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SPEAKER_02: Hey, everybody. Hey, everybody. Welcome to Angel the Podcast. This is season three of the podcast that I paired with my book, Angel. If you haven't read the book, go ahead and buy it on Amazon or Audible or Barnes & Noble Voice. For the 6% of you that do, go ahead and buy the Audible book because, hey, I read it myself.

SPEAKER_04: And there are many theories about how to invest in startup companies. There is no one unifying theory of investing. And that is why it's such a great sport. It's such a great endeavor is because everybody who comes to it has their own idea of which founders are going to succeed in which markets. And there's a ton of randomness, but there are some heuristics. So what I'd like to do here on this podcast is talk to the most successful investors currently investing in Silicon Valley here in the cradle of innovation. And I'm super excited today that my friend Mamun Hamid. And it's Hamid, right? People say Hamid or Hamid.

SPEAKER_06: They say Hamid. It's Hamid. It's Hamid. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: It's Hamid. And it's Ramadan when we're taping this. So you're a little bit weak. You're fasting.

SPEAKER_11: I am. And if I slur my speech, it's because I'm not as sharp as usual.

SPEAKER_12: But you get to eat when the sun goes down. Yeah. Which is about six hours from now.

SPEAKER_13: So it's a 12-hour fast.

SPEAKER_12: It's actually more like 4 a.m. to 8 p.m.

SPEAKER_16: Oh, okay. So that's more intense. 16 hours.

SPEAKER_04: Yeah. I've been doing the 13-hour circadian rhythm fast. I lost 15 pounds on it. You start at sundown and then you can eat breakfast the next day.

SPEAKER_02: You look great. Yeah. Thanks. And you have a little ways to go.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. I do the no breakfast fast, which is pretty awesome too. Yeah.

SPEAKER_22: Yeah. You feel more mentally clear when you lower your caloric intake?

SPEAKER_21: As well as less distractions. Like food is distraction.

SPEAKER_25: It takes so much time. When you cut out one meal a day, you get back like an hour. Oh, totally.

SPEAKER_26: Plus the hour after when you're digesting.

SPEAKER_27: Oh, totally.

SPEAKER_26: So it's really like a gain of two hours and you're only awake and productive for maybe 12 hours a day anyway, 14 hours a day.

SPEAKER_28: You look better. You feel better.

SPEAKER_26: You're smarter. You're crisper. I think it's also for older folks. When you pass 40, I think they say lower caloric is better for a life extension. So I think that seems to be directionally correct. Yeah. If you're an engine and you burn less calories, you burn the engine less. It's like driving your car less.

SPEAKER_15: We eat too much. I mean, just if you look at our ancestors historically, you know, we didn't consume 3,000 calories a day. And we worked a lot more. We weren't in sedentary lifestyles sitting behind desks or in meeting rooms.

SPEAKER_34: Yeah. Well, now we have standing desks. So that solves everything. Yeah.

SPEAKER_26: I love how people are like, oh, you have standing desks. So treadmill desk, you're good. Treadmill desk makes sense a bit. I'm not sure standing makes all that much of a difference. I mean, it might be more comfortable, but.

SPEAKER_29: I haven't gotten to that one yet. Yeah. So by way of introduction, Mamoun, if my memory serves me correct, and I don't want to embarrass you, but Yammer, Box, and Slack. And Front App. Am I right that you were the partner on all of those? I know you worked on teams, but you were on the board and or the partner who made those investment decisions? That's correct. Yeah. I mean, that's a pretty heck of a track record.

SPEAKER_42: Well, I've been doing this for almost 15 years.

SPEAKER_12: Yeah. How did you get started? What was your first gig in venture? My first gig in venture was actually a summer internship when I was in business school in summer of 2004.

SPEAKER_46: For Stanford or Harvard?

SPEAKER_12: Harvard.

SPEAKER_47: You went to Harvard business school? Harvard. You couldn't get into Stanford? I didn't apply to Stanford.

SPEAKER_50: That's my standard joke. You handled it well. Usually when I say to a Harvard person they didn't get to Stanford, they explain to me that Harvard's the better school.

SPEAKER_15: Yeah, I know. Well, I'd gone to grad school for Stanford, to Stanford, so I'd done my master's at Stanford. So I just thought the- In what? In management, science, and engineering.

SPEAKER_53: Management, science, and engineering.

SPEAKER_15: Yeah, it's a combination of like eight different degrees at Stanford from the 90s, and it became this thing called MS&E, which everybody knows about now, but I was the first class of MS&E. But I started out actually in electrical engineering at Stanford for my master's because that was what I did my undergrad in. I thought, okay, you know, my parents, immigrant parents, expected me to do a PhD in electrical engineering or something or the other. And so I went to go get my master's with the hope maybe I'd get a PhD one day.

SPEAKER_34: But yet you didn't, and you just totally disappointed them.

SPEAKER_12: Totally. Actually, my dad just even a few years ago said to me, you know, it's not too late to get a JD.

SPEAKER_60: Yeah.

SPEAKER_12: Like JD.

SPEAKER_60: You're like, I'm one of the top 25 venture capitalists in the world.

SPEAKER_57: Why do I need that?

SPEAKER_47: But it's pretty funny. Are you, what national are you? I don't even know.

SPEAKER_66: I'm Pakistani. You're Pakistani. But I grew up in Germany. So from 0 to 10, Germany. Yeah. 10 to 13 in Pakistan, 13 to 16 back in Germany.

SPEAKER_70: There is a major educational and aspirational push from those groups, yeah?

SPEAKER_25: Growing up Pakistani, educational push is hard. Yeah.

SPEAKER_15: Especially for the immigrant. Totally. I mean, we were like in the 70s and 80s when I grew up in Germany, not a lot of people that looked like me. Yeah, that must have been very interesting. Yeah. It's a great place to have grown up. Nevertheless, not a lot of people look like me. So, you know, our parents, my parents, education was pretty, we were pushed.

SPEAKER_37: You listen to Preet Bharar's podcast at all? I have not, but I hear it's amazing. It's great.

SPEAKER_76: Yeah. Stay tuned with Preet is great. And then he's also got a paid one at cafe.com called Cafe Insider.

SPEAKER_26: But anyway, his book came out and it was number four on the bestseller list. So he says to his dad, hey, dad, I'm on the New York Times bestseller list. I'm number four. And his dad says, oh, so there's room to improve. Yeah.

SPEAKER_81: I thought that was a pretty great.

SPEAKER_86: So you were at Kleiner and before that you were working with my friend Chamath and my other friend Ted at Social Capital. And then before that you had an internship somewhere?

SPEAKER_88: Oh, no. So I had six years of Social Capital and six years of U.S. Venture Partners. That's where I started my VC career.

SPEAKER_89: Ah, U.S. Venture Partners. Yeah.

SPEAKER_17: That's where Ted worked. That's where Ted and I worked. That's where we got to know each other. What are you, like in your 20s when you guys worked there?

SPEAKER_12: I joined when I was 27. So I'm 41. So yeah, right out of business school in 2005.

SPEAKER_90: So you're part of that group of people.

SPEAKER_86: Yeah. It used to be the old trajectory to be a venture capitalist was to go to business school.

SPEAKER_26: And then your first job out of school would be in venture capital.

SPEAKER_21: Yeah. Well, I had worked for six years for a company before that, before I went to business school.

SPEAKER_15: So I'd been an engineer. Got it. Worked for six, well, three years as an engineer, three years as a product slash marketing guy.

SPEAKER_95: What type of company?

SPEAKER_11: It was a company called Xilinx, a semiconductor company, worth like $30 billion still today. Kline at Perkins led the Series A.

SPEAKER_25: Got it. So you did get some experience working at a tech company.

SPEAKER_15: Totally. Yeah. I mean, I think I don't think I would have been qualified to do anything in venture capital had I not worked inside of a tech company.

