Uncapped #16 | Mamoon Hamid from Kleiner Perkins

26:30If you found the right entrepreneur, you'd be like very leaned in to invest because it's an idea that makes sense to you next. Taking that pyramid structure again, it's that invisible pyramid I'm drawing here is okay. So you go one layer below. Okay, what are the jobs that are like slightly less paid but still skilled. Okay, those are nurses. They're salespeople, they're financial analysts. They're jobs of that ilk still very qualified college educated. And we found that okay, well, now some of those parts of this job is actually just do them completely autonomously. For example, for nurses, we have a company called Hippocratic, which is an autonomous agent that does work that a nurse would do.

27:12Like make a bunch of phone calls. Like they're making thousands of phone calls today to patients to talk about either like a pre -op conversation, a wellness check, do like a post check -in. And by the way, when you, you know, turns out that patients like to respond to phone calls in the morning or in the evening, like 8am to 9am or before work or 5pm to 6pm. Well, guess what? Like if you tell a nurse, you can only call those hours. That's pretty hard. But if you can an agent can do it. You can agent, you can tell them call only those hours and 10 ,000 people simultaneously do it exactly. That's the beauty of when you create abundance through AI, you can do some pretty amazing things.

27:54And by the way, those calls today are probably made. They go to voicemail. And then you don't do a follow -up because you just don't have enough humans to make those phone calls. Yeah, we'll never give up. Yeah, I will never give up. Right. And then that hopefully, or in the fullness of time, creates the right outcomes that these protocols are suggesting why should these calls be made is because there's some protocols that suggest if you make the call, you increase the decrease of likely, you know, readmission by X amount. And so all this abundance in AI creates all these opportunities to just get to the asymptote of a better world.

28:26And so back to your question, man, like, you know, what are the things that, so this phase of like in the last year or so, like a lot of autonomous agents that are doing parts of the work just completely on their own. And I think the end state is if you go down, so what is the lowest paid work and lowest skilled, it's physical labor. And it's just the truth. It's like backbreaking work that people do and still do it. And that's probably the hardest place to attack today. And where I were thinking sort of much further out, which is like robots. Yeah, it's like humanoids. The beauty of our time was that, you know, the transformers, LLMs really were able to take all the corpus of the internet, take lots and lots of textual data, transcript data, and understand this corpus and do really well with factual knowledge based data.

29:18But when it comes to the physical world, there is so much more. And no one's fully, you know, digest every single piece of video to understand or actions, human actions, to solve and address robotics today. And I think that's a magnitude bigger problem to address that a couple of really cool companies are looking at doing. But the problem is bigger, bigger, much bigger, and the cost to actually accomplishing and magnitude is bigger. Yes. And I just think that's like further down the road for us. That one could be like investing in grocery in the dot com era instead of in 2015. And it's like an obvious outcome, but it's, you know, not there.

29:57Like you're even setting this room up this morning, like a lot of people had to move a lot of things around to the right place and set up stuff. Doesn't seem physically impossible that a robot could do that one day. It just doesn't seem like we're there quickly. Yeah, it goes back to the cost equation. I think you could get a robot that robot probably cost you half a million dollars to do the work that was done here today. And it would take the robot five times as long. Yep. Okay. And so it's all about the cost benefit or cost the cost equation. And I think we'll get there eventually. We always get there.

30:27Yeah. But it takes some time. It seems like that will be to me at least that seems like that will be like the biggest economic unlock. And maybe like sort of quality of life unlock imaginable to me. If you could really have humanoid robots doing all that. I mean, it seems like a fantastical idea, but this keeps coming up on the podcast. It's like the obvious eventual conclusion. I don't see why it wouldn't happen and why it wouldn't be like the biggest thing that ever happened. Yeah. I haven't thought of it that way. But just one is that I'm not sure that's the human informed factor that the, I don't know if you need a humanoid.

30:57Yeah. Yeah. Robot. But just a robot. Yeah. Robot like on wheels moving around, doing things that we would do. I think it's already, it's we're closer when it comes to moving vehicles, bringing things from point A to point B, you know, like Amazon deliveries, food deliveries, all that delivery tech stuff. Right. But but things like in factories where there's very confined jobs to be done, we have a company really, it's called Dixterity, which loads, unloads, boxes off of FedEx trucks or UPS trucks, you know, just like, which is again, like, you know, it does like, if you watch the videos, it does a perfect job of like squeezing boxes into crevices that humans would never think about squeezing a box into.

