, at this point, like Firefox, Mozilla. Chrome's not even existent yet.

• 11:54Barry Ritholtz?

  Right, it was Internet Explorer until Chrome came along.

• 11:56Speaker 03

  Exactly, right, and so, uh, my thesis was, okay, one of the most, uh, one of the applications for business that will move into the browser, so software as a service, uh, will be file sharing and collaboration. And so, because, precisely to your point, like, the file that you always needed was somewhere else. And this made so much sense to me. And so, at the time in 2007, when I invested in Box, there were probably half a dozen, two dozen, I don't know, there's many of these companies doing file sharing, uh, but it was mostly for consumers.

• 12:28Barry Ritholtz?

  Right, Dropbox.

• 12:30Speaker 03

  Dropbox was in that same era, but there was like XFile and Elephant Drive. I mean, I remember these, I, as an associate, you're, you know, when you're suggesting an investment, you're gonna do a lot of diligence. I remember like, the laundry list of companies I looked at, there were probably like forty companies that were doing something similar. But most of them were dedicated towards sort of consumer use cases, photos, music, stuff like that.

• 12:53Barry Ritholtz?

  Napster era was right around then.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly, and so... The hypothesis was, hey, like, this stuff will be relevant to large companies who will want to have file sharing and collaboration for their companies. And Box actually pivoted from being a consumer company to being an enterprise company. And that's when I got pretty excited because it lined up with sort of this view that I had that large companies will move from file servers in their data centers or wherever in their buildings into files that now reside in the cloud.

• 13:26Barry Ritholtz?

  And they're willing to pay for it.

• 13:28Speaker 03

  They're willing to pay for it.

• 13:28Barry Ritholtz?

  Unlike, back then, anyway, consumers were so reluctant.

• 13:32Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 13:33Barry Ritholtz?

  To pay for anything. So it's interesting because you've had a lot of early investment success with a variety of companies. Is it easy or difficult to learn from past winners? Is every startup different? Or do you start a little pattern recognition that gives you some clues? Hey, these guys are on to something.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think there's definitely some compounding of learning from early wins and losses. You brought up Box. And so Box, first investment, got to spend a lot of time with the founders, got to learn the business with the founders, actually, because they were young. I was young. I was in my twenties when I joined the board. And from that experience, I learned a lot about like what it meant to actually bottoms up sell software into large companies, which led me actually to this investment in Yammer, which many folks may not remember, but it was an enterprise social network circa 2010,

• 14:38Speaker 03

  kind of like Twitter meets Facebook, but for your company. And Microsoft ended up acquiring it in 2012 and is part of the Microsoft suite now and part of Teams and all that. But the experience of this bottoms up adoption, you looked at Yammer and a lot of large companies wanted to have an enterprise social network or somewhere where it's kind of like a town hall, a messaging platform. You share a file, people comment on it, like people do it on Twitter or Facebook. And that was taking some of the learnings from the web era and the social era and applying it to the business world. And so at Yammer, I learned a lot. It was a quick journey, but nevertheless, like, there was a...

• 15:23Speaker 03

  Level of engagement and monetization, uh, that was, was good. And, um, a few years later, maybe even like a year later, I came across another company, uh, Slack.

• 15:34Barry Ritholtz?

  Slack, yeah.

• 15:35Speaker 03

  And, uh, it was so similar. Now it was true messaging. Actually, on my way over here, I was walking through and I saw a bunch of your colleagues on Slack, which makes me really happy. Um, and Slack is used broadly across the globe, uh, to this day in 2026. And, uh, but the lessons learned in that 2010, 11 era led to the investment in, in Slack in 2014 for, for me, uh, when it was a 10-person company. And so back to the point around like compounding of learning, Box led to Yammer, Yammer led to Slack, and since Slack, there's been others. But, but there certainly is some pattern recognition around products that are working.

• 16:15Barry Ritholtz?

  And, and then in 2011, you co-founded Social Capital with Chamath, very famous, um, model of, of social capital, which is how can we address many of the social ills that are, are hurting the country through the intelligent use of startups, technology, et cetera. Um, uh, what, was this a reinvention of, of venture capital? Or just a new set of tools within a, a partnership that, um, you know, was kind of novel for its era?

• 16:48Speaker 03

  It was novel for its era because we decided that we would go after, uh, education, healthcare and, uh, finance, um, you know, three of the largest parts of society. And how do we address, uh, inequities in, in, in those areas with our investments? And believing that technology has the ability to democratize access to healthcare, education, and financial services. Uh, and that's, you know, largely played out over the last 15 years. Uh, but we just thought that there would be a ton of opportunity as venture capitalists were seeking out opportunity. And we thought that going after large pockets of, of GDP, uh, you'd identify really exciting opportunities.

• 17:31Speaker 03

  Turns out, you know, my interests are, remained in, in enterprise software and I did spend a lot of my time, uh, In enterprise software, even when we started Social Capital.

• 17:43Barry Ritholtz?

  So 2017, you leave Social Capital for Kleiner Perkins. A firm that has long been iconic, the laundry list of companies Kleiner has backed. Google, Cisco, were they early in Apple also?

• 17:58Speaker 03

  They were Google, Amazon, Sun Microsystems, Genentech, Intuit.

• 18:04Barry Ritholtz?

  Unbelievable.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  Tandem, if you remember. The list of greats is amazing.