SPEAKER_12: Right. But you didn't work at startups. I did not. The company at the time was about a thousand employees. Yeah. So it was not a startup.

SPEAKER_26: Now, people seem to be hiring not from the ranks of the big companies or the Harvard or Stanford's, but going into the companies and looking for the growth, engineers, and the founders. That seems to be the more likely career path, right?

SPEAKER_15: I think venture capitalists come in all shapes and sizes. And if you look at the last few people we've hired to our team, every single one of them has an operating background. So having worked inside of a company that's seen some scale, one of my colleagues joined from Uber. She was at Bain before that.

SPEAKER_103: I heard that's a good company. Yeah. Yeah. It's done okay. Congratulations. Well, we'll find out on Friday.

SPEAKER_22: Yeah. You'll be fine. I think I'll be okay. You'll be okay. Yeah.

SPEAKER_26: People are like, are you nervous? I'm like, I invested when the company was 5 million. If it goes out at 5 billion, you realize I've done okay.

SPEAKER_47: That's a thousand X? That would be like the thousand X. Yeah. I think I'm okay with it being at 50. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04: Or 25 or anything in between. Who cares? So we're all lucky.

SPEAKER_113: Yeah. Absolutely. Born in this country at this time or got to this country at this time is the gift.

SPEAKER_12: Is the gift. We were telling our kids last night that your biggest gift is that you're born to this family in this time.

SPEAKER_116: So we count our blessings.

SPEAKER_26: Well, if you think about it, in terms of wealth creation, in terms of safety, security, yeah, being born in this age, in the developed world, you've eliminated starvation, murder,

SPEAKER_34: hopefully, and just having access to education.

SPEAKER_15: Yeah. Just even from stillbirth to birth defects to all kinds of things that would happen. And you hear about your grandparents who had three other kids that-

SPEAKER_61: Didn't make it. That didn't make it. You didn't know about it.

SPEAKER_117: They died in childbirth.

SPEAKER_61: Yeah. They died shortly. They died when they were two or one. Oh, totally. Yeah. Devastating, right? Like I have a one and a half year old.

SPEAKER_12: Can you imagine? The notion of just that is just crazy.

SPEAKER_04: And it was common. It was totally common. Yeah. I found out later in life that my mom and my uncles and aunts, they had a seventh sibling. Yeah. And we never knew. Yeah. Because you didn't talk about it. It was just too painful to bring up. And that was every family, I guess.

SPEAKER_124: Every family. Yeah.

SPEAKER_123: Yeah. No, totally. So we live in a pretty special time. We don't think of it because we don't have the context of history.

SPEAKER_26: Right.

SPEAKER_100: Or the past.

SPEAKER_26: We're so entitled.

SPEAKER_100: We are so entitled.

SPEAKER_26: It's crazy. Like I was having this conversation with my wife and I was like, wow, you know, like any existential angst we have, any anxiety we have, we should really just punch ourselves in the face and just be like, get a grip because we didn't have to live through a war.

SPEAKER_04: We didn't have to fight in a war. We didn't have to be scared of being drafted.

SPEAKER_131: None of this stuff.

SPEAKER_130: Yeah.

SPEAKER_131: And we complain about our food arriving late to our doorstep.

SPEAKER_133: I was outraged today. I ordered Uber Eats and my impossible burger. I very specifically ordered lettuce, tomatoes, pickles, and avocado.

SPEAKER_135: And it came plain.

SPEAKER_66: Well, I think the problem is- The rage I felt. The problem is that you ordered an impossible burger. You should have had a Beyond Meat burger.

SPEAKER_137: Oh, is that the problem? Your investors and Beyond?

SPEAKER_133: I'm happy. Do you think all that stuff is going to work? Is that going to be able to be as affordable as meat?

SPEAKER_04: Because factory farming is super cheap. But my understanding is that some of these mock meats or imitation meats or replacement

SPEAKER_138: meats are more expensive right now.

SPEAKER_66: They're actually not.

SPEAKER_15: So it hit me about a year and a half ago, maybe two years ago, my next door neighbor, Leo, I think Leo's between 75 and 80, very kind man.

SPEAKER_91: He comes to our house and drops off a box of Beyond Meat burgers. He's like, hey, these are the best thing. You need to have these. And it's like, where'd you get these? I think my firm's an investor in this thing. It's like, oh, Safeway. I eat them like every week. And so that, to me, is like, holy cow.

SPEAKER_15: Wow, it made it. Leo is buying these at Safeway and having them multiple times a week.

SPEAKER_100: And he's not a vegetarian, but he just likes the taste of the burger.

SPEAKER_26: And didn't one of them go to Burger King now? Is it impossible or Beyond? Impossible is at Burger King. Is it at Burger King?

SPEAKER_43: Yeah. That seems to be the tipping point to me. If that flies, that's the game changer right there.

SPEAKER_15: Well, for the longest time, these things were not scalable. Like the, you know, there's pretty big differences between Beyond Meat and Impossible Burger taste. You know, there's one that has heme and the other is pea-based. Yeah. But nevertheless, like, they've figured out how to make this cheap. Like, make it so that it's actually viable at Safeway. But there, I think the macro suggests that the amount of water that's used, land that's used to make beef, beef burgers, is like, you've seen all the charts that show, like, it is not sustainable. No. And so, we need a better solution. And when this thing, this Beyond Meat burger, this Impossible Burger tastes really good and it's-

SPEAKER_61: 80%. 80%, right? What do you feel? If you had to put a percentage, if you were just, if you weren't on camera right now, you didn't have Beyond Meat. By the way, they had a credible IPO. They're worth almost $4.5 billion. It's incredible. Incredible. And that bet, whoever made that bet probably looked really stupid for two or three years.

SPEAKER_43: Oh, it was an- And they probably look brilliant now.

SPEAKER_48: We just actually did a deep refund because we were the Series A investor at Kleiner.

SPEAKER_15: You were the Series A?

SPEAKER_143: Yes. Oh, that takes conviction.

SPEAKER_15: Oh, I mean, I wasn't, but the team that made the bet and we were going through just the ups and downs of that company yesterday as a debrief of like, hey, successful IPO. But, you know, the folks in the room, John Doerr and Brooke Byers and Touchline who were just reminding us like, hey, guys, like, this thing went through ups and downs and, you know, we didn't think it would make it. Ethan the founder didn't think it would make it.

SPEAKER_144: Wow.

SPEAKER_15: So, but nevertheless, it's now public, went public last week. It's awesome. It's amazing. But maybe more to talk about the macro trend there. It was about, we talked about land and water use for making beef, but the thesis was like, hey, we need to find a better solution to this.

SPEAKER_11: So let's go find a protein, a plant-based protein that is manufacturable. And that's what the Series A bet was actually. It was one of our partners, Amol Deshpande, who now runs a company called Farmer's Business Network. And he actually came from the ag world, from Cargill. So he had a thesis around like, you know, plant-based food and just that we're going to run out of food if we keep going in the current trajectory. And so that was a thesis, Series A thesis behind investing in.

SPEAKER_29: Yeah, I had him on the podcast back in the day, and I thought it was super interesting. What percentage do you think it's there for somebody who's a meat lover?

SPEAKER_43: For a meat lover, what do you think it is on a percentage basis?

SPEAKER_66: I'd say what you said, about 80%.

SPEAKER_43: You think, yeah.

SPEAKER_66: Yeah. I think if you're a vegetarian, you'd love it. Like someone was telling me. Oh, for sure.

SPEAKER_15: They went to some, you know, weekend away somewhere and they lived off of like Beyond Meat burgers because they're vegetarian. They couldn't live life without like Beyond Meat anymore. And that's pretty amazing. But I think as a meat eater, I'm a, you know, I have high LDL, so I shouldn't be eating as much meat. But I'd say it's about 80 to 90%. I mean, I love Shake Shack in and out. Yeah. Yeah, so, but every once in a while, impossible, Beyond Meat, 80%.

