Mamoon Hamid’s Post

Academy Award and Emmy winner Riz Ahmed and Kleiner Perkins Managing General Partner Mamoon Hamid led a thoughtful and sobering discussion on AAPI and Muslim representation in the creative industry at our Gold House Ventures Banquet. What a rare lesson between two titans that turned a delicious dinner into a nutritious one ✨ Among our favorite bars: “Individual success is failure,” encouraging more immediate, collective growth “One community’s liberation can be your liberation,” emphasizing a dismantling of scarcity mindsets “Culture is our superpower,” encouraging a focus on similarly-shared values and interests to weather disagreements elsewhere.

Five years ago, we set out to build Glean with the simple goal of helping people find the answers they need to do their best work. Since then, we’ve expanded our work to help CIOs quickly and securely deploy generative AI in the enterprise, and today, we are so excited to share that we’ve raised over $200M at a $2.2B valuation led by Kleiner Perkins and Lightspeed, to help us further achieve our vision for the future of work. Generative AI took the world by storm last year, and I’ve spoken to countless CIOs who are eager and energized to bring this powerful technology into their organizations. But every CIO also knows they must deploy generative AI in a way that’s safe and secure enough for the enterprise. Glean’s state-of-the-art search and RAG technology retrieves the most relevant information for LLMs to generate personalized answers grounded in each enterprise’s unique knowledge graph. All answers generated are secure, private, permissions-aware, and fully referenceable back to source documentation in the enterprise. This uniquely positions Glean to deliver a solution that meets the challenging requirements of a truly enterprise-ready AI assistant, and it’s an honor to be chosen by some of the world’s leading enterprises to bring this transformational technology to their workforces. I can’t say enough how grateful I am for everyone who has supported us at Glean — our customers, partners, investors, community, and team. Because of your support, we’re able to work as hard as we do to achieve our ultimate goal: be the enterprise AI platform with a ready-to-use AI work assistant, as well as the tools to build custom generative AI experiences grounded in company knowledge. We’ve got a lot further to explore – this latest round of funding will enable us to further propel our work in developing the most secure, comprehensive, and intuitive AI assistant of the future.    Thank you to all of our supporters: Mamoon Hamid at Kleiner Perkins, Ravi Mhatre at Lightspeed, Quentin Clark at General Catalyst, Sonya Huang at Sequoia Capital, Capital One Ventures, Arvind Purushotham at Citi Ventures, Lucas Swisher and David Schneider at Coatue, Andrew Ferguson and Phil Shin at Databricks Ventures, Somesh Dash at IVP, Tengbo Li and Matthew Jacobson at ICONIQ Growth, Erin Yang at Workday Ventures, Brian Dudley at Adams Street Partners, Ansaf Kareem at Latitude Capital. The best is yet to come. Read more about this exciting milestone:

Kleiner Perkins. There are very few firms in venture capital that have a history as rich as Kleiner Perkins. Having backed iconic companies such as Genetech, Sun, Amazon, Google, Twitter, Lotus, EA, Compaq, etc., KP is without a doubt of the small handful of firms we consider when thinking about the early history of VC. When I started in VC in 1999, KP was nearly 30 years old, and the firm recently passed 5(!) decades in existence. This type of longevity is incredibly difficult in venture, particularly as eras, teams, and markets evolve. Like any organization, venture firms go through periods of prosperity and adversity, and Kleiner is no exception. I recently sat down with Mamoon Hamid, who in 2017 took the reins at Kleiner to go "back to the future". It was a fascinating conversation where we had a few themes: 1/ Going back to basics, and focusing on what you are uniquely positioned to succeed at. While many firms added many new products in the lead up to the peak of 2021, KP embraced essentialism, and went back to fewer products to improve firm-business model fit and focus. 2) The need to have a clear culture and values, and using these values as a core component of hiring and maintaining cohesive teams. 3) Why VC firms need clear OKRs to understand the quality of execution (hint: these OKRs are not just related to returns which take many, many years to become clear, but OKRs that help provide the necessary inputs to measure iterim proof points). Since he joined in 2017, the firm has backed companies such as Figma and Rippling. This was fun interview, podcast link in the comments below! Venture Unlocked #vc #investing #limitedpartners

One of the most interesting case studies in venture capital is Kleiner Perkins. Over the past 5yrs, Mamoon Hamid and Ilya Fushman have refocused the firm on early-stage investing and snagged investments in Figma, Rippling, Glean, Viz.ai, and many others. It may prove to be a new golden age for KP. https://lnkd.in/eyquAcFC