• 18:10Barry Ritholtz?

  So they're an iconic company, but they're not the dominant force they once were. When you joined, what made that opportunity so attractive?

• 18:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, so look, I actually long admired Kleiner Perkins, had an extreme reverence, I would call it, for Kleiner Perkins. Going back to my days moving to Silicon Valley. I mentioned I moved to Silicon Valley in 1997. I worked for this company, Xilinx. And if you think about my first few weeks on the job. I'm in my cubicle, I've got a Sun Microsystems workstation, which is actually a dream, because in college, we had to share 20 of them amongst like 2,000 of us. And now I have my own Sun Spark, I think it was a Spark 20. And guess what, there's a Netscape browser. And I'm buying books for grad school on Amazon.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  And by the way, there's a couple of guys down the hallway at Stanford who are starting this company called Google. And I'm starting to use that search engine called Google. The one commonality amongst Xilinx, Sun, Netscape, Google and Amazon is that Kleiner Perkins had led the Series A, so the first institutional investor for all five of those companies. So as a young guy, I had this, developed this extreme reverence for Kleiner Perkins. Because of the investments they had made in these, really like, history-making companies. And so, which is also what led me to think about venture capital as a career, as a young engineer, is like, you know, I want to be like those guys. Those guys are investing in all the coolest companies I'm using as a 19-year-old here.

• 19:46Speaker 03

  And that's really what got me excited about. Venture capital and actually one of the people behind all many of those investments, Sun, Netscape, Google and Amazon was my partner, John Doerr. And so for me, there's this extreme reverence for John Doerr and his career and trying to emulate that, you know, and he was an electrical engineer from Rice, went to Harvard Business School, worked at Intel Corporation, then came to Kleiner Perkins out of business school. And so it had a deep meaning to me and actually, truth be told, I actually in my business school essay, which I have still, wrote that I wanted to go work at Kleiner Perkins. This is in 2003 when I wrote the essay.

• 20:31Speaker 03

  2002, I wrote the essay. And then, you know, when I tried to apply for a job in 2005, coming out of business school, I didn't get very far, but I did end up there in 2017.

• 20:42Barry Ritholtz?

  So, you know, eventually, if you keep plugging away, you get to where you want to go. That's great. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Mamoun Hamid, Kleiner Perkins managing member, talking about the reboot of the firm. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

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• 21:42Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume, so writes Bloomberg Business Week's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs, and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees, with the company looking for people with raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting

• 22:24Speaker 01

  and hiring practices, but according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company, and Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates, quote, "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

• 23:05Barry Ritholtz?

  I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest this week is Mamoun Hamid. He is managing member and general partner at Kleiner Perkins, where he is pivoting the firm towards early investors in software and artificial intelligence and automation. So you co-led the refounding of Kleiner Perkins in 2017, 2018. The firm was refocused on early-stage Series A investing. Tell us what was behind the thought process, what made you say, "We don't want to be bigger, we want to be smaller and more focused."

• 23:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, if I look back at the decades of being probably the most successful venture capital firm throughout the 70s, 80s, 90s, and even the early 2000s, the one thing that defined Kleiner Perkins was it was a small partnership of

• 24:08Speaker 03

  Seven-ish or so partners who sat around a table in Menlo Park, meeting companies and having healthy discourse and debate about what companies to invest in and what the future of technology would bring to the world. And it was defined really by a small group of partners that were, in many cases, technical. They were operators. They had a passion for technology and its impact on humanity. And that was sort of what I kept coming back to, is that that was what defined Kleiner's decades of success.

• 24:47Speaker 03

  And we went back to the future in 2017 and 18 to that model. And today, our partnership is six partners, and then we have three more investment professionals. So we're a very small nimble team. So we have two funds, and this team invests from both pools of capital.

• 25:09Barry Ritholtz?

  So early-stage, does that seed round, or is it a little more developed?

• 25:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the early-stage fund is seed, Series A mostly, and maybe some Bs. And then the growth fund is Bs, Cs, all the way to, we invested in the last Anthropic round at, you know, a $900 billion valuation, which is, you know, rare for special companies, but it has the ability to invest across even to the pre-IPO.

• 25:39Barry Ritholtz?

  And is it a coincidence that the growth fund is two and a half times the size of the seed fund? At that point, these companies are bigger, require a bigger check, or is that just happenstance?

• 25:52Speaker 03

  I think our funds are sized based on the opportunity set in front of us. Our early-stage funds have been almost exactly 35 companies for the last 15 years. So 35 companies per fund, which we think about as...

• 26:12Speaker 03

  The right number of shots on goal for an early-stage fund to return multiples on it.

• 26:16Barry Ritholtz?

  Like 25 to 30 million per.

• 26:18Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. So it starts out with maybe, in some cases, a $5 million check and the subsequent checks is another 15, 20, or it could be first check is 30 and then with Prorata, you're investing, let's say, up to $40 million per in a company and then your growth fund is doubling down, investing a lot more in those companies.

• 26:38Barry Ritholtz?