31:39And so if you break the job down into very specific things, I think you can already do it today. But I think the, you know, the very dexterous robot that does a random set of things in your house. Super far. Super far. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I'm just very interested in the idea of like how far can prompt and go. I think about what type of business might you be able to prompt into existence in five years? Like, could you prompt a simple e -commerce business? Seems like you could probably do that. Could you prompt like a SaaS business into existence, et cetera? And you can like go down the levels of complexity of like what is promptable into existence?

32:18But on the robot side, if like one day, 30 years from now, you could prompt build me a house. That'd be crazy. But it doesn't seem physically impossible at some point. I don't know. It does not. So I guess you're thinking through this kind of pyramid, and that's informing the way that you go about your investments. I kind of want to now shift over to you building the firm and sort of how you're now, you know, marrying the apparatus that you, you know, are leading to approach the situation where I wanted to start was the thing that I think is very impressive, rare and interesting is you came to Cliner in 2017 and Cliner has this unbelievable history back to the early 70s, super dominant, you know, like investing in unbelievable companies.

33:03Obviously, it was still like a meaningful thing, but it like went through like a trough relative to like those heights. It seems like it's pretty rare that new life gets breathed back into a really storied old venture firm. And I'm just curious to hear about what went into whatever you did to make that happen. Yeah, no, it's it's been the journey and on over lifetime to be a Cliner Perkins since when I joined almost eight years ago. It is the firm that really got me thinking about venture capital in the first place when I was a young engineer in Zilinx. And at the time, there were, you know, the equivalent of tech crunch or your podcasts were red herring and the industry standard.

33:48And whenever you pick up the magazine, the print version, you read about a company and it was like literally always backed by Cliner Perkins. It really got me thinking about what is it that these folks do? And it turns out most of the people that worked at Cliner Perkins, like John Doer and Minoed Kostla and Brookbuyers at the time in the early late in the late 90s were engineers who went to business school, usually one of two and got into VC. And so that's sort of set my sights on I have to go to business school to get into VC. And so, but the dream job coming out of business school was to go to Cliner Perkins.

34:25Quite literally I tried and tried and tried didn't work out, but eventually I did in 2017. And the point of telling you all this is that it was the most storied venture firm through the 80s, 90s and early 2000s. And it is the firm that I looked up to. And I think many of us in industry looked up to and folks like John, who I think is the the goat, the best venture capitalists of all time, two out of the six or seven trillion dollar companies or John Series A's. And so to have an opportunity to be at the firm and put our spin on it and sort of quit a refounding moment of the firm in 2017, which we did truly was and felt like.

35:09And it is what the folks who brought me in, John and Ted and Brook wanted it to happen. I'm just really curious because I know you've gotten a chance to learn from him. Can you share anything about John that you've been able to learn that like made him so good? Because it seems unbelievable to two Series A's are multi -trile like it just seems unbelievable. John has a drive and like no other went when he sees something, he is relentless. He will not shake it off until he gets it. And that's how we probably pursued, I don't know the exact stories of pursuit Larry and Sergei as well as Jeff. But I know that he went up to see Jeff and Seattle in his sort of makeshift loft like building like this and where Amazon was getting started and going to the Stanford campus where Larry and Sergei were.

36:04So once he saw something in those founders and he uniquely has worked with so many of the greats. So many hundred billion dollar plus companies and is still in the board of door dash, still in the board of alphabet. You know, he backed Scott Cook into it compact computer. The list is so insane with John in terms of like the number of hundred billion dollar plus companies. But I think he has a formula of identifying greatness and having this view of products and markets and people that will build probably the most insane companies in the space. John, I think I'm sure he's missed a few too but and he's told me about it.

36:43Some of his misses that would have made him even crazier in terms of what what John's accomplishments would have been. But I think his relentless pursuit of great founders is something I've learned from. So when you came into Clenar, what did you set out to what did you need to do and what were you sort of planning? First, you take stock of what's actually happening on the ground. You come in, I literally spent the first two months meeting with every single person all the way from the front desk person to our all my partners, including former partners, just to understand what made us great. What were the assets and what were the liabilities?