SPEAKER_26: Yeah, I think that's what I'm going to do is I'm going to go 50-50. Yeah. It seems reasonable to me. For those of you wondering, episode 680, which I think was back in 2013, Farmers Business Network co-founder, Amal, was on the pod. Wow. Yeah, that's crazy. We've got to pull that, 2016. Yeah, we've got to definitely do a podcast about that. But all right, when we get back from this quick break, I want to understand how you had the conviction, speaking of conviction, to do Slack. Because that, to me, sounded like the silliest, stupidest, unfundable idea. A chat room.

SPEAKER_29: When IRC is free, you guys decide to make a bet on it. And it becomes, let's face it, I think, in the top four or five companies of this last cohort of unicorns here in Silicon Valley when we get back on Angel Podcast.

SPEAKER_156: Because hiring is so hard. It is probably the hardest thing you're going to do, aside from raising money. And you know what? A lot of the people I know who raise money, they have a harder time finding team members. It's arduous. It's hard out there. We have incredibly low unemployment. And there's a massive, massive competition for great talent. But luckily, there is LinkedIn Jobs with more than 500 million active members. People come to LinkedIn every day to make connections, to grow their careers, and to discover new job opportunities. 90% of LinkedIn users are open to new opportunities. But they're not actively looking on job boards. You know these people. You're probably one of them. So LinkedIn Jobs gives you access to an entirely different demographic that doesn't exist anywhere else. We call those passive job seekers. They might not be looking for a job, but they would consider a new gig if it was better. And we found Director Sir Charles and our marketing manager, Maureen, on LinkedIn. You need LinkedIn Jobs to find the right people for your business, and you will get targeted job promotion, recommended matches, and candidate management through a dashboard that tracks everyone from application all the way to hire, all in one place. So you're not going to lose valuable candidates. LinkedIn Jobs uses knowledge of both hard skills like cloud computing, social media marketing, video production, whatever it is, and soft skills like collaboration and time management. And they do that to match people who fit your role best in your company. So here is your call to action. Post a job today at linkedin.com slash angel, A-N-G-E-L, and get $50 off your first job post. And that's right, a 50, a 5-0 from J-Cal and your friends at LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com slash angel.

SPEAKER_158: It's that simple. Terms and conditions, of course, apply. Let's get back to this amazing episode.

SPEAKER_113: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Angel the Podcast. My guest today, Mamoun Hamid, or Hamid?

SPEAKER_06: Hamid. Or Hamid. Hamid. Hamid. Got it. Hamid. What is your title at Kleiner Perkins?

SPEAKER_10: I'm a partner.

SPEAKER_133: But aren't you the lead partner? Aren't you in charge?

SPEAKER_10: I'm just one of the partners at Kleiner Perkins.

SPEAKER_115: Wow, you're smiling and being so humble, but I thought they brought you in to run the early stage.

SPEAKER_66: Well, we're only one stage, which is early stage. And so, yeah, we're five partners at Kleiner Perkins that invest.

SPEAKER_12: But you're the lead partner. There's no such thing as a lead partner.

SPEAKER_02: No, it's just all equal. We're all partners. But you set the strategy and hire the team members.

SPEAKER_66: I had the good fortune of being able to hire some of the partners that are here now. And we together are the partners that run Kleiner Perkins.

SPEAKER_163: Why is it important that partnerships maintain this level of partnership ethos?

SPEAKER_25: Because you're very...

SPEAKER_26: I know you're in charge, but you're very clear to sort of signal that it's a partnership. Why is that important? Why is it so important?

SPEAKER_15: Partnerships are just very fragile things. And I talk about actually how partnerships need to resemble a basketball team. And a partnership that wants to win championships, or just like a basketball team that wants to win championships, needs to have five partners in the key roles, point guard, shooting guard, power forwards, small forward, center.

SPEAKER_100: And they're very different roles, right? Yep.

SPEAKER_26: One person brings the ball up court. One person dunks it. Another person shoots it. There's all different specialities.

SPEAKER_15: Right. But if you want to win championships, you need a top one, two, three person, each one of the roles. Yeah. Right? Sure. Do you agree? Of course. Yeah.

SPEAKER_26: In fact, they say today in the league, you need to have at least two all-stars. Probably three in order to compete.

SPEAKER_15: Right. And so I think partnerships need to resemble that. Venture capital partnerships. And you also need to have a bench, you know, with a sixth person. Yeah. Maybe a seventh. You need to do well at drafting from college. Yeah. Right? Developing talent. Every once in a while, you have a Steph Curry that you recruit from Davidson. Yeah. Right?

SPEAKER_171: Eighth pick in the league. Knicks had the seventh. Right. Passed him up. Who was that? I can't remember who we picked at seventh. It might have been, was it Marcus Camby?

SPEAKER_115: It might have been Trevor Ariza. I'm not sure.

SPEAKER_15: At the time, yeah. No, Marcus Camby was-

SPEAKER_173: Marcus Camby was way older.

SPEAKER_15: Way older. Yeah.

SPEAKER_34: Maybe it was Trevor Ariza. I don't even want to look it up because the person is probably no longer playing in the league. Yeah.

SPEAKER_175: So that's actually- But that was a hard decision to make, Steph Curry.

SPEAKER_176: I mean, he was like 140 pounds. Yeah.

SPEAKER_91: Yeah. He developed. He developed. So partnerships, why is it important to have- I think one is to have complementary skill sets. So people are different at different things inside of partnerships.

SPEAKER_15: Some person might be just exceptional at like, forget about just like the sectors they're good at, but even internally operating, like they're really good at marketing PR. Someone else is really good at the, more the operational, like working with- So most partnerships have, divide up the roles and responsibilities to help run an organization because there is no CEO, right? Most partnerships don't have a CEO. Most partnerships, they do have a CFO, a COO, but they're not typically investors. And so, like I said, they're fragile things and they're- To keep the balance and the partnerships, you just need to have a group of very complementary people who want to take on the roles and responsibilities of sort of, you know, managing a firm.

SPEAKER_70: And speaking of partnerships, you were at US Venture Partnership, which seemed to be kind of like,

SPEAKER_133: I don't want to say dorky, but kind of like an old school dorky venture firm back in the day. Yeah.

SPEAKER_12: It was kind of an old school firm, right? Yeah. I mean, hey, like the average age of a partner, if that tells you something, it was higher.

SPEAKER_15: Yeah. It was probably in the 50s, you know? And I learned the craft of venture capital through my partners there. Yeah. So I'm severely indebted to all the learnings from there, but it was different. It was like, you know- Old school.

SPEAKER_181: It was like a 90s firm.

SPEAKER_15: It was a 90s. It did incredibly well in the semiconductor networking era. Got it. And I think we kind of missed the boat on the internet and software.

SPEAKER_145: Why does a firm like that miss the boat when a new paradigm comes out?

SPEAKER_86: Because it's obvious to everybody else. The paradigm is here and it's going to work. Why do they miss it? I'm always confused by that.

SPEAKER_15: I think it's a bit of the innovator's dilemma. Or it's also a bit the, you know, if things aren't broken, like why fix them or why change? Got it. And I think also venture, actually just like professional sports, you have a power alley. Like you have years, like earning years. You have years where you're really good at it. Yeah. Your network is really good. The relationships, like your deal flow.

SPEAKER_91: Your energy. Your energy. All that is good. And then you just like, I kind of made it. Like I don't need to work as hard.

SPEAKER_176: So success is the big deteriorating effect. You become successful and it's like, well, why would I need to chase deals? Totally.

SPEAKER_88: Because it's hard work, Jason. You know this. Oh, God. It's so hard work. This is a grind. Yeah. Right. So if you want to do this job, you better show up to work.

