20VC: Kleiner Perkins' Mamoon Hamid on Investing Lessons from Leading Rounds in Figma, Slack and Rippling | Lessons Building a Generational Defining Firm with Kleiner Perkins | AI: Where Value Accrues, Startups vs Incumbents & Scaling Laws

25:12In the same vein, we had to take our reserves and put it into box and we weren't investing in new companies at the time. And that happens in every sort of cycle, down cycle like this. I think we all know, like, some of the best investments come out of that cycle. And so we got to invest more dollars in the box at a $25 million valuation. Every incremental dollar or $23 million in bridge that was being done, done at that valuation. What are the biggest reasons breakout companies plateau in your mind? You've seen some absolute monsters and you mentioned that box was struggled in those times. What are the reasons why breakouts plateau?

25:47So they don't innovate anymore or fast enough. They are big companies become, which is you're trying to protect your turf and you're not disrupting yourself and someone else comes in to disrupt you and starts taking away revenue from you. You mentioned box, that box of the IPOs. A liquidity event is always welcome by LPs and investors. How do you think about when's the right time to sell? It's the age old thing. You look at all of you know, basamers, mamas. You always underestimate the size of your winners. How do you think about one to sell? Great question. Well, I wish there was a bit more selling happening right now or opportunities to sell.

26:22As you know, the M &A markets have been pretty, pretty slow. But to answer your question, Harry, there's a local maxima that I think about sometimes with companies where this is sort of the local maxima in terms of perceived value by the market for a company. And that's a great time to sell. And so you now have to figure out when is the local maximum for a company. And I would say it's like the markets are riding high, but it's also like where people believe that this company is the leader, but there's questions around whether there's there There's a standalone company we built and it's way better off being acquired by a strategic who can do even better things with the company That is again doesn't happen as much anymore.

26:58Have you done well selling? There's one particular example that I think ended up working out pretty well This is when Yammer got acquired by Microsoft It was a 1 .2 billion dollar acquisition at the time. It felt like man We've got so much ahead of us. Yammer can become the next slack. Fortunately for us, Yammer got acquired. A year later, we had a chance to invest in slack. It almost like you had a great outcome, and then you weren't conflicted out of investing in the future slack. Also, you don't have the challenge when it's acquired. Do I hold, do I distribute, do I not? And that awful choice is almost easier when the choice is removed.

27:38In that case, when you get to just cash, you just distribute the cash and you move on. And you know, generally speaking, I would say even when companies go public for us, we've been pretty good about distributing stock. It's tough when you think, sure, before I went public at 700 million. Yeah, everyone, either way, you're gonna get criticized. Yeah, and I would say just here, like again, we have a lot of friends in the industry. In almost all scenarios, when you're returning 10X to fund on a great outcome, or 5X plus, let's say, of a fund through a legendary company. Your LPs are happy, you're happy.

28:14You wish you would have held on and generated another few multiples on that fund. But you have an option of holding it. The LPs do, as do you as a GP. You can hold on to your Google stock forever as John Doer has done over the last 25 years. And that's a great choice you have. What has been your best performing investment on a pure multiple spaces? It's probably Slack, I would say, even at the 250 post with all the delusion over time and take the 27 billion or some other number. That's a great multiple. Figma, the initial investment was done at about 100 posts. Ripling was also the 250 posts when we did it.

28:51There's one investment I remember doing early days of USEP where we did it at I think 10 posts. It was a $3 million dollar check for like 30 % of the company. That company, about a year and a half ago, the founder, CEO, Steve Flagg, they sold it to Siemens for $700 million. And that ended up being 70x. Crazy multiple, right? some ridiculous multiple. But you know when you hold on to something for 15 years, guess what the IRR on that investment was? If you still owned, let's say, 25 % of that company at 700 million, so like, 100 and something 170 million, 3 million becomes 170 million or something like that, or that's a great multiple.