  Huh, really, really kind of interesting. So the focus is artificial intelligence startups across software, healthcare, transportation, and autonomy industries. So, so let's unpack that because I'm, I'm hearing a little overlap with each of your prior venture experiences. Tell us why those four areas are so attractive.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this is a truly once-in-a-lifetime revolution that we're going through with AI. And the number of exciting companies, people that we're seeing right now is at an all-time high. The whole world in some ways is being refactored with AI and, and this is just the very beginning. And so I would say that all parts of the economy, even beyond those four areas, it is, like I mentioned earlier, healthcare, financial services, it is all

• 27:46Speaker 03

  sorts of knowledge work, it is going to be all sorts of physical automation in terms of robotics, even space, even defense areas.

• 28:02Speaker 03

  Drug discovery, materials discovery, I think it is all fair game at this point in terms of where the exciting pockets of innovation are, just because there has never been a tailwind like this that really allows all parts of the world to be refactored based on, you know, the biggest technological revolution ever.

• 28:28Barry Ritholtz?

  So I'm glad you described it that way because I keep hearing people compare AI to the internet and that seems too contained, too timid. I wonder if you agree with the thought that the only thing remotely comparable to this is the industrial revolution, which centuries later we're still dealing with the impact of.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  I absolutely agree with you Barry. It is like the industrial revolution, it's like the railroads, it's like the printing press. It is that, it's not the internet.

• 29:01Barry Ritholtz?

  That's really interesting because when I think internet, the first thing you think of is, oh, this is a bubble and this is going to collapse. But you mentioned you're an investor in Anthropic. These are, forget not profitable companies, these are companies with giant revenue streams already, they're barely a few years old. How big can this sector get? Is this going to take over every corner of the economy?

• 29:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, let's talk about that. I think that's the, I think that's the real conversation and the more, the very exciting conversation that one can have about this topic is, and I start at a very high level, which is the GDP of the world today. It's about $120 trillion. And about half of that is labor, the labor component of it. So roughly $60 trillion. And of that $60 trillion, roughly 60% or so is white collar, maybe 50, 60, somewhere. So that's anywhere from 30, 35 trillion dollars. And if you look at...

• 30:16Speaker 03

  Tokens and what the frontier model companies provide, it is it is units of labor. We're already seeing how those units of labor are being utilized in in computer science, so software development, in in law, in medicine, in drug discovery. Um, it is, these are little little agents and buddies that we as humans have now to help us do more with our intellect. And uh, the way I see it is that, you know, we're talking about trillions of of of dollars that are opening up for for these companies that exist. And Exhibit A is a company like Anthropic, which is uh, publicly stated, uh, has gone from zero to forty-five billion revenue run rate.

• 31:00Barry Ritholtz?

  That's unbelievable.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  In a matter of less than three years. Okay. And that is likely going to double and, you know, and and uh, the company started this year, I believe, at twenty. It is already doubled, more than doubled, in the short year that we've been in so far. And so these numbers are astounding, not only because these companies are selling software or technology, they're selling units of labor. Uh, and the labor markets, as we all know, are the biggest component, as I just mentioned earlier, uh, of the world's GDP. We're talking about trillions of of opportunity, dollars of opportunity. Uh, and that's uh, what excites us so much about this time is that uh, it's not just

• 31:42Speaker 03

  about selling tools and software that we've been accustomed to selling to IT departments. It's it's selling uh, like, actual labor to to companies, to corporations, uh, to, you know, even to consumers who are using AI um, uh, in their personal lives.

• 32:00Barry Ritholtz?

  So let's let's talk a little bit about that. The the fear I keep hearing is everybody's gonna lose their job. It it's a very Malthusian argument that this technology is gonna replace uh, labor the way the steam engine did. I'm getting a sense from the data and from other analysts like Torsten Slok that this isn't a replacement for white collar. More labor, it's an enhancement. Or at least that that's the argument. Give us, give us your perspective on that.

• 32:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I actually uh fully agree with that, the point of view uh that you have. Uh it is, it's it's like, you know, uh getting email. I mean, I think uh the fact that the we got the computer didn't, you know, the people were using the typewriter, started using computer and started doing other types of jobs. Uh even in the steam engine era or the industrial revolution, uh we found ways to repurpose jobs or people and their skills. Uh I don't think humans are going out of style. I don't think uh uh you know, the world is going to be largely unemployed and on UBI uh because we are going to displace all this uh work and all these people with uh with AI. Uh I think it's it's the extreme where the mind goes to,

• 33:16Speaker 03

  but that's just not the reality. And that sort of bears itself in the numbers that we see. You know, in uh record low unemployment rates and uh and actually we need more labor, more people than we ever have. And so.

• 33:29Barry Ritholtz?

  More skilled labor, we are seeing a decrease in um job availability for kids right out of college, for unskilled labor. If anything, is this likely to force more people to get more technical, to up their skill set?

• 33:47Speaker 03

  I actually do believe that. Uh it it is not like a, oh, you know, you don't need to be a software developer and study CS anymore because, you know, these software jobs are going away. It it is like now the job of the software engineer is to manage a whole host of agents and make them do work for them and be the brains behind the operation. You have, think of it as like you have all these little agents and common little employees who are working on your behalf. And so, yeah, that is like the the higher level thinking. And uh the things that actually, you know, like when we go to school, we think about how to problem solve and, you know, if we're solving a math problem, it's hard. We think about many different ways to solve it. And the same way, it's like, how how am I going to use AI to help me solve problems?