37:23Liabilities and you know, one of the things that didn't work or weren't working and having your own point of view on the things that weren't working. My takeaway was that what made Clenar so great and iconic and produce these epic returns were that we were early stage specialists who was a small partnership of early stage technical people, practitioners who cared about the craft, the venture capital, being in the trenches with founders, really being truly their first partners and their best partners. That was sort of the takeaway of if you talk to Kevin Compton or Doug McKenzie or Joe Lakeob, I mean, these are like the epic partners of the 90s at Clenar.

38:12You took away like there was just and they were all very different. If you meet any of these folks, they were very complementary different. It was a truly a partnership of people who wanted to be exceptionally great at early stage investing and we were not just early stage investing in 2017. So we had all kinds of different products, we had different geographies and so we brought it back to the core. We brought it back to the future moment and that was actually our tagline in 2019 when we raised KP18 was back to the future. So we went back to the future to a small lean team of early stage practitioners.

38:50We did add on a growth fund later on and there was a really good reason for that. But we went back to that. My partner, Ilya Fushman, who was one of the first people I brought on, because he and I saw the world very similarly, which is you want to be a small lean team doing early stage back in the best founders at the series A. And actually maybe just inside is we never had a mission statement. And so we actually created a mission statement. It sounds a little hokey, and the mission statement is that we want to be the first call for founders who want to make history. And the history part was that this firm had made history with its investments.

39:29And I think it was be hard for some other firm to say those those lofty words. But truly, Cliner 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 pretty much nailed every single dominant company in those waves. And so how could we make history again with this our body of work, this this group of people. And especially now relevant to AI, how do we make history with our AI investments? And we sort of brought it back to its core and had a very distinct mission to us.

40:12And that informed what kind of people we wanted to have inside the firm, the partners investing on behalf of our LPs. There, we thought we wanted to have folks for technologies have some operating background. But truly want to be exceptional at investing. Like this is the craft and career they want to really excel at. Not like, you know, I was a founder. That was my peak. And this is like the next thing I do after I start a company. No, no, I I want to do this as my career. And which is why also we've groomed a lot of folks from within, even though I had many years as an operator as an engineer, so did Ilya.

40:50We really got an adventure pretty early on. And we got groomed by some really amazing venture capitalist. Ilya was a coastal event. I got to work with Benode and we got to work with Pure LeMonde. I got to work with Irwin Federman, who was my mentor at USUP. And you know, probably the most legendary semiconductor investor. So we all had mentors and we wanted to create a partnership where we could groom younger folks, associates, principals, also younger partners. And that's, you know, today, you know, some of my partners, Ev Randall and Lemary and Josh Cohen. And so who have really grown up in the business.

41:30And both Josh and Ev were associates back in 2017 -18, that I joined. How do you think about on that topic growing your own talent versus, you know, recruiting in people at the GP level directly, you know, like when I look around at a lot of at least in sort of my cohort of, you know, people in their mid -30s who I consider to be great investors, a ton of them started, you know, at the firm that they're currently at and rose into a, you know, GP level there. So, you know, obviously there's just both examples. How do you think about what you're trying to do as you grow the team? We typically add one person a year or so, maybe Max.

42:10And there's no heart set number about growing the team because we're not trying to necessarily grow fun sizes. And so, you know, at any given point in time, we have five to seven partners. Yeah. And that's in the Yankee years I call them of the final Perkins where every year they're winning championships. There's small teams. It was like seven partners. Yeah. And so I think there's also in terms of like you want to be able to sit around a table like this and have great debate and conversation around investments you're about to make. And at some point you go beyond the seven stuff starts to just be different.

42:48And there's actually research around it that suggests that there's a, the Goldilocks is probably six -ish. And so, you know, if you're five, someone's out that week, you know, you can't have a full conversation if you're seven, you know, maybe people aren't saying things that they want to really say because they want to upset someone. So there's a number. And I think we've continued to optimize for that number. And so, to your question, how do you create that partnership? It's inevitable that not everyone's going to have been home run portfolio. And so, those are the reasons usually why someone leaves.