29:27But the IR over 15 years look more like, like, 15%. We're in the multiple business still at the end of the day, but IRRs do take a hit when you hold on something to something for 15 years. But liquidity is tough and liquidity is tough because M &A is not what it used to be. I mean, M &A market's dead. They're in slow, man. Yeah, slow. A lot of the big companies are just gun chai. I hear this all the time, just like not ready too much going on in the regulatory environment. Why would you bother? I feel them. Exactly. You're like, why create headaches? We already have like multiple legal things that we're pursuing and we don't need yet another thing we're questioned about or used as an example in this other thing.

30:11So yeah, why bother? The question is, are there next tier of companies that we'll buy? And we thought obviously with Adobe Figma, Adobe is that next tier. And even that, the story's been told. Well, I think the thing that you are seeing is actually like incredibly high price companies. Yeah, I'm not going to name names because they are too high priced, but they are actually acquiring much smaller companies in only stock deals. And I've had quite a few deals, but I'm getting shares at $10 billion and it's coming to my work's worth too. And that is the kind of acquisition currency that they're going for and they're small enough that regulation wise, they're not getting any done.

30:44That's the only thing I'm seeing. Yeah, you're right. Yeah, there are big private companies looking to buy a small private company. That's happening and I think that was never part of the playbook. What would change the M &A market to say? You know, it's easy to say like regulatory environment, like the people running these organizations. Yeah, is it, I mean, being blunt, Is it like, hey, Lina Collins gets replaced and then we get right, I'm in A back. I don't think so. I don't think a lot of the blame on Lina Khan, poor Lina Khan. In our own experience, that's not that was not the issue for Adobe Figma.

31:13It wasn't Lina or the FTC. There were other issues here in the UK. There's a CMA that was really involved there. IPM market is also like bluntly not easy. Sarah Burst, I think in pronounciate, right? Yeah, but Fald. I think Sariburus. Sariburus, there we go. Fald recently. But that's kind of been it recently. And you can sign by IPO market's being closed. Yeah, I think everyone's just waiting until after the election. Yeah, I think we all thought there's a window of like eight weeks before the election or this year to go out and Just not a lot of activity. I do think that we're gonna have a good year next year.

31:49You do. I do. I think we need to see one of the big ones to go out for it to open. It needs to be a database of Stripe, a stall link. You're not gonna make it on Syriprus. I'm really hopeful. I think next year will be a good year for IPOs. You mentioned the $100 million thing around, for example. I spoke to quite a few of our mutual friends and they said, you've got to ask him about this. Respectfully to Dylan and team. This was pre -any revenue scaling, really. This was pre -any real inflation point in the company. Cash had been in before, you know, Gralot were in already, index were in already.

32:22He saw something that no one else in the market saw. This was like a real pick. What did you see that no one else saw in this round? And why did you? Credit goes first and foremost to Dylan and Evan who'd built an incredible product. It took a while to build. We've heard sort of famously the story around like WebGL, advancing, and finally by 2017, Figma had a product that could work multiplayer inside the browser as a design tool. And that just wasn't the case in 1516. It just didn't have the latency for people like, designers are very high -end in terms of their needs for product naturally, right?

33:02And so lucky for us that we got to see the company when the product started to work and in the metrics for the product, even though the number of users was small, the amount of use, you look at something like a down -mount or look at an L28, you just saw that designers were using the product 15, 16, 17, 18 days out of a month. So effectively every workday, a designer was going in and collaborating inside of or using it to design inside of Figma. And so you saw early indications that the product that was just had just launched and it was just in a few hundred care revenue, it was working. You know, lucky for us that we got to catch it before it.

33:42Can I ask what did you get wrong in your assumptions on Figma? I have to share my memo with you because I love that. Yeah, I know I'll share it with Sometimes it's eerie, how right you can get it. In terms of talking about the adjacencies to product people, so designers to then marketers and to engineers, not just the growth in designers, driving the number of seats that you can sell at Figma, but also adjacent seats. And doing so the math behind what was potentially possible in terms of Figma's TAM, which one would have said, well, it's just like the Invision TAM or the Sketch TAM, which is like not that exciting.