• 34:30Speaker 03

  And that's the way I think we all, and I I would say, you know, we have four kids. Um, you know, believe it or not, I'm telling them going to math, science, like uh and actually art, like have like spectral diversity in your your learning because all the the skills that mattered in the past, solving, you know, math problems with pen and paper um will will really matter in the future.

• 34:53Barry Ritholtz?

  So let's bring this back to how you think about the opportunity set that's out there. At Kleiner Perkins, you do structured reviews of every interesting deal that was passed on. I'm kind of fascinated by that. I know a lot of VCs kind of hold their misses as a badge of honor. Some firms post it on their website. What do you think of, what's driving the thought process around revisiting either missed deals or mistakes or what have you? What does the process teach you?

• 35:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, so actually, one of the things that I did when I got to Kleiner Perkins in 2017 was that we would look every week at that week's Series As that got done by our peer firms, about 30, 40 firms, and whether we had seen the company that it was invested in or not. And it's simple heuristic of like, are we seeing the things that matter? Because they seem to matter because our peer firms invested in those companies. And so we've been doing this now for the last nine years. And initially, our goal was like, we should see 60%. And seeing means you met the company. And for us, that hovers around now 70% or so.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  You don't want it to be 100% because then you're just, that's the game you're playing. We just see everything. And you don't want to be 20% because you're not seeing enough. But we think 70% is a good number. And we look at the ones, okay, we saw, if we saw 70% of the good stuff, let's say, let's call it, was the 30% that we didn't see even better? Or if we saw the 70%, do we pass on the good stuff and do the bad stuff? And so we go through that exercise quite frequently. We just had an offsite a few weeks ago and we go through, again, we pour salt on the wounds and say, okay, we saw these companies and we passed.

• 36:59Speaker 03

  Why do you pass at that round, that early-stage round? And just to remind ourselves why we need to adjust the way we do things. I'll give you an example. Anthropic, which is an incredible company, its Series A was not a traditional one. SBF from FTX led the Series A.

• 37:22Speaker 03

  Famously.

• 37:22Barry Ritholtz?

  We know how that worked out.

• 37:23Speaker 03

  We do know how that worked out. It was an amazing investment and very prescient on his behalf. I forget how much we're worth today, but it would be worth a lot. But the the Series B was a sort of non-consensus, non-obvious round. And we actually met with the founders and but we met them over Zoom. And we played with the product, but you don't get the same visceral

• 37:50Speaker 03

  feeling about a company and the founders and their ambitions and aspirations and what they're trying to do with their with their with their companies. And so what a miss, right? And I think that round got done in that four billion dollar valuation or something, which not a small valuation, but still.

• 38:07Barry Ritholtz?

  Compared to today.

• 38:08Speaker 03

  Compared to today. And so and we we looked a lot of our passes that we were good companies. And many times we just didn't meet them in person. So the pandemic era bred some really bad habits of, you know, you did a first meeting over Zoom. And so and I looked at my own investments and the last 20 investments that I've done. The first meeting was always in person. The first meeting. So I've driven my whole calendar to like, I just don't want to do any meetings

• 38:42Speaker 03

  on Zoom anymore. I want to meet people in person. And if it's worth a 30 minute Zoom, it should be worth a 30 30 minute in-person meeting. And I'm glad we get to do this in person because, you know.

• 38:54Barry Ritholtz?

  Big difference.

• 38:55Speaker 03

  It wouldn't be the same thing if I was on a Zoom screen doing this thing with you.

• 38:58Barry Ritholtz?

  That's exactly right. What about the reverse of that? If you're analyzing your misses, do you ever review your your hits, your wins and saying, why did we get this right? What can we take forward from this?

• 39:13Speaker 03

  That's a great question. I think we just assume, what we do look at, okay, is, are the ones that we did, the portfolio that we built, is it better than the portfolio that we missed?

• 39:27Barry Ritholtz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 39:28Speaker 03

  And it's actually a toss-up. It's that, you know.

• 39:31Barry Ritholtz?

  Huh, that's really interesting.

• 39:32Speaker 03

  In the sense that we didn't even see it, and, because it would be bad if we didn't see companies, and that basket of companies was way better than the companies we saw. So, and we try to be very intellectually honest about, like, are we seeing the right stuff or the wrong stuff? And it turns out we're seeing, it's a toss-up, actually.

• 39:55Barry Ritholtz?

  Right. The reason I ask that question is, you learn, in the public markets, you learn more from your misses than your wins, because it's very hard to tell the difference between skill and luck. In the public markets, I'm curious if the same sort of thing applies to venture.

• 40:14Speaker 03

  I think it does. I think you really beat yourself up on the misses. And the ones that you do, you're just like, okay, check, you know, it happened. And you don't, maybe you don't think about it as much as the ones you missed.

• 40:28Barry Ritholtz?

  Huh, really, really interesting. Coming up, we continue our conversation with Mamoun Hamid, partner at Kleiner Perkins, discussing the state of venture investing today. I'm Barry Ritholtz, you're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  This is the Bloomberg Tech Minute, brought to you by ChatGPT. I'm Carol Muster. Getting hired at SpaceX requires exceptional ability, and may include having Elon Musk review a candidate's resume. So writes Bloomberg Businessweek's Lauren Grush. She reports that the company culture is defined by Musk, and job candidates must understand that a commitment to SpaceX means adhering to this culture and exhibiting loyalty to Elon Musk. To get hired, candidates must demonstrate their achievements from past jobs, and hands-on experience matters more to recruiters than advanced degrees. With the company looking for people with. Raw innate intelligence. A spokesperson for SpaceX didn't respond to a request for comment on its recruiting and hiring practices.

