Kleiner Perkins Is Back With Mamoon Hamid Carrying It On His Shoulders

I talk to Hamid about Kleiner Perkins’ $2 billion exit and the future of KP

Mamoon Hamid, 44, hosted a group of about 40 current and former Kleiner Perkins partners at his home in Atherton to toast the 50th anniversary of the firm’s founding this month.

Those assembled posed for a photo: John Doerr — the Google investor and chairman of Kleiner Perkins — smiles from the front row. Mary Meeker — who helped save Kleiner’s reputation with her stellar growth investments only to leave to start her venture growth firm — sits at the far end of the same row. Vinod Khosla — the Sun Microsystems co-founder, former Kleiner partner, and founder of Khosla Ventures — stands looming toward the back, wearing all black.

Front and center, three men lean forward in a partial crouch — the firm’s leadership trifecta: Ilya Fushman, the former Index partner and Dropbox executive, is to one side; longtime Kleiner partner Wen Hsieh, is on the other; between them, head slightly elevated, Hamid stares at the camera. He looks triumphant.

Whether it was serendipity or skillful timing on Hamid’s part, he had quite the feather in his cap to show off. Before the Kleiner gathering, Hamid’s portfolio company Figma sold to Adobe for $20 billion.

The deal should net Kleiner Perkins some $2.1 billion, thanks largely to a $16 million Series B check that Hamid wrote in December 2017, just a few months after he joined Kleiner Perkins from Social Capital.

There’s no doubt that Hamid will hate the headline of this article — venture capital firms are partnerships after all as Hamid reminded me during a recent conversation.

But he is carrying Kleiner Perkins on his shoulders right now. It’s not just Figma. Hamid (with Fushman) is the Series A investor in Parker Conrad’s Rippling — a company that many believe could be a once-in-a-generation software company. It’s hard to know exactly how buzzy portfolio companies like Intercom, Handshake, and Coda will end up performing, but Hamid’s track record across his venture career are confidence inspiring. At U.S. Venture Partners, Hamid led an investment in Yammer and took a board seat. The company sold to Microsoft for $1.2 billion in cash back when that was a huge exit. At Social Capital, Hamid led an investment in Slack and again took a board seat. Slack sold to Salesforce for $27.7 billion.

Aaron Levie, whose company Box, Hamid led the Series B round for at USVP, said about Hamid, “He’s got an incredible knack of thinking through where the areas of disruption are — in particular in enterprise software — and he combines that with an immense ability and intent to go help company go achieve the best case scenario for the business.”

I spoke with Hamid last week about how he landed the Figma investment, the state of Kleiner Perkins’ rebuild, Slack’s sale to Salesforce, and how he’s thinking about investing in new software companies amidst a troubled stock market.

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