SPEAKER_91: All right. And if you've made it and you don't have the inner desire to keep working or, you know,

SPEAKER_15: just grinding it, then you should retire, but most don't. Right. And then you become, then you're, because you're senior at your firm, you just miss on things because you're like, well, I don't think that's important. Why change?

SPEAKER_172: Because it's working. What's working for you because you're not doing anything.

SPEAKER_171: Right. By the way, Steph went at number seven.

SPEAKER_26: The Knicks actually had number eight. So the Knicks were going to pick Steph. So it wasn't as painful as I thought. We were number eight and we picked Jordan Hill, who I don't think ever played in the

SPEAKER_198: NBA at this point.

SPEAKER_12: So Slack, when did you meet Stuart Butterfield? Yeah. I met Stuart for the first time in October of 2013.

SPEAKER_91: What was he doing? He was running- Where were you? I was at Social Capital, as you know, and he was running, at the time, a company called Tiny Spec. It was a video game, right?

SPEAKER_15: The video game that had just pivoting into building Slack and they'd built Slack. At this point, they had six companies that were using it and it was used by maybe a few hundred people. I remember this was about maybe six to nine months after Yammer had been acquired.

SPEAKER_91: David Sachs' company, which you were an investor in. I was an investor in and on the board of Yammer.

SPEAKER_15: And that to me was an attempt at the social network or the messaging platform for the enterprise.

SPEAKER_26: Yeah, it was Facebook or Twitter for enterprise. Exactly. It launched at our conference and then got bought by Microsoft, what, year six, five? Actually-

SPEAKER_11: For a billion dollars? A billion two. And it was probably three years into Yammer and six years into the company because- Because they had Genie before that and they had pivoted. Exactly.

SPEAKER_133: What is it about these messaging platforms that they're all based on a pivot? Genie became worth nothing. Yes. Close to nothing. You weren't an investor in Genie.

SPEAKER_15: I actually wanted to invest in Genie. That's how I got to know David. Ah. I met David in 06 when he's still making a movie.

SPEAKER_209: But yeah, we can go talk about- Thank you for smoking. Yeah, great movie.

SPEAKER_26: Great film. Great, great.

SPEAKER_171: Elon has a cameo in it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_26: Do you know that? I remember that, yeah. He's the pilot because David needed a plane to have the CEO, whatever the person was flying on. So they put Elon in the front seat as the captain and he turns around and says, welcome aboard or something. Take your seats. Oh, yeah. I remember that.

SPEAKER_188: That's Elon's plane.

SPEAKER_15: He loaned him the plane. Yeah. I remember. We went to, what was it? Sundance? No, Letterman, you know where Founders Fund is? What's that? The Presidio? Yeah, the Presidio. Yeah, that's where he did his screening. David did his screening. Oh, he did his screening there? Yeah. That's hilarious. And so that's when I first met him around that time. I became infatuated with Genie, the social network for families before Facebook was- Right.

SPEAKER_218: It was like an accessory. Yeah. It was a great idea.

SPEAKER_15: It was supposed to be like the Facebook for everyone else.

SPEAKER_142: That would work now if you think about it. It would work really good right now.

SPEAKER_15: Right now. But again, timing- Timing is everything. Everything, right? So I was an investor in Yammer and had seen that play out. And I thought that was the company that could have been the messaging platform, the social network, or the network for companies. And we sold it to Microsoft. So now my mind had moved on to the next thing. And I still thought there was an opportunity for a true messaging. So Gchat, iMessage. And Stuart comes along. So we meet in October of 2013. And at that point, I remember meeting him with my Ted Maidenberg. Yeah. And you know Ted. And he and I are sitting there. And I'm like, this is cool, man. But go get some more traction. You have like 100 users or so. We didn't tell him that. But I was thinking to myself, good luck, Stuart. And then Ted kept following up with Stuart because they were on a board together of another

SPEAKER_12: company, Cozy. Cozy, which I'm an investor in. You're an investor in Cozy. Yes. Gino. Gino. Gino. So Gino is the reason why we know Stuart. Ah. And we love Gino. Amazing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_29: So yeah, because Stuart invested in Gino. Gino did Cozy. Myself, Gary Vaynerchuk, Kevin Rose.

SPEAKER_223: I think Kevin Rose introduced me.

SPEAKER_224: So Ted and I, we led the seed round in Cozy.

SPEAKER_223: Yeah.

SPEAKER_91: And that's how we know Gino. And Gino and Stuart used to be designers at Yahoo together. Ah. And then Stuart joined Gino's board at Cozy. Right. To be a good friend and help him out. Help him out. Right? And so that's how.

SPEAKER_132: You guys decided. And you guys did the Series B? What was it? A recap?

SPEAKER_15: How did it go down? In October, it could have been a recap.

SPEAKER_91: But Stuart was such an awesome guy. He's like, you know what? Like I don't, my investors put all this money behind me. I'm not going to recap.

SPEAKER_232: He raised 30 million or something.

SPEAKER_91: At that point, he'd only raised 15.

SPEAKER_188: From Idrisen or something? Idrisen and Excel. Got it. Yeah. And failed.

SPEAKER_91: Yeah.

SPEAKER_234: It was not working. The game wasn't working.

SPEAKER_26: The game didn't work. That's also known as failure. You're being kind. But he failed again at a game.

SPEAKER_234: At a game. It was like his third game.

SPEAKER_26: He fails at games and then builds multi-billion dollar companies. Yeah.

SPEAKER_234: Flickr would be a huge company today if it was still-

SPEAKER_26: Oh, that'd be a billion dollar company for sure.

SPEAKER_15: Huge, right? Yeah. But yeah, we meet him and we're like, okay, this is great. But let's keep in touch.

SPEAKER_91: And so then Ted stays on it and he's like, hey, man, you got to check this out. This is your area. You should spend the time on it. And actually, I remember emailing David, David Sachs. Yeah. At the time, he was at Microsoft now. He's like, hey, David, have you heard of this thing called Slack? He's like, no, it won't work.

SPEAKER_237: Spoken like a true competitor. Right? Impossible. Impossible, right? That's what lifts that about Uber.

SPEAKER_91: Yeah. And so then you're like, okay, I should get on this thing. Yeah. So we actually, we met again.

SPEAKER_96: You guys put what, 10, 20 million in?

SPEAKER_12: No, no. We put in $25 million in the first round of Slack. Really? For what? 25%? No. No, it was 10%.

SPEAKER_240: 10%.

SPEAKER_12: It was crazy.

SPEAKER_240: The company's going to go public at 15 billion?

SPEAKER_241: Yeah. Is what people say. It's a direct listing. It's a quiet period.

SPEAKER_240: Okay, we can't say it.

SPEAKER_243: You can't talk about that. You still on the board or? No, no. Chamath's on the board. Chamath's on the board.

SPEAKER_76: Yeah. So if it goes out at 10 or 15 billion, that winds up being 1 billion to 1.5 billion in return.

SPEAKER_247: And you guys get 20, 30% carry on that.

SPEAKER_06: It's a $200 or $300 million payday for the partners. Yeah, it's pretty nice.

SPEAKER_251: The math works out.

SPEAKER_91: Yeah. But you asked about why Slack at the time. So I think I would say you look at Yammer. Yammer, if it was just a comparison to draw to, Yammer at the time of acquisition was about, forget about the number of users, but the users that converted from free to paid was roughly 15%. And the users that were using the product, they're about 7% Dow Mao.

SPEAKER_15: So 7% of the monthly active users were also daily active users.

SPEAKER_33: Which shows engagement, how engaging the product is when you divide the Dow's into the Mao's.

SPEAKER_91: Exactly. And then Yammer was charging about $1.80 per user per month. Slack, on the other hand, the free to paid conversion was about close to 50% at the time. The Dow Mao was about 50%. Wow.