• 41:29Speaker 01

  But according to recruiters, advisors, and those who've interviewed for jobs there, it's the space exploration dream that draws people to the company. And Musk invokes that dream regularly to remind workers why they're there. Prospective hires are told that the job will require stamina, including in job ads that candidates quote "must be willing to work extended hours and weekends as needed." One major perk for all that hard work? Employees' access to equity, either the right to buy shares or payment in the form of restricted stock units that vest over time. That's the Bloomberg Tech Minute, brought to you by ChatGPT. Get started at ChatGPT.com.

• 42:09Barry Ritholtz?

  I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. Mamun Hamid is my extra special guest. He is a partner at Kleiner Perkins, where he is driving the firm's focus on early-stage investments in artificial intelligence and related technology. So let's talk a little bit about the state of venture investing today. When you meet a founder for the first time, preferably in person, what are you looking for? What are you trying to spot that isn't in the pitch deck they sent earlier? How do you separate intensity from delusion? Like, what are you trying to identify in that first meeting?

• 42:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is the most interesting time in my venture career. And for obvious reasons, this AI revolution, the tailwinds that AI brings to companies that are being started today is unlike anything we've seen before. So the quality of ideas is at an all-time high. And I would say the quality of the people is also at an all-time high. And those two forces combined suggests that there's a lot of really high-quality ideas and founders that we're seeing. And so I would say it's, the volume is, because of that, at an all-time high. And so to your question of like, what are we, what are we looking for?

• 43:41Speaker 03

  I think, obviously, everything today is AI-enabled, AI tailwinds. And venture capital isn't venture capital unless there's like a strong tailwind of something. And so this is a, makes it such an exciting time because there's such a strong tailwind. And the, the pace at which the tailwinds are, like, the winds are so strong. And in some ways, because the frontier model companies are providing better and better models, which allow companies that build on these models to provide strong value proposition. Take, for example, a company like Harvey, which is AI for legal.

• 44:26Speaker 03

  Is in most of the AM Law 100s, sells to large enterprises and Fortune 100-type companies. And becoming sort of the de facto way that legal, law firms and legal departments are using AI inside of their companies and inside of law firms. And, yes, they have a lot of secret sauce on top of what the model companies, but, but at the same time, they get better and better as these models get better and better. And this is a category that just got created in the last few years. And there are numerous examples like it in every sector of society. And just take a step back, when we first saw, I don't know what were your reaction was to ChatGPT

• 45:08Speaker 03

  when you first saw it, but for me, it was the same reaction I had when I first got to use a browser, internet browser. To me, that, that Netscape moment was equivalent to the ChatGPT moment. And we started to think about what are the, the second order effect? What are the things that come from here, from ChatGPT, from LLMs? And it was, we, we thought about like the, the labor pyramid, think about knowledge work. And we went straight to, okay, what is, what are the most highly skilled, highly paid jobs in the, in the country? And if you actually look at the top 20 list of jobs, dollars made by job,

• 45:50Speaker 03

  it's some form of engineer, doctor, or lawyer. And so what we did at Kleiner Perkins was to invest in companies that do AI for legal, AI for software development, AI for medicine, or, and so we invested in companies like Harvey, Windsurf, which got acquired by, by Google.

• 46:10Speaker 03

  We invested in a company called Ambiance, Open Evidence, to go after that, that, that labor pyramid.

• 46:17Barry Ritholtz?

  Top of the pyramid.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  Top of the pyramid. And back to your point, it's like an enhancement to those people. It was supposed to be like a co-pilot, and which it is. It's, and in some cases-

• 46:26Barry Ritholtz?

  Registered Trademark Microsoft Corporation.

• 46:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Co-pilot, exactly. And, and in some cases, it's become an autonomous agent for those people. So, software developers run agents to do work for them now. And so, we worked, we worked our way down the labor pyramid a bit. And we went down, what's the next level? So, think of it like, if doctors, lawyers, engineers are in the 200K plus a year pay, then what's one below that? You know, like, you've got financial analysts, salespeople, nurses. And so, then we invested in the next class of companies. So, Rogo, which is AI for finance. Hippocratic, which is an agentic nursing platform.

• 47:13Speaker 03

  Nooks and Revo, which are helping salespeople be co-pilots for their work. And so, we've sort of worked our way down the labor pyramid. And if you think about the pyramid, guess what's at the bottom of the pyramid? It's physical labor. It is, is the lowest paid, lowest scale in some, some, and eventually robotics will get there.

• 47:34Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 47:35Speaker 03

  And hopefully do a lot of the backbreaking work that nobody should be doing.

• 47:39Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 47:39Speaker 03

  And I think we, eventually, that is sort of the, the way, also goes along with the timeline of the way we're thinking about these things, is that you start with the highly scaled, highly paid, and eventually, over the next decade, we get down to the, sort of the lowest scale, lowest, lowest paid work.

• 47:53Barry Ritholtz?

  So, so you mentioned the tailwind behind AI. What does that do to valuations? How, how do you underwrite startups in a market where even the half-decent companies look kind of expensive?