43:21But how do you backfill or how do you have someone? And usually you sort of, you know, we've tried to grow from within. Yeah. And because that's so important because your culture, can you live the KEPI culture, which is a very much a servant culture. Like we're a servant leadership. We are here to serve our founders. And this is not about us as individuals. It's about our job to our founders, which is to work on their behalf tirelessly to help them become successful. How do you assess talent on the way up? Let's say somebody's been with you for three years and they've got a portfolio. Do you ever have situations where somebody, their investments are good, but you actually don't believe in their future performance or vice versa?

44:05Or do you sort of do you promote inside the firm specifically based on performance? Because it it seems both clear cut and the numbers are the numbers on one hand. And then on the other hand, there's quite a lot of like luck and randomness involved. And so as somebody who has now gotten the chance to see a lot of people develop, grow a lot of people, manage a lot of people and investing. What have you learned about how do you pick career path? There's the seeing. Are we seeing the right investments? Then are we picking the ones that we should be in? Then there's the winning. Are we winning the ones that we should be like if we decide we're going to invest, are we winning?

44:45And our internal goal is actually 100%. If we want to invest in a company, we have to win it. And we keep track of the seeing, the picking, the winning. And then the hardest one to actually, which takes the longest period of time to figure out is working, working in investment, meaning like how are you helping drive the success of a company? Which in many ways is the is a function of the founder and their team, but we're trying to help work it as well. If you're sort of three years in, you're, you know, you've been seeing and you've been picking. So we know how you see and you pick. And if you're just really good at like seeing stuff and some great founders and also then winning, like you're capable of winning what we think are the investments we should be.

45:32Like if you can do that whole cycle, then you're, you know, like, and you see that, you see that day to day, like you're bringing in great investments, who are great founders that we actually want to invest in as a group. And then you're actually winning them. You can win them. Yeah, that's a sign. Okay, then now that's great. It's awesome. But now it's time to show that you can work them. Are they producing revenues, profits, real iconic company status, or at least are you on, on track for that? And can you have, you know, per fun cycle, like one company that we all are really proud of, you know, you know, in a fun cycle, we invest in 35 companies and the math suggests that we need like two outlier type outcomes and a couple more.

46:14They're really great. And which means that every partner has to like deliver a company per fun that you look at. It's like, yeah, it's a really good company. And so that becomes more apparent over, you know, from year four to seven. You know, and so, but you get to have multiple shots on goal. And so part of it's really like, can you, yeah, see pick win, but are there true outlier outcomes that you're producing for the firm? You said it's important to win always if you want it. Yeah. Why is that? Like, why is it not okay? What? Why not aim for 70 % win rate? Like, why is it not even actually me to ask it this way?

46:53Why would you not prefer a 70 % win rate, which implies that there were some that you went for that were so good and got so competitive and whatever. We actually have a lower rate at the seeing. We don't need to see everything. We don't need to be fully exhausted at seeing. And internally, like our target is to see 60 % of all series A's that get done by a pure pure set. Series A is what you care the most about. Yeah. That's where we measure it religiously. Like, we look at it on a weekly basis. We look at our, like what series A's were announced, do we see it or not? And seeing means you actually met with the company.

47:25Not just like you heard of that. Yeah. You saw it. You spent time. You spent time on it. Yeah. And you deliberately decided to not do it. Like, there was a decision made by you as a partner, as a team. We all. And so that's what we really keep it looser because you don't want to be so exhausted that they're just chasing around right companies just because you heard someone's raising this series A. You want to have a real look at it and real assessment of the company and have a point of view on it. On the winning piece, we believe that, you know, and then you pick, you know, we decided to pick.

47:55We decided like we want to do this. Let's go win it. Let's go do the full team tackle. Let's use all of our resources to win and convince founders. We are best suited to help them win. And that comes via endorsements from our founders, you know, getting, and that's usually the biggest thing. It's endorsements from our founders. It is they see some of the work that we do for them with them. But we have to win because we have the wind in our back of like the brand of a client of Perkins. We have the resources of a client of Perkins. We have endorsements from founders like we there's a network like and we feel like we're best suited to be that series A partner.