34:16Sometimes you can play this out in diligence or plays out in your head around building a real prepared mind around an investment. And in the case of Figma, you know, sometimes you get it right. Do you like competitive markets? You mentioned Invision, you mentioned Sketch. Invision was bigger than Sketch, quite a while actually. Both Sketch and Invision are way bigger than Figma for a while. And a lot of investors like Pfft, this market's competitive. Do you like competitive markets and say, yes, it's competitive because that's where they're going to price value? Or do you actually prefer my mindset, which is, I don't want to be one -off.

34:48Yeah, and going off to this. Yeah, I don't mind competitive markets, but at the same time, I love products that create markets. Slack created a market. In some ways, Figma created a market. There wasn't a notion of collaborative design software. I love companies that create markets. They get to create the playing field, they play on the playing field, and they win the game. That's a beautiful thing. I speak to Owen, another one I've found as before, who I love, and comes a great story. But he said that you definitely have a type you have It's young and it's not where you're going. It's product oriented Okay, and he said it's very much deeper than that unpack that with him So when you think about your founder type, I know we say we don't have one and me you know everything Probably not true.

35:35Yeah, what is your founder type one of the founder types that I love is the first time founder hyper obsessed about building a product in a sort of new -ish market where it's not obvious and the market doesn't necessarily exist. And that would put Owen from Intercom in that bucket. I'd put Dylan from Figma in the bucket. Owen's alluding to Young Product Centric Founder. And the other bucket for me is actually the repeat founder who had an okay outcome or even a pretty good outcome and is doing it again. And I would put Stuart Butterfield from slack in that bucket. I would put Parker from rippling in that bucket.

36:14He was a repeat founder, as you know. So there's the first time founder going into a market that they're hyper obsessed about. They're building in a beautiful product. Taste is on. The level of grind and grit is there. And then there's a second time founder who wants to surpass anything they've done before. What found a perfect turn you'd like? I don't like the, we looked at the landscape and we discovered this is a great place to build a business. We did a whole market mapping exercise and the TAM is going to be $X billion. It is that sort of like the top down approach to building a company versus the bottoms up approach to building a company.

36:54A UOK paying a premium for the experience. I'm doing a seed now at my main. I so appreciate you being an Alpium Myfons. Price is slightly odd. It's like a 40 million for a pre -seed pre -product pre -another thing. The founders are unbelievable from one of the best companies in the world, and exceptional. I'm paying a premium for experience. You always happy to do that. Yeah, so I mean, I'll just give hard numbers. And when we backed Arvind and Glean, we did it, co -let it with light speed at 35 post. And Arvind is a G. You know, he started Ruberick. He's like, how much did he raise? He raised a lot.

37:29He was like 15 million at 35 post. So it gave up a lot of the company in that round. A 35 post. Yeah, and because that's not crazy for someone who's involved in this profile actually. It's not, I don't think it's high. Yeah. I think, but in today's environment, that would be like, oh, it needs to be 200 post. So would you do that at 200 post? Probably not. Yeah, how a thing. So I think it's not that I'm trying to get a deal. I'm trying to work with people who see the world the way I see it, and they're willing to be partners together and creating a bigger pie for all of us. They're not so short -term oriented around like, well, I need to have this crazy pricing.

38:05Another example is, Sayed Ali at Alif, we did that also at like 35 posts. And Sayed had come off of a company just sold for $6 billion. And do you think he could have raised at a higher price? Probably, but he's just that. This feels fair, it feels right. And so I'm sure a lot of people listening or are thinking, wow, like really jammed them. Or no, these are adults making decisions together around what the right pricing of a company should be at that stage. A lot of times founders are told, listen, your job is to raise as much money as possible at the highest price. Yeah. A great disagree. A disagree?

38:38At that series A seed, it's about the people you're surrounding yourself with. I also think bluntly it can damage you incredibly from that surround. When you don't, and she's scaled into it, and suddenly you have to do a bridge or whatever it is, it makes it so much harder when you've got a hugely high watermark that you have to fill. Do you think you should always be raising? For the CEO, founder CEO, CEO, your job is to make sure you're coming to have rounds out of money. If you have $300 million sitting on your balance sheet, I'm not sure you should be raising at all. So if you're well -capitalized, heads down, go built.