• 48:09Speaker 03

  Great question. So, when you have companies that have gone from zero to a trillion in, in value, you know, in the last three to four years, and when you're a founder, what do you do? You point to that, that's what I can be. I can get to a trillion dollars, because I'm going after really large problems. And we love that, that ambition.

• 48:40Speaker 03

  And what do people do then is that, well, you know, if the probability of a of a one trillion dollar outcome is one percent.

• 48:49Speaker 03

  And you do all the other ninety nine percent of probabilities for the rest of the numbers. You've got yourself to a expected value of ten billion dollars or more, at least. That's the minimum, right? You do the one percent of one trillion is ten billion. And you add up all the other probabilities, it's probably like thirty, forty, fifty billion. And so if you're looking at a series A company where the ambition is tremendous. You're the valuation may just be, you know, you're raising a hundred million at a billion dollar valuation for two guys out the gate. And those are real examples. And I think we've we've got a bit of this, you know, pointing at the the large outcome. And if it's paired with smart people, ambitious idea.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  It has that kind of potential. But the reality is like there's usually one or two of those the real outliers that that are mag seven scale. And just the, you know, just gravity in itself doesn't allow for, you know, the the world can't have. You know, a hundred trillion dollar companies.

• 49:51Barry Ritholtz?

  Plus, if it's a trillion dollar total addressable market, it's going to attract a lot of competition, a lot of other startups. Perhaps more than if you're focusing on a smaller niche. Although even the cloud storage was, you mentioned forty companies. Early days, there's got to be tens of thousands of companies going for each of these segments in AI.

• 50:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, and there are. And I think the the hard part of the work that we have is is identifying what we think will be the leading company. Because in technology, generally speaking, the leading company gets most of the market cap. You know, which which is if you look at the mag seven.

• 50:33Barry Ritholtz?

  Winner take all.

• 50:34Speaker 03

  Winner winner take most, right?

• 50:35Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 50:36Speaker 03

  Like, take ninety percent of the market, you know, Nvidia, ninety five percent of all GPU spend. You know, take Google, Alphabet, you know, multiple businesses, or take a Tesla.

• 50:48Speaker 03

  Take a Meta, own social, right? So winner takes most in technology.

• 50:53Barry Ritholtz?

  Huh, really, really interesting. You've described the AI moment as one of the most important company building opportunities in our lifetime.

• 51:02Barry Ritholtz?

  Um. What's the risk of venture funding too many of these startups? Or is this just a fat head of winners and a long tail of, well, we gave it a shot? Um. Is this just the nature of this business where it's a a couple of winners are driving all the returns for for your funds?

• 51:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, venture is a power law business. Um. There's no question about it. And uh, if you already look at like, um, there's this article I read the other day where ninety percent of the AI revenue is in the hands of two companies.

• 51:36Barry Ritholtz?

  That's crazy.

• 51:37Speaker 03

  OpenAI and Anthropic.

• 51:38Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 51:39Speaker 03

  So, uh, and the remaining ten percent is in a bunch of companies that are excellent companies. But the scale of those two other companies is so massive.

• 51:47Barry Ritholtz?

  Right.

• 51:47Speaker 03

  That it dwarfs all the other good, great work that's happening in tons of other companies that we've backed. Uh, and by the way, like, you know, those will be great outcomes and be great companies. There's no question about it. Uh, it's just that it it dwarfs and the the power law really does. You can see it uh, when you look at the numbers. Uh, and uh, it it's, yes, our job is to be in the companies that that make history and uh, are in the power, are following the power law. Uh, what we find is that they're actually, you would think there's dozens of companies. There's actually tens, maybe like less than ten, and there's like two to three that are converging to become winners in a category.

• 52:30Speaker 03

  And I think everyone's trying to identify those two to three companies and be in those two to three companies. And so one of the challenges we face is that we we try to invest in what we think is a winner in the category early. Sometimes you you don't know early that this is the winner. And if you invest too early, you conflict yourself out of the the eventual winner.

• 52:50Barry Ritholtz?

  Right. Uh. You only invest in one company per silo, so to speak?

• 52:54Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 52:55Barry Ritholtz?

  Right?

• 52:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 52:56Barry Ritholtz?

  Just to avoid those sort of conflicts.

• 52:58Speaker 03

  So the conflict typically we're joining the boards of these companies and and if you have, uh, you know, confidential board level information and uh, you you don't want that, like, now you invested in a competitor, all of a sudden there's a chance of conflict, conflict of interest. And so we definitely try to. Avoid that conflict of interest.

• 53:14Barry Ritholtz?

  So I'm I'm kind of fascinated by as venture investors, you obviously see the promise of AI across all these different economic sectors. I'm curious how you're using AI internally at Kleiner Perkins. Are using it to source deals or do due diligence or predict specific outcomes? How does AI fit into your operations?

• 53:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, we have definitely been maxing out on AI internally, not only because we invest in these companies. Whether we use, Glean is a company we incubated inside of Kleiner Perkins, actually, and it's it's in year seven now is pre-AI company. Started by incredible engineer Arvin Jain. And that's like our knowledge management, every single piece of knowledge inside of Kleiner Perkins resides in Glean and you can go to it, query it, chat chat with it like. If I want to find out your phone number and email, like, and then I've never met you before, but I know someone at Kleiner probably knows you, I'll go to Glean. Or if I want to ask about like a HR policy, I'll go to Glean quickly ask.