SPEAKER_234: And the price per seat per month was like $8. So like multiples on every dimension.

SPEAKER_145: Right. Because it was growing like a consumer business, but had the profitability of sort of an enterprise company.

SPEAKER_91: Yeah. Like high gross margin. If you look at the S1, it's like, I don't know, it's in the 80s, 90% gross margin, which was also the case. Because what are your costs to message each other?

SPEAKER_264: It's like AWS costs.

SPEAKER_34: I want to know how you got over, and maybe it's all these metrics, but how did you get over the fact that there were so many free solutions available and most developer, it was used mostly by developer teams and most developer teams were just using IRC and thought Slack was silly.

SPEAKER_05: Yeah. And too colorful.

SPEAKER_15: I think you couldn't get over, we couldn't get over the fact that it was so incessantly being used in the organizations where it was deployed.

SPEAKER_33: So the engagement in the organizations that did adopt it, not the number of organizations that adopted it, was the deciding factor for the investment.

SPEAKER_12: Totally. You always look for atomic unit of value. Atomic unit of value. What does it mean? It means that at the end of one. Okay.

SPEAKER_91: End of one means? Like one company using it. Like figure out what's really going on with like the 20, 30 people who are using it. Ah. If it's working, if people are spending eight hours a day inside of Slack or four hours a day and messaging, number of messages back and forth, there's something that's like kind of hit, they hit it in that one company. So now let's take it to 10 companies and if it's working instead of 10 companies in this very similar fashion, I bet you it can scale to 10 million companies.

SPEAKER_29: Wow. See, that's a really interesting way to look at it.

SPEAKER_34: I've always known that you want to go deep on the engagement with the people who are using it because that is how Snapchat actually raised the money and people decided to make that investment because they looked at it and said, okay, there's not a lot of people using this thing, but the people using it are using it a lot.

SPEAKER_277: So it's not a lot of users, but a lot of usage. And a lot of usage means a lot of value because people are busy and have options for their time.

SPEAKER_48: 24 hours a day. And if we have less time to do more things. Yeah. Many options. Many options.

SPEAKER_43: It just got me thinking. I've been trying to figure out a way to analyze the inside.com newsletters I've been doing.

SPEAKER_34: And I was thinking about the atomic unit as you were speaking and I just realized there's a group of people who click on of the 10 links, like the top 10 stories every day. There's a group of people who probably click on greater than five.

SPEAKER_02: I need to figure out who those people are and then in the database just treat them differently and kind of understand which writers get the most clicks. Because I bet you there's one writer who gets double the number of clicks on a percentage basis than the bottom writer. Yeah. Which means they're better at selecting stories to be curated, which means the users get more value. Yeah. They've got work to do.

SPEAKER_209: So yeah, I think figuring out what that thing is.

SPEAKER_15: In the case of Slack, I think they just, so when they launched or even in the beta, which is when we invested, it was cross-platform. It was iOS. It was desktop and browser. So you could be anywhere and be like, I have access to Slack. Most companies like, oh, let me launch the iOS app and then I'll launch the desktop app and, you know, and I'll have the browser app, which is okay.

SPEAKER_91: They decided to go with a small team of 10, build cross-platform. Wow. It was amazing. I remember the pricing page that was up there, you know, stayed up for like two years. It was like that team of 10 was incredible. And I think most of them are still there.

SPEAKER_15: And so you have to find like, they just hit it with, the product was just well-designed. It was fast at the time. It was still fast, but it was really fast for 2013, 14. And it just kind of hit the, it talked to you. It really did talk to you. So it wasn't some boring chat product.

SPEAKER_43: It had personality. It did have personality.

SPEAKER_26: Yeah. They had a famous design firm here in San Francisco did the colors and the logo and everything. I forgot the name of it.

SPEAKER_15: I believe it's, it was, they're actually in Vancouver.

SPEAKER_197: Oh, in Vancouver. Yeah. Do you remember the name of that firm?

SPEAKER_34: Jackie or Nick, producer Jackie, Emmy awarding producer Jackie and no Emmy Nick. If you guys could do a quick search, no Emmy Nick. Um, but he may, he may be getting an Emmy soon.

SPEAKER_269: Vancouver. He wrote a blog post about it. So he did.

SPEAKER_34: He did. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: Who designed, just type who designed Slack, who did the graphic design Slack? We'll find out when we get back. All right.

SPEAKER_26: Uh, after this break, let's just tackle it. Let's go right there. I had Chamath on stage.

SPEAKER_277: He took a giant five gallon drum of gasoline, poured it over his head and lit it on fire. And that went viral. Social capital imploded.

SPEAKER_29: And you left to go run Kleiner. I want to know what happened from your perspective. Chamath's been pretty public about his perspective. Let's get yours. When we get back on Angel the Podcast.

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SPEAKER_158: and get a free onboarding training session. You got nothing to lose and you're going to get that 50% discount. And really, thanks to the Salesforce team for being so generous to the startups who listen to this week in startups and angel, my two podcasts. Go to salesforce.com slash angel and get that 50% discount.

SPEAKER_113: All right. Welcome back to angel. If you want to subscribe to this podcast, type the word angel into your favorite podcast

SPEAKER_26: player and you will see the hundreds of podcasts about angels, religious angels, archangels. You will not find this podcast. So go to angel podcast.com and then click on one of the links because there's literally a hundred podcasts by very kind, sweet ladies in the South who are talking about the angels that have intervened in their lives. It's bizarre. I can't find my own podcast on these podcasting apps. So go to angel podcast.com. You'll find the link. My guest today is Mamoon from Kleiner Perkins and he was one of the co-founders and I guess three or four partners who founded-

SPEAKER_297: Yeah. Social Capital.

SPEAKER_26: Social Capital along with my friend Ted.

SPEAKER_247: Ted and I were on a board together at USVP when he was at USVP. So that's how Ted-

SPEAKER_300: What was that? It was the couponing site. Oh, savings.com.

SPEAKER_295: Savings.com.

SPEAKER_300: Yes. Lauren.

SPEAKER_247: Lauren. Beldman. Just a great guy. And it was my first board. Yeah. And it was my first time getting equity in somebody's company other than my own. Yeah.

SPEAKER_34: And I got, I think, 25 basis points and I made- Or 15 basis points. I think I made $125,000. That's amazing. 15 years ago and I was like, oh my God, Jade, I showed, I told my wife, Jade, I was like, I showed up for nine board meetings over two years. That's 15, almost like $12,000 per board meeting and I show up, I do an hour of prep.

SPEAKER_115: I talk to the team afterwards for an hour or two and it's like a two hour board meeting. It's like five hours. You realize I'm getting paid like $2,000 an hour to be on a board.

SPEAKER_26: It was a big deal for me and it was good because I met Ted and we became friends.

SPEAKER_29: Um, okay, so social capital launches, you guys are going to do series A's. I was right there on the front seat. We had a partnership. You guys were an LP in my funds. I was a feeder fund. Obviously, I'm great friends with Ted. You sort of were, were friends. Yeah, we're friends. We're friends. Not great friends. I'm close friends with Chamath. Totally. Close friends with Ted. You and I are friends. Um, and Chamath, this thing is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. Every year you go drift a little bit further from the series A investments. Now there's a hedge fund and Chamath's making public stock pitches and he's going to build the biggest and the SPACs and the IPOA. And this thing seems like it's going to the moon and there's, what, 100, 200 people in the office every day? What did it peak at?

SPEAKER_306: No, I think we're like 50, 60. Okay, so it's getting big. Maybe more after I left.

SPEAKER_26: It's getting big and there's a lot of drifting into other categories of investing. And then one day he just decides the whole thing's over and he disappears. What happened from your perspective and how did you manage it? Because the fund was a lot of his money that he made on Facebook. And let's face it, he did start the fund and he recruited you guys. So it was kind of his baby. Yeah.

