The Next Generation of Software | Mamoon Hamid, Partner at Kleiner Perkins | Ep. 16

Kleiner had made history from the days of semiconductors, to then computers, to software, to the internet, those four big technology waves. If you look at the list of companies in each one of those major waves across decades, we've pretty much nailed every single m- dominant company in those waves. And so how could we make history again?

[upbeat music] All right, Mamoon, I'm super excited to have this conversation with you. Thanks for making time for it.

Thank you for having me, Jack. Really good to see you.

Um, so I wanna start by talking about your kind of history over the last couple decades or, you know, twenty-five years in Silicon Valley. And if you could just sort of take us back to when you came to tech in Silicon Valley, and maybe sort of the experience you had through the different innovation cycles.

I was really fortunate to come to Silicon Valley, uh, as a first-time engineer, first job out of college in 1997, uh, working for a semiconductor company, of all things, that was a company called Xilinx, actually a Kleiner Perkins-backed company, that, uh, was, uh, the underpinnings of lots of, uh, switching and routing equipment that was the, the backbone of the internet.

Mm.

And so I got to really see from that lens, uh, the rise and the fall of the internet and, uh, see my stock appreciate and then depreciate a lot. And so, uh, I, I look back at that sort of first few weeks in my cubicle at Xilinx in San Jose, uh, in 1997. I'm nineteen years old. I'm very, uh, influenced by all the things that were happening around me, and, um, I've got a Sun workstation, and I'm running the Netscape browser, uh, buying books on Amazon, uh, for my grad school classes at Stanford. And turns out just that a new search engine has just, just come out, uh, called Google. And, uh, so these are the kinds of influences that I had, uh, in those early, early years in Silicon Valley. And, uh, and turns out actually all those companies, uh, Xilinx, Netscape, Sun, Google, and Amazon, were all companies backed by Kleiner Perkins at the-

Mm

... Series A. So, uh, which also got me thinking about, "Who are these venture capitalists? That seems pretty interesting as a job." Nineteen ninety-seven, 'ninety-eight, 'ninety-nine were, like, these boom years. Uh, it felt a lot like probably today, uh, but a lot more parties maybe-

Mm-hmm

... at the time.

Mm-hmm.

And people forget that that was a time of, like, felt like a time of excess, actually.

Was it way different feeling than now, like, on that front?

Uh, it, it, it slightly... Because I think we still have mostly builders today.

Mm-hmm.

And, uh, by 1998, '99, non-builders had arrived to help monetize the internet, and a lot of interesting business models were sitting on top of, you know, the, the internet hype bubble. And so, uh, I feel like we're, we're still, like, a few years removed from that today here. Today's still builders.