• 54:23Speaker 03

  Cause it just knows everything about Kleiner Perkins, it knows investment memos, it can, it knows cap tables, it knows like the really like confidential stuff. It's permission in a way where the people who are supposed to know

• 54:36Speaker 03

  will can know and it's it's very like, that is part of the magic is that it's very safe, secure. And you trust it to to really know the things it's supposed to know and not know the supposed things it's not supposed to know. So, and so that's an example. But we are, we get so much information. And whether it's board decks and they're long, board memos, financials and so when I'm going to a board meeting after this, I got the board memo. And the first thing I do, it's it's sent to an email alias and it and that runs it through AI and it produces a summary for me of the of the board meeting and questions I should be thinking about.

• 55:18Speaker 03

  As an instant thing that I do, once I get the board materials, just so that I start thinking about it. Before I actually go read the board memo, I I sort of have a preview of it in my mind. We do a quarterly or every four month portfolio view and we have a couple hundred companies. It used to be a very manual process that we had a dedicated person working on it. And now our technology team has built the system where we take these summaries, they get piped into this portfolio book that we create and with all the financials, all the metrics and everything and it's something that we are heavily leveraging AI.

• 55:57Speaker 03

  In this case, it's glean, it's Claude, so the underlying models, obviously. And we have done a bunch of other things. I actually love to rate my meetings, just so I know, like, so I remember like what are the tens and the nines that I should have paid attention to, but I forgot because I didn't. So I want to have an exhaust of all the things that I'm encountering in my real life and AI is an amazing capture of the exhaust and to provide intelligence and signals to our team and it can pipe it into our CRM. And so there's all these cool things that we've done. We have an internal tech team, which is an amazing team of four folks who build a lot of these tools and we are definitely maxing out on using everything that's out there.

• 56:42Barry Ritholtz?

  Huh, really, really quite fascinating. So, final question before we get to our favorites that we ask all our guests. What are investors not thinking about when it comes to AI but or anything else, but perhaps should be? What sort of topics, policy, data, geography? What's getting overlooked but shouldn't?

• 57:04Speaker 03

  I think right now we're going through a time of where software is considered to be dead and or there's called the SaaS apocalypse and

• 57:15Barry Ritholtz?

  Although they're just coming off their lows.

• 57:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, and there's always an overreaction to, oh my God, it's going to be an AI capex world and only chips will matter and only like, you know, like fiber and data centers and power will matter. The reality is like the way we as humans interact with software, with technologies through software and through things, you know, we have known to be called software and tools. And so, and by the way, CIOs in large companies buy, buy from companies that sell to them and they don't just buy, you know, a smart agent. And so I think something that's been certainly Just the pendulum swung a little too far is that we underappreciate what software still

• 57:58Speaker 03

  does and will continue to do forever for for enterprises, for governments, etc.

• 58:03Barry Ritholtz?

  Software not going away.

• 58:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:05Barry Ritholtz?

  Really interesting. All right, let's jump to our favorite questions, starting with, who are your mentors who helped shape your career?

• 58:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, one of my mentors is Erwin Federman, who I dearly love. He's ninety years old now. He's a New Yorker.

• 58:24Barry Ritholtz?

  Wow.

• 58:24Speaker 03

  He sold peanuts, I believe, at Dodger Stadium when there was still the Dodgers.

• 58:28Barry Ritholtz?

  The 50s?

• 58:29Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:30Barry Ritholtz?

  That's amazing.

• 58:31Speaker 03

  But he was my mentor at USVP, and he's a legendary semiconductor investor. Believe it or not, he was one of the co-founders of SanDisk Corporation. Before that, he was the CEO of AMD.

• 58:45Barry Ritholtz?

  I hope he still has a few shares of those.

• 58:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, and he probably does. But SanDisk, which is in this memory hype

• 58:51Barry Ritholtz?

  Yes.

• 58:52Speaker 03

  cycle that we're going through, hype or not, but like, there's a real need for memory, I believe now is maybe like a half a trillion dollar market cap company.

• 58:59Barry Ritholtz?

  Yeah.

• 59:00Speaker 03

  Something crazy. Don't quote me on that, but memory's having its day right now. But in any case, he was a mentor because not only I worked for him, but I saw through his lens how to be a great board member, how to make investments, how to back people, how to build relationships with people. But he also gave me feedback that no one else in life would, because I think he just wanted, he loved me. I really felt the love, because the kind of feedback he gave me was feedback that I don't think people generally have the courage to give you. And it's sort of, you know, it's like, pretty direct.

• 59:40Barry Ritholtz?

  Tough love?

• 59:41Speaker 03

  Tough love.

• 59:42Barry Ritholtz?

  Yeah.

• 59:42Speaker 03

  And I love that about him. And, you know, reminds me that I need to go pay him a visit.

• 59:48Barry Ritholtz?

  Well, you're in New York, you might as well, right?

• 59:50Speaker 03

  Oh, he's actually, you know, he lives in the Bay Area.

• 59:51Barry Ritholtz?

  Oh, okay.

• 59:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, so he's a New Yorker, relocated to the Bay Area, I think, like, fifty years ago.

• 59:57Barry Ritholtz?

  So, let's talk about books. What are some of your favorites? What are you reading currently?

• 1:00:01Speaker 03

  So...