SPEAKER_08: What happened from your perspective and what did you learn from it?

SPEAKER_15: Yeah. So, um,

SPEAKER_08: Because you've never talked about it publicly.

SPEAKER_15: I haven't, I have not talked about it. No.

SPEAKER_08: But it's a safe space.

SPEAKER_311: So you can tell, just look into that camera and say, Chamath, you're how I feel.

SPEAKER_15: So, uh, as you mentioned, Ted, Ted, uh, Ted and I used to work together at USVP for a number of years, five, six years, uh, overlap and before we left and, um, Chamath and I, we overlapped when he was at Mayfield before he went to Facebook. Yes.

SPEAKER_33: He did six months at Mayfield, another old school VC.

SPEAKER_15: And so that's how we got to know each other. Right. Chamath and I got to know each other. Trading deals. Yeah. And he was cooler than I was and he still is. Slightly. Uh, yeah. And, uh, so Chamath actually approached Ted, uh, when he was at USVP.

SPEAKER_12: He's like, hey man, like, you know, they, and they were used to work together at AOL back in the late 90s. Yes, which is where I met them. Right.

SPEAKER_26: Because I had, so my company to AOL, when I was going through the revolving door, Chamath was leaving. Yeah. With ICQ and AIM on fire behind him. They had put him in charge of it when it was crashing. They were like, yeah, this thing's got a hundred million monthly users and it's, there's no fuel left and the engines are on fire. Here, you take the controls. He was like, I'm out of here. I'm going to go work on this new Facebook thing or become a venture capitalist.

SPEAKER_11: Yeah. So he became a venture capitalist and that's how we first met. Yeah. Uh, and, uh, I think, uh, Chamath always still wanted to be an investor, you know, like,

SPEAKER_15: and that's, I think that's why after Facebook or while he was at Facebook leaving, he's like, oh yeah, I want to go invest my money. I made a ton of money. Let's go invest it now. And he approached Ted about it. And then I think Ted's like, oh, you know, um, just investing your money would mean that I'd be working for you. And he's like, why don't we go raise a fund? And like, why don't we try to recruit my, my buddy here at USDP, my moon. And so that's how it all kind of came together. Got it. And so, um, we raised our first early stage fund and, uh, with a focus around education, healthcare, financial services, and we layered on enterprise, which is my area. And then we raised our second fund and a third fund. And, uh, that was pretty much all that we had, you know, for many years. Three funds. Uh, three, actually a fourth fund and opportunities fund as well.

SPEAKER_76: Chamath was 20, 30% of the funds.

SPEAKER_161: Yeah, exactly. So most of the money was not Chamath's.

SPEAKER_15: Right, right. Um, but a significant portion. Yeah, yeah, for, for sure. Like make no bones about it. Like the fact that one, one of the partners and the founder of the firm, like put so much money into a fund and LP is like, okay, you, that's a lot of skin in the game. Like we'll put money into, right?

SPEAKER_321: Yeah.

SPEAKER_26: I mean, skin in the game is the name of the game. Like they expect in a venture fund, the partners collectively to put in low single digits, right?

SPEAKER_115: Yeah, totally. So if you have a $300 million fund, they expect the five partners to put in a half million dollars each or something, or a million, maybe.

SPEAKER_152: It's, it's like, and you know, it's, it's usually it's low single digits, right?

SPEAKER_91: Low single digits.

SPEAKER_15: And to hear it's to have like one of the partners putting so much money, it's like, okay, well, that's like, that's conviction. That's belief. And so I think both of us have known Chamath long enough to know, uh, there's immense amount of conviction that he has in himself. And so it was just same thing. And I think it's still the same thing holds true today. Uh, so, uh, and, uh, I think, um, you know, we, we went from an early stage to we launched, uh, a public fund, uh, and then we, um, we're going to raise a growth fund. And, uh, we then, um, around the time I left, we did the SPAC. So there's a bunch of, like a bunch of stuff emerged beyond that was beyond venture. And to be honest, like I, and I, you know, Ted knows his Chamath, I love venture capital. Yeah. I love, actually, I don't love being called a venture capitalist, but I like, love the job of being a venture capitalist. Yeah.

SPEAKER_40: An early stage investor.

SPEAKER_15: Totally. Early stage investor, first partner to amazing founders. Um, I mean, I think the, if you just look at the body of work from Kleiner Perkins from Genentech to Intuit, Symantec, Sun Microsystem, Netscape, Google, Amazon, you go down the list, first money into those companies, first partner to those founders. And you know what? All those companies changed the, the course of like how humans live. Right. True. I mean, like that is, I, I believe that to be true, even though I have nothing to do with those companies. Uh, and I think I love that about being an early stage investor is that you get to work with these incredible founders and help sort of give them micro advice on a daily, weekly basis and help them fulfill their ambition. And so, uh, that's, that was what I, what gets me out of bed every morning. And I think, uh, we, we decided to go do more than just that. Um, and, uh, but you asked the question about like what happened. I, I think, uh, what happened is, uh, you know, I think Chamath is kind of the master of his own domain. Yeah. So he's like, this is what I want to do. Yeah. And so. You want to do something else. Yeah. And that's, that's, I think we all respect him for that.

SPEAKER_26: Yeah. Right. So it's, you guys are not, you guys are on speaking terms. You're friendly. It's not a disaster. I mean, it's not perfect. It's not perfect. Right.

SPEAKER_247: But you still get your carry from Slack and all these other great investments.

SPEAKER_331: Yeah. I mean, that's just like, that is what it is.

SPEAKER_15: But yeah, like, you know, exchange text messages.

SPEAKER_284: Yeah. So it's not the end of the world.

SPEAKER_15: Yeah. I think, Hey, like we're going back to the conversation we started out with, like we're extremely fortunate. Yeah.

SPEAKER_333: We're very lucky people and we get to do what we want and we get to earn great living doing what we love.

SPEAKER_26: The great irony of this is Chamath was recruited by John Doerr to maybe merge social capital with Kleiner.

SPEAKER_335: That's true.

SPEAKER_26: Yeah. That was very out in the public. That didn't happen.

SPEAKER_335: Yeah.

SPEAKER_247: Because Chamath wanted too much control or something. Just couldn't, a deal couldn't get done from what I understand. And then you wound up taking it over.

SPEAKER_15: I think, uh, you know, my journey with Kleiner was a very long one because of, uh, it was like a three year courtship. Um, and one is you just don't leave the firm that you, you co-found, right? Yeah. And so to me, that was just a hard call together. Like there's no, I can't do that. Can't leave my partners and the team that we've built here and the companies. And, uh, but over time it became clear that this opportunity at Kleiner was kind of once of a life, once of a lifetime opportunity.

SPEAKER_338: Yeah.

SPEAKER_15: Right.

SPEAKER_209: One of the most venerable institutions in venture capital and maybe in technology even to be able to really, uh, reboot it.

SPEAKER_26: Yeah. Um, they kind of lost their way for a little bit. What, what happened? Why did they lose their way? They, they bet too big on green energy or they just didn't nurture and draft enough picks

SPEAKER_145: in the lottery. If we're using the analogy, when they brought you in, they said, Hey, here's the mistakes we've made. Here's the things we need you to fix. What were those things?

SPEAKER_234: Well, I don't think it was as explicit, like, like, Hey, here are the things that could

SPEAKER_197: be improved maybe.

SPEAKER_91: I think I came to Kleiner Perkins because I thought we could be number one in what we

SPEAKER_15: do. Oh, okay. And so what, what's the action plan?

SPEAKER_341: Got it.

SPEAKER_15: So that's been the journey that we've been on in the last 18 months is like, how do we get to where Kleiner used to be, which was number one for decades.