39:09When you've got a found to pick wrong, what do you get wrong? Generally, I would say you get the markets wrong. I would say that counting great found to overcome a bad market. Hard. Yeah, hard. Bad markets, the structure of industries where margins are compressed and customers are bad. Life's just too hard that way. So will you back a really great founder if they're in a ship market? Probably not. Yeah. That's interesting. Yeah. Because like for me, it's like I'm pretty seeding seed generally speaking. We do series as well. They're like generally pretty easy. I'm like, you know what? Great founders find their way to great markets.

39:44And if they're truly great, honestly, they'll pivot, they'll change, they'll make their way. I mean, I think one could have said that about like you would have maybe would have missed a seed at Uber, because what probably not so great economics early on, right? Customer acquisition and like trying to pay the drivers, et cetera. So I think it was a slack and obvious home run when you did it. None of these are obvious home runs when you do them, right? No, it wasn't. It was 500K of ARR at the time and... What price did you do it at? 250 million post. You did it at 500XRR. Yeah, and I think we weren't thinking in those terms.

40:16Why? Was it usage patterns again? Yeah, I think there were enough... At that time, there were 10 ,000 or so users, like a third of them were using the project every day for multiple hours a day. And like, okay, well, we all need something like Slack and you can scale this by 1 ,000X because there are lots of companies that look like this. They use it like this today. Do you think that's the wrong mindset to approach it with? A lot of investors do approach it on a revenue multiple basis. Is that wrong? For early stage companies, yeah, it's, yeah, you can't take a 500K error or a million. But when you're paying 250, it's kind of like a, Some of us see that.

40:49But if you've seen the engagement data on a product that you think can apply to 10 ,000, 100 ,000 of companies, then... The entire workforce. Yeah, then why not? I think it's really a mistake to look at revenue multiples that like half a million, a million. What do you think it's not the VCs do today that they shouldn't be? There's just a big echo chamber and a lot of people live in the echo chamber. Folks think that's information and information is knowledge and knowledge is arbitrage. But when everyone has the same knowledge, then it's no longer arbitrage. Do you think everyone does have the same knowledge?

41:23A lot of big firms say, oh, we built out these amazing data platforms, and that's why we're operating off this proprietary information. I think it's mostly BS. Many have tried and failed at using the very data -oriented approach to investing in startups when, at the end of the day, it's about the founders. And the founders wanting to work with you. Exactly. Yeah, I know. I think... That's what I tell a lot of LPs, though, which is like, you know, I remember speaking to an LPH here about you and I was like the thing that you go to on the sound with my moon is like every in the valley respectfully probably sees the same deals.

41:53But you have to be aspirational capital to the best famers in the world where they say, yeah, I've got 12 term sheets, but I want that one. And that's the only thing that matters. It doesn't matter that you saw it. It means shit. 100%. It's about how do you position yourself so that the founders are choosing us. It's based on reputation of our body of work, our firm's body of work, what the firm represents, what we can offer them once we get involved or even before we're involved. What are people saying about you? What's the folks who you work with before? How do you think about decision making?

42:26One of the things I think is crazy is voting structures in venture firms. I get us as by a lot of LPs which is one of the most voting structures and they kind of seem quite upset when I say, well, there's any four of us and so anyone can write a check and I believe the best deals are often non -consensus and right. So we don't have like four out of 10 or six out of 10. They look quite upset with me when I say this. I think that's not. How do you feel about voting structures in decision making? Yeah, I don't believe in voting structures for early stage venture capital. I think you have to allow every partner to put themselves on the line with their conviction that they've built up over years sometimes, weeks sometimes, but you have to give into the conviction of the person wanting to lead.

43:05And so the way we work is that because we sit around the table, we literally get to see each other's body language, which how someone goes from excitement to less excitement when one of our partners, like, you know, Ilya asked me a question about why I'm so excited about a company and then he asked another question and then I said, well, that's a good question that I don't have a good answer for. Maybe my excitement wanes and then I come back a few days later when we see each other again. It's like, you know what, like we talked about that and, you know, I'm sort of leaning out on the opportunity.