• 1:00:03Speaker 03

  I'm just starting on this book. It's called Believe. Why you should believe, especially in this like era of AI. And it's my, I'm on the board of a company called Thrive Global and the CEO founder is Arianna Huffington. And Arianna gave me the book and she and I have very aligned views on faith and spirituality. And she gave me this book. She said, you know, like, so Arianna, I believe Greek Orthodox. I'm Muslim and we talk about how faith guides our lives. And we talk about how in this age of AI, this is actually the conversation she and I have. And she's like, I have the perfect book for you.

• 1:00:48Speaker 03

  And it's about how we should believe even more in this age of AI. Because it helps us actually understand the world. Because we're trying to make sense of it all the time, all the time. And actually, religion can give us a bit more constrained view of like what the world actually is. Because otherwise, it's just like a black hole, black box. You won't be able to comprehend the vastness of what we're trying to comprehend as human beings. And especially with AI now, we're pushing boundaries of what's possible. And I think there's actually more, more in the scriptures than you think. Is sort of the view that she and I share. And this book actually sort of hits home with it.

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  It's a New York Times columnist, Roy DeHut. But yeah, Believe. Check it out.

• 1:01:39Barry Ritholtz?

  On my list now. What about streaming? I know you host a podcast. What do you either watch or listen these days?

• 1:01:47Speaker 03

  So my wife and I, we love to watch Dateline, Forty Eight Hours.

• 1:01:53Barry Ritholtz?

  All the crime shows?

• 1:01:54Speaker 03

  All the crime shows. It's like, in some ways, it's a, it just kind of takes it down a notch. But it also is so instructive around human psychology. What motivates people to do not so great things? And, uh, and there's generally like a theme to it. At this point, it's a very repetitive theme.

• 1:02:15Barry Ritholtz?

  Dunning Kruger, it's all they have no idea. They're just trail of DNA evidence they leave everywhere. Anytime I've watched that show, it's like, what are you doing?

• 1:02:24Speaker 03

  And it's, you know, it's, it's, it should be that it's harder and harder to commit crimes. It should be harder and harder.

• 1:02:30Barry Ritholtz?

  And yet?

• 1:02:31Speaker 03

  There are still crimes.

• 1:02:32Barry Ritholtz?

  There's still, and just as many as ever, only people are getting caught more easily.

• 1:02:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, and we know the cell phones, they're pinging those towers, you know?

• 1:02:41Barry Ritholtz?

  What do you mean you weren't in the house? We could tell you were within a hundred feet of this person at that time.

• 1:02:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it, it is like, it's not probably a, a, a very, uh, full answer and you're probably looking for some cool show that you can go watch.

• 1:02:54Barry Ritholtz?

  Not at all, I, I'm, I'm fascinated by that. Uh, my, my, it's funny because there was, used to be this giant gap between the CSIs and, and, and what actually was going on. But if you watch the two of them, it's really closed because uh, maybe there's a little selection bias here, but all those shows, it's all these people they got, that got caught. So you're seeing where the technology worked, where the forensic science was that guy.

• 1:03:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:03:22Barry Ritholtz?

  It's really, really very funny. All right, our, our final two questions. What sort of advice would you give to a recent college grad interested in the career in either venture investing or technology?

• 1:03:34Speaker 03

  Uh, I would, it's, it's probably the same advice I would have given 20 years ago or given myself when I came out of college is go work at a fast growing company where you can learn from the growth that it's encountering, but also the people and then probably the network that you build for the rest of your life. It is probably the best time in your life, coming out of college, to go learn from others around you and to experience high growth. Because from high growth, lots of lessons are learned. And so if you can find a way to get into a high growth technology startup, AI startup.

• 1:04:13Speaker 03

  It is the best way to develop the skills, but also like the empathy of what it means to have carried a bag and sold something and built something and shipped something. I always tell folks like there shouldn't be a direct path into venture capital. It's not a, it's a second thing. It's not the first thing you do coming out of college or coming out of grad school. It's like you have to have built and shipped and sold and developed that empathy for high growth and the lessons learned before you get into our career.

• 1:04:49Barry Ritholtz?

  Really, really interesting answer. And our final question, what do you know about the world of venture investing or technology today? Might have been useful 25, 30 years ago when you were first ramping up.

• 1:05:03Speaker 03

  It's all about the people. It sounds so trite, but it is about especially, it's, I say, ordinary looking people doing extraordinary things. And how do you assess those ordinary people who are doing extraordinary things is by really understanding the people, their intentionality, their desires, their ambition, what drives them, their motivation, which goes back to the, why do you meet them in person? Because you're trying to figure out like, why are they doing this? Building a startup, a company is hard work. It's a sacrifice on life. So there better be a good reason why you're doing this.

• 1:05:41Barry Ritholtz?

  Huh, really, really interesting answer. Thank you, Mamoon, for being so generous with your time. We have been speaking with Mamoon Hamid. He is partner at Kleiner Perkins. If you enjoy this conversation, well, check out any of the 647 we've done over the past 12 years. You can find those at Apple, Spotify, YouTube, Bloomberg, wherever you get your favorite podcasts. I would be remiss if I did not thank the crack staff that helps put these conversations together each week. Alexis Noriega is my video producer. Sean Russo is my researcher. Anna Luke is my podcast producer. I'm Barry Ritholtz. You've been listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio.

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