SPEAKER_26: Right. Yeah. I mean, if you were coming to Santo road, you would be with Sequoia and Kleiner. Yep.

SPEAKER_300: Google did and Facebook and everybody, and you generally would pick one of those or both. Google had both.

SPEAKER_104: And then it drifted a bit.

SPEAKER_91: Yeah. Is I think when you've solved one set of problems, which is the internet and done like

SPEAKER_15: incredibly well, better than anyone else in the industry. What's the next problem? And in sort of circa 2006, seven is a lot about green tech and sustainability and kind of save the world from itself from humans that live.

SPEAKER_145: Yeah. John did that famous Ted talk where he cried about what kind of world am I going to leave

SPEAKER_26: for my daughter. And that's another type of feature drift, I guess. Right. Which is, some people get rich and they call in lazy and rich. Other people get inspired to take on a big, huge challenge and forget where the money was made maybe. And John wanted to take on and save the planet, but probably in hindsight, he should have done that and kept doing the internet stuff.

SPEAKER_91: Yeah. And not just John. I think the partners like Kleiner Perkins should not have drifted, right?

SPEAKER_15: That's the thing is like going back to the, these are partnerships, and not just one person can say what we should do. We should be able to, as partners, like we're all, we're supposedly bright people that are practitioners of understand what technology trends are like, where the great founders are coming from. We should be able to say, you know, we should allocate X percent to sustainability and green, but like the majority of it goes to, you know, mobile, the, the booming mobile.

SPEAKER_347: Yeah.

SPEAKER_15: They missed that whole thing. Right. And so, uh, you know, to be, to be fair, like the, the, the returns have still been great. It's just not Kleiner great, right? Right. The bar is so high for, for this institution. Yeah.

SPEAKER_156: They have to win championships, like being in LA or Boston or New York, like the expectation

SPEAKER_145: for the Yankees is a championship or nothing. Exactly. Or for the Celtics and the Lakers is like, oh, you got to the playoffs? Who cares? We're here to win championships.

SPEAKER_26: Look how many championships we've won before. Um, there was some negativity. I saw some story and it was a little perplexing to me. I didn't read it, um, because I'm just tired of and exhausted from all the toxicity here in the Valley. But I, I noted it because it had a picture of you and you were friends and it seemed to be deriding Kleiner, I guess, for the diversity issues in the past, which were a little bit weird because it was the most diverse farm of all of them. Right? It was. Yeah. Um, and I thought there was some irony here because, or it was confusing to me because

SPEAKER_06: you're not a white dude, I don't know if you've noticed, but you're not a white dude, like me, you're a Pakistani immigrant of immigrant parents.

SPEAKER_349: My parents don't even live here. They live in Germany.

SPEAKER_06: They live in Germany. So you're an immigrant. And I'm Muslim.

SPEAKER_247: Um, and Muslim Pakistani, who is now running one of the most legendary venture firms in the history of the world. One of the top three. Isn't that like a tremendous success for diversity and evolving Silicon Valley? It's a little weird to be criticized, isn't it?

SPEAKER_15: Yeah. I think, uh, Silicon Valley's definition of diversity is very perplexing. Um, uh, it's, it's very unidimensional and, uh, you know, if you look at like, actually most of the partners at Kleiner Perkins, my partners are, we were not born in this country. Um, we, we, you know, have immigrant stories, but that's, you know, that's not diverse in the Silicon Valley, uh, dictionary of, uh, diversity. Uh, and, uh, I, I think, um, there's, uh, and so we actually looked at this. We looked at, uh, our portfolio of CEOs from our prior funds, Kleiner Perkins 17. We found that 70% of our CEOs were, were foreign born.

SPEAKER_358: Wow.

SPEAKER_15: Tell me that's not diversity.

SPEAKER_358: That's as diverse as it gets. Yeah.

SPEAKER_15: Yeah. And so, and then talk about diversity when it comes to Kleiner and having hired people from all sorts of backgrounds. I'd say if we use women as diversity, uh, we've hired more women, had more women,

SPEAKER_91: women partners, more successful female investors than any other firm in the history of venture capital, maybe even private equity.

SPEAKER_15: Yeah. So, uh, so I think we don't get any credit for that. Yeah. Right. And, uh, probably should, uh, it's not, not my work.

SPEAKER_91: Like, to be honest, it's like, you know, this is the work of the, the partners at Kleiner Perkins before me.

SPEAKER_26: It is interesting when you think about diversity, um, many of these firms were just six white dudes.

SPEAKER_29: So that must've been challenging or perplexing to you coming in. Did you feel like you were wanted or not wanted as it were coming in as a non-white

SPEAKER_238: male? Or do you feel you were treated differently? No. What was your personal experience?

SPEAKER_363: I've never, I've, you know what, like as immigrants, we're also, uh, wired to charge forward.

SPEAKER_15: We don't really look at like what's holding us back. We just go run forward. Yeah. And so, um, you know, the victim mentality doesn't set in so much as an immigrant, I guess. Uh, so, uh.

SPEAKER_365: There's not much time for it, is there?

SPEAKER_91: There is not much time for it. Exactly. You're, you're running. You're surviving. You're just trying to get on the boat and try to, you know. Land. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Um, Calais, you know. Yeah. Calais at Dover. Yeah. Um, so, uh, no, I was embraced.

SPEAKER_15: Wow. The partners at Kleiner Perkins embraced me. Yeah. Um, and, uh, I was, you know, help us, you know, make this what it used to be.

SPEAKER_368: Make it great again. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_91: I hate using that term because it reminds me of something.

David Friedberg: I know it triggers all this, like, yeah. It triggers.

SPEAKER_26: It is a bit of a disaster. It's got to be personally frustrating for you as well to watch Trump be in office as a Muslim and how bigoted he is about this issue. Like, you wouldn't have been allowed in the country, right, if it was now?

SPEAKER_48: Yeah, I would have gotten my student visa probably, and then I, once I graduated from college, I probably wouldn't have gotten a visa to stay here for a job.

SPEAKER_15: So, I'd probably be back in Germany, working at Deutsche Bank or Siemens, you know, in middle management. Yeah, you'd be an executive VP. Middle management.

Chamath Palihapitiya: EVP. Maybe lower. SVP. Lower, lower, lower. VP. Yeah, maybe like that. Director. Yeah, something like that.

SPEAKER_379: Associate Director. Yeah.

SPEAKER_47: Yeah, it's crazy to think that.

SPEAKER_29: And, you know, the particularly troubling, and I'm not an expert on it, but you are, I think, because you're in the community, it's perplexing because you do have radicalism. Yeah. And then you have people who are assimilating while, you know, respecting tradition, but being part of these other cultures, and America is supposed to be a melting pot, and I think

SPEAKER_43: maybe if you say melting pot today, people would take offense to that. I don't know.

SPEAKER_29: When I grew up, they told us this is what made America great, was that we were a melting pot, and now we have this xenophobia, and, you know, to not accept the most progressive

SPEAKER_26: of the Muslim community is the biggest problem because, you know, the most progressive members of the community are the ones who are derided the most by the radicals, like the fact that

SPEAKER_113: you work in the West is not appreciated by them.

SPEAKER_15: Yeah. I think as Muslims in America, I think we just need to do better at assimilating, you know, police officers, firemen, you know, professors, lawyers, civil rights lawyers, supporting those,

SPEAKER_11: the homeless that are down the block from you here, you know, and I think it's just doing more than the average American, and because it's-

SPEAKER_392: Setting the bar higher. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_15: Just like, you know, and so if you go to a mosque on a Friday prayer, that's when you have a sermon, the imam gets up and says, you know, and a lot of times it's about, hey, just be better Americans, like, don't play victims here, like, go be better, like, use your religion to guide you to be better human beings and help people, go public service, public office. Yeah. And that's why I think you're seeing people like Ilhan Omar in Congress and other Muslim women in Congress now and men. It's because people, it's kind of starting to hit, like, you become a real contributor to this society, your country. And I think, I have hope.