43:31And so I think that's also the magic of being around the same table in the same room. You get to really test each other's conviction. So you don't have a vote. We have a discussion, but there's no vote. If I disagree with you and I say, Mamoon, I don't think we should do this deal. Yeah. I do not see the market. I don't see the upside. The answer prices to my... If you wanted to be told me, you could be told me. But it hasn't happened. No one's ever vetoed. Why did deals get crushed mostly? I'd say it's when questions get asked around or is this a fleeting cycle of adoption for this sort of product or this is going to be gnarly dog fight because there are too many competitors or this is the wrong time.

44:11The risk reward isn't great for this round. That's when your excitement tends to wane. Do you do outcomes in our air planning? We used to and haven't done it more recently. You used to do like what is the probability of this company being a zero, a 500 million rx at a 250 million rx at a billion rx at and a 10 billion rx at you do the percentages. It's such false precision. I always do 25, 25, 25. Thank you so much. It's such false precision that I think it feels like busy work actually. Who's the best picker in the team? Josh is a very precise picker. I would say that Ilya and I, we're almost always on the same page.

44:49We're like two similar actually. It's not too dangerous, Sachi, because you can almost encourage a little bit. It's actually great because if I meet someone, and then I, you know, come on, you know, like I'll see you in the hallway. Can you meet this person for like five or 10 minutes, And he did that to me recently actually and I'll come in and he's like, oh yeah, I see the same thing you do So we are in some ways quite similar, which is awesome. I think we may miss some of the same things then too because of it But I think it's a good lock to get like especially when we're trying to build conviction or like at least like Quickly get to am I seeing the same thing you were seeing?

45:19What was the most contentious deal that you did? You know actually figure out was quite contentious because to your point around like half a million of AR at a 110, 15 posts or whatever it was at the time. The same thing, there's Envision, there's Sketch, this company's been around for five years, it's not obvious to us. It was contentious that there's a lot of questions around the investment. You had a fund that I can't remember the exact vintage, and it was a false deployment. It was like 12 or 18 months. It was a time whenever everyone was deploying fast, but it was fast. How do you think about deployment pace?

45:49Is it a play the game on the field or do you take a much more structured discipline and view towards it? I think the viewers here, We'd loved it deploy over a two and a half, that three year period of time. When we got to KP, I came in 2017, a bunch of the team joined in 2018, so Bucky, Ilya, Annie joined that year. Josh joined the same week I did. So there was a period of time in 2019, so we just raised our first fund as a team together where we deployed that fund within like 15 months. I think it was just a new - The sound of the rip playing fund. It was, rip playing, glean, a bunch of other stuff in there.

46:21We just were a new team. Then at board seats, we had a fund ready to deploy, and so we deployed it fairly quickly. I would say mostly Series A, like real ownership Series A's, the core of the business. And so if I look at that fund, I think it'll be an amazing fund, actually. Unbelievable. You could have said, well, wait a second, guys, in due time to diversify, it was, if you would have deployed over to an after -your -period, you would have missed a high -valuation environment into it lower and yada yada and so I would say that that would be the counterpoint to fast deployment like no you can actually work.

46:55Very damn mutual fund of both forces, kersh kersh and thrive think that bluntly everyone has the plasticity to move between stages or in their fun. Yeah, I don't think everyone but like they're in vases do. I think that is just really hard to do. Which side do you take? I think generally speaking it's hard to have the neuroplasticity to one day think about 10 years ahead and a new infrastructure company that's building on a new open source framework and the next day think about like pre -IPO stage consumer company. While we all have one meeting, one pipeline meeting, one investment team meeting for both early -stage and venture, all of us do venture investing and a few of us will do more that select investing.

47:38because we don't want to burden everyone to bring neuroplasticity to the job every day. You said about putting your name on the line and really believing, when have you put your name on the line most and been wrong? You know, I've just gone through my first sort of bigger loss in terms of capital loss for a while. Come here, just shut down, and come here, call it Tally, and the founder Jason Brown, who I've known for 15 years, I had a lot of sure. Yeah, and how much did he do? 30 million or so. multiples of the largest loss prior to that. So I don't wear this badge of honor of losing a lot. I mean, there's a whole thing in venture.

48:15Like you need to lose so many million dollars before you made it kind of thing. And I think there's a lot more precision one can apply even at the early stage to not put more money in to lose more because our job is to invest 5, 10, 15 up front. And if you lose five on a seed check, all good. That's your job. Is there anything you love from Tali that lending businesses are really hard? Consumer lending is very hard. Did you do Resovs? Yes. And that was where it went wrong. Well, the first check was back to the 6040. It was like 6040, but there's more along the way that went in because they raised subsequent up -rounds from great investors, the round after us, Angela and Andrew St.

48:52Horowitz did it, and it was a great round, great time for the company, and then it didn't win in 2022 with one of our seed investors sway, led the growth round because things were going really well, and then consumer lending just turned. This is when it interest rates went up from you know 0 to 5 % and that really made that business really difficult How have you changed most significantly as an investor over time? I mean obviously there's more experience But actually let's try not to let that weigh me down because I think Job is to stay open -minded and have naivete and dream the dream and too many scars Aren't necessarily a good thing for like being open -minded and thinking about what the next Figma or Rippling will be.

49:33Where do you most need to improve as an investor? I think I'm a dreamer and I want to just believe in the people that I pack. I heard this, I heard that you are such a dreamer that sometimes you believe for too long and you should cut things before. Yeah, how do you think about knowing when is the right time to cut the belief and actually we've had enough time? I agree, I agree that. That is fair criticism. But I think that's just part of the package. That is who I am. I believe in the people and I want to be on that journey you would, um, do you believe in VC value at my moon? But then all Chris's famously said, you know, 90 % of VCs actually just try and find you.

50:08Yeah, I don't disagree with the note that there's destruction of value that happens with the wrong advice, but I think if with the right advice and the right help, we can help supercharge your companies. What makes the, I'm not asking for the name, but what makes the worst bought the worst board, the worst board? It starts with how a CEO runs a board. How do the best CEOs run a board? They start off with a high level of view of how the company is doing and then they give a chance for their leaders. They're very capable leaders to go dive in deep and share and ask questions. And there's a fair bit of cheerleading, but a fair bit of like asking the hard questions.

50:43And I like board meetings where there's one or two things that are talked about in detail. You go deep dive into one or two things because at any given point in time, in a company's juncture, that moment in time, one or two things that really matter, we can help change the trajectory on. And so if we're talking about seven different things that matter, we're probably missing the point. And so I love board meetings where that's sort of the structure. Two more questions. Do you mind super dilutive businesses? Like your door dashes a lot, I know you've been in a door dashed different cash profiles intensely, but still.

51:14Do you mind them? Personally? Yeah. Those are not my kind of businesses. I like more capital efficiency, but I can get behind them. What would you like to find this a little like in 10 years? When I I hate you there, it feels like, actually, there is scope for you to go into the capital of key mulite bucket. Yeah, do you want that? No, I don't. I don't think we want that at all. We love where we are today. We really do. And I don't try to not be a senior, you're a long time friend. And I believe in venture, early state venture being a beautiful asset class, especially if you can follow the power law and being the few companies that matter.

51:46And then you can invest in the very few companies that really matter out of your select fund and then call it a day. I totally agree. We share the love of Vansha and we share the kind of love of the beauty, key nature of Vansha. I want to move into a quick fire. What do you believe that most around you disbelief? Venture is an Easter job. It's clamorous. It's all of that except clamorous. My favorite is the amount of friends I have who are operators who are like, this is the one that's set on the 10. This is so fucking hot. Totally. And you're like, yeah, I totally agree with you that. What's the most memorable first founder meeting you've It has to be Aaron Levy when I first met him.