SPEAKER_396: I think this has actually been a catalyst for a lot of people to actually own it and be better.

SPEAKER_04: It's fascinating because I have been watching Ilhan Omar.

SPEAKER_29: I've been watching her and I've been trying to give her the benefit of the doubt because it's great to see the diversity in Congress. She's Congress, right? Yeah. And, you know, then it's a little bit of anti-Semitic thing maybe, but I never thought about it from the perspective you just shared with me, which I appreciate, which is I didn't realize there was a movement inside of the culture to say, hey, let's assimilate, let's be great Americans, let's participate and bridge that gap because it feels like the gap is sometimes

SPEAKER_02: insurmountable at times. And it's not. It's not.

SPEAKER_88: I mean, you have a woman wearing a hijab in Congress now and you have like probably six other Muslims who are in Congress. Well, that's like, just shows that America doesn't care what your color is, what kind of headscarf you wear and where you come from.

SPEAKER_131: They just want people who serve the country. Yeah. Who believe in this country, right? Yeah. And who believe in the ideals. The ideals.

SPEAKER_15: The ideals. And that's why I'm here. I mean, I've been in Silicon Valley for what, 22 years now? I love Silicon Valley for what the ideals of what it stands for.

SPEAKER_29: What do you think about the soft bank issues around taking money from Saudi Arabia? This is kind of intense.

SPEAKER_315: I've been pretty vocal that we should pause it. What do you think about my stance? What's your stance?

SPEAKER_72: Yeah.

SPEAKER_15: I think it's Saudi Arabia and the government, there is pretty troubling. Yeah. Very troubling. And so, it's tough to justify taking large sums of dollars, $45 billion from that government and deploying that across growth engines of our economy and feeling good about that as founders, CEOs. Investors. Investors, right? Yeah. It's just all around. It doesn't feel good. It doesn't feel right. And so, that's how I feel about it.

SPEAKER_396: So, you personally feel? That's how I personally feel.

SPEAKER_26: How does the firm feel? And then, how do your founders feel? So, because these LP, I mean, we're talking about one of the largest potential LPs in the world. Yeah. And they want to invest. And now, they've sort of blown it. It's so weird. I don't know if you saw those photos or my tweets about it. Like, MBS comes to the country, tells everybody this is going to be the big change. And then, he goes and kills Khashoggi in cold blood. And then, or his people do. And I guess he's denying it. And then, we just had 37 public beheadings last week.

SPEAKER_29: How do founders feel about it here? Are founders cognizant of it and saying, like, do you have them as an LP? Or, what should I do if they offer me money? I'm getting it from my founders.

SPEAKER_61: I think founders are cognizant of it.

SPEAKER_410: But I think at the end of the day, when you have a term sheet on the table, you forget about those things that matter.

SPEAKER_15: Yeah. But you're absolutely right. These are, this is not normal. This should not exist in the world as it stands today. Yeah. This is, you know, we should stand up for it. We should, we're better for it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_66: Especially if we're in Silicon Valley, where we, you know, we're supposed to be the, not the moral high ground of the world, but-

SPEAKER_416: We should have the moral high ground, actually.

SPEAKER_66: I think we should. We should, right?

SPEAKER_247: We should aspire to, at least. I mean, we created the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Eleanor Roosevelt created it with the UN. She led that charge.

SPEAKER_43: We should be the champions of human rights. So, yeah. Of course.

SPEAKER_11: I mean, I think my firm feels the way I feel about it. Yeah. And, but it is, I had hope, you know, for-

SPEAKER_91: Me too. MBS. I did. He came out here, did his thing, and- Shook everybody's hands, said the right things. Women are driving now. It's like- Yeah. It gets crazy. Women can drive. It's 2019, and women are driving now. I had hope.

SPEAKER_43: They pitched him as a reformer, and I was maybe going to meet with him, and it didn't wind up happening. But then I see all this stuff, and I worked at Amnesty, and I was just thinking, you know, we're not perfect here in this country, but this dialogue needs to occur. Yeah. And I am in a position where at least some number of people will consider it, if I say

SPEAKER_247: it, that may not change somebody's opinion. You might not change them when the term sheet's in front of them, but at least they'll think for a moment. And it really should challenge us as well, because I was reading that China has a million

SPEAKER_06: Muslims. Actually, more. It has- Two million now, is that what they say?

SPEAKER_91: No, no, no. It's actually more like, I believe it's more like 50 million, like 50 to 100 million in Western China.

SPEAKER_29: Are in a re-education camp, is what they call it. It's a concentration camp, or it's a lockdown city, somewhere between those two. Yeah.

SPEAKER_43: And this is where I think it's very important for us to lead the charge. If we have three million people incarcerated in this country or something like that effect, and a million of them shouldn't be in there because it's for nonviolent cannabis crimes or something. And then we have the death penalty here. And then Bush thought, and this idiot in the office right now thinks it's okay to waterboard people and it's not torture, if Trump thinks waterboarding is not torture, I invite him to try it. Because I think he'll quickly find that simulated drowning is the same as drowning. Like, we can't be torturing people as part of our foreign policy or our military, and we cannot be keeping people incarcerated who don't deserve to be there. If we want to go to MBS or China and say, hey, you guys should reconsider. If you want to do business with us, we need you to just step up the human rights. Just try to meet us halfway, and let's at least steer the world towards some base level of

SPEAKER_02: human rights, right? As opposed to devolving it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_91: So, in a way, the world is great today, but at the same time, we have big powers with big

SPEAKER_15: sorts of weapons, whether it's cyber weapons or physical weapons. Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02: We all sort of feel on edge today. It is a little anxiety producing. It's all trending in the right direction.

SPEAKER_26: I think the field we play on, capitalism, is the new battleground.

SPEAKER_247: Because if you think about it, we're not blowing each other up as much as we used to in having world wars. But suddenly, Saudi Arabia wants to participate in capitalism at the highest level. So, where do they go? Silicon Valley. China wants to participate on the highest level. Where do they go? Silicon Valley. And capitalism.

SPEAKER_43: And so, in China, they're going to try to beat us on capitalism. They want us using TikTok. TikTok's a Chinese company. TikTok is obviously a spying app for the Chinese government. I mean, if you don't think that they have all that data, they now have the microphones and cameras of 50 million Americans. They can spy on all of America, just like Huawei again. And we have to open up our eyes to this possibility that human rights and capitalism needs to work

SPEAKER_05: at a high-functioning level for democracy to work at a high level.

SPEAKER_100: Yeah. Well, a lot's at stake, Jason.

SPEAKER_15: The number one superpower is at stake over the next five years. It will either flip-flop or we'll stay, you know, be the policeman for the world or it may become China.

SPEAKER_434: Yeah.

SPEAKER_435: What would you rather like?

SPEAKER_247: If we want people to live under imperfect democracies, we better hope for America. And if we want them to live under perfect authoritarian dictatorships, then pick your poison. Yeah. China, Saudi Arabia, Russia. I mean, they've perfected the art of being a dictatorship. All right.

SPEAKER_29: Thank you for joining us for this week in dictatorships.

SPEAKER_441: We went deep, huh?

SPEAKER_29: We went deep. We went on a couple of tangents, but I think important ones. And listen, I just want to tell you, continued success.

SPEAKER_247: I'm very proud of the fact that you took that top slot, a Kleiner, even though you deny that you're in the top slot, because you're hardworking and your heart's in the right place.

SPEAKER_188: And I wish you great success with it. The world needs more people like you, Mamoun. Thank you, Jason. Thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_284: Yeah. My pleasure. We'll see you all next time on Angel of the Podcast. Boom. Boom. Boom.