52:22Why? He brought along with him a wonderful person care and page because he thought he had to bring on an executive or bring an executive to the first meeting. He was like hyper nervous, I felt, coming to a VC from office like in a cotton shirt and but I could tell from that meeting that he had thought about the problem of cloud storage more than, and this is 2007 so like cloud storage was not a thing. More than anyone else. And so for me it was like an instant I need to invest in this founder like right away But it was also just memorable from the other things that were going around the public mall Okay, revenue multiples need to reflect for venture to be a sustainable business I mentioned box that I post like whatever it is a billion in revenue billion in revenue I'm gonna cite four and a half billion market cap.

53:05Yeah, yeah, I think Growth and profitability to my point Do we need to see the reflection for venture to be sustainable or not? I think just getting back to normal historical levels would be good enough. Which branch of invested you most respect and learn from outside of Clienter? You know, one of my favorite investors is Matt Kohler from Benchmark, Hawaii. And London. Got to see you in yesterday. I wish he and I were on more boards together. You can be CEO for a day, my moon. Of any company, which company you see of? Easy. Open AI. I just want to see what's going on. I just want to see how far AGI really is.

53:39What concerns you most in the world? You can be CEO for a day, I mean, of any company, which company you see of. Easy. Open AI. Really? I just want to see what's going on. I just want to see where how far AGI really is. Geopolitics, polarization, even in our own countries. Here, we talked about the UK, we talked about the US a little bit before we got going. There's too much of us versus them, whether it's in our own countries or competing with other countries. This is so unfair, maybe fuck it, I'll go to your hand. You can invest in a seed firm, a series A firm and a growth firm purely on multiple's basis.

54:14Who do you invest in? Seed firm you. Seed A firm us and growth firm us. I was like, he's going to give me a new one here. Come on, hit me. I can tell you mine. You tell me yours first. Well, I mean, like one on the seed I do Gileera Nana at Cyber Starts in Israel. Okay. If you want a pure seed play. Okay. Unbelievable. It would it would either be Clienter or it would either be Benchmark because of the smaller fun size And then growth it would have to be the Pat or Kush. I totally agree penultimate one. What do you know now that you wish you'd known when you joined us VPN 19 years ago? Just that Ventures a grind and Do you still love it as much as he did?

54:55Absolutely. I mean how could you not love living in this like super cycle of AI man like we will not see this at the ground floor level value creation in our lifetimes ever again. Final one, what question are you never asked that you think you should be asked more? Religion and politics are like the taboos obviously and so the question is how does faith impact the way you work? How does faith impact the way you work? It's everything. It starts, it's the beginning of a day, it's the end of your day and everything in between is, is how do you, how does your faith inform how you treat people? How do you treat this earth, how do you show up in a meeting with someone?

55:33It's around how much humility you bring, empathy, care, love for each other for the planet. You know, just like, it's sort of like deeply embedded in you. And it's at a board meeting, you know, everything. My deep faith lies in liquidity.

55:50That's the most like capitalist way to finish the conversation. I mean, I've loved doing this. Thank you so much for joining me and this has been so special. Amazing. Thank you so much, Harry. My word, that was so much fun to do. As I said, I met Mammune at a Saster Conference in 2016. He's been a dear friend and a mental ever since, and that was so special to do in person. You can watch the full interview on YouTube by searching for 20VC, that's 20VC. But before we leave you today, this episode is presented by Brex. The Financial Stack Founders can bank on. Brex knows that nearly 40 % of startups fail because they run out of cash, so they built a banking experience that takes every dollar further.

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58:29It's no surprise eight Blinkist users see themselves as self -optimizers and 65 % say it's essential for business and career growth. Speaking of business, Blinkist is a trusted L &D partner for industry leaders like Amazon on Hyundai and KPMG UK, empowering over 32 million users since 2012. As a 20 VC listener, you can enjoy an exclusive 25 % discount on Blinkist. That's B -L -I -N -K -I -S -T, just visit Blinkist .com slash 2 -0 VC to claim your discount and transform the way you learn. As always, I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for a very special episode on Wednesday with a brand new firm.

59:08Three partners introducing what will be an incredible new series use