48:37And if you decide to otherwise, we're going to look back and introspect on why we didn't do better for you. Why we can convince you better because we believe our track record from series A to success is very high. And why would you not want to work with us? That's how we believe. But if we don't pick us, we have to really introspect. And we actually keep a spreadsheet of all the losses at the and then we revisit them at every off site. And we look at like, okay, did we miss the good ones or the not so good ones? And what was missing in our playbook as to why we didn't win that investment? Does maybe takes me to one of the things I most wanted to talk to you about and try to learn from you is what I perceive around incredibly good picking over a lot of years into a lot of interesting companies.

49:28And you know, I'm sure I'm going to be missing something, but just like off the cuff, I can think of, you know, we talked about box, there's Figma, there's applied, there's Rippling, there's like, there's more, I know there's a lot more slack, slack, clean, good ones. Very good. Like past a point where it's like, looks lucky, you know, it looks like something's going on. You just talked about, you know, being able to win all the time. I guess the first place I'm curious to ask about is were those investments hyper competitive when you did them and was winning a huge factor in them or when you look back as the part that you're more proud of that you picked something very accurately?

50:05Like did everybody see that they were good and you just won or did you have an insight other people didn't have? Yeah. If I look back at box in slack, which chronologically were the first two that you mentioned, those were not competitive. I think there were no other offers at the time of investment. Box for sure because Aaron was having a hard time raising around slack. It was just too early for anyone else to take note of the early success. And maybe just to break it down a bit in terms of, for most of my investing career, I've really been excited about productivity. And that sort of goes back into my growing up in Germany where everything's so efficient, so productive and you're like constantly thinking about, okay, how do I make this more efficient?

50:52How do I make this more productive? So, and I always saw that software in the cloud, lots of way better experienced for productivity than desktop software and all kinds of other ways of doing work. And so, and I made the sort of kind of a major of mine is workplace productivity. And so, when you find encounter founder like Aaron around big categories of productivity, you sort of, they see the world the way you see it and you're back them. And so, you have what we call a prepared mind. You approach it with a prepared mind. So, you already come into the meeting with a bit more of a, you're leaning in before you've met them because you know what they're doing.

51:28In the case of Slack, just to give you a sense, like it was a, you know, a gaming company that had pivoted become this, this, this chat IRC thing. And we'd heard that a few of our companies were using it. And one of the founders we backed really like, hey, like we loved using this thing. And it was, you know, a few thousand users. But there are other, lots of other chat products. And by the way, like you could say, like, why not just use iMessage or why not just use gchat. And there are a few other products like it. So it was easy to dismiss it at the time. But what you couldn't dismiss was the level of engagement.

52:04And I think at the time, no one was asking some of these, this is like 2013. No one was asking like the engagement questions around like, you know, L28s or down, it was not a thing for enterprise software. The engagement there was insane, right? It was insane. It was like a 50 % down, out four hours a day instead of Slack. And I think just being a little bit early on into understanding what was really happening with Slack and not dismissing it. And actually someone overpaying and making an offer to come reviews. You know, at the time, like investing 25 million at 250 posts for a series A company felt insane in 2013.

52:42But what's, I would say across the board between Aaron at Fox or Stuart at Slack or Dylan at Figma or Arbineg they're on this general like workplace productivity category. But they were pretty product obsessive founders who had hooked so many holes at their own products. And as a product obsessed investor, I actually don't get product advice because if I've invested in a product obsessed founder, it'll be quite the insult to them to tell them where they should improve their product. But you're finding people who are way better than you at certain things, which is a product and building in categories and areas that you care about.

53:24So file sharing in collaborative design in workplace communications in enterprise search. And these folks all had like deep, deep ties into this for many years, even though they were fairly young when they started a couple of folks were very young when they started. Aaron was 21. I think Dylan was maybe all of 19 or 20 when he started Figma. And in the case of Figma, you know, it was also just sort of post launch product. And again, but not super competitive at the time. I think they had other offers, but they were a company that had been around five years. I have a history of investing companies that have been around for a while before I invest in them.

54:02But the next, the new thing or the product they launched way many years in is the thing that works. In the case of Figma, five years in, you launch in July of 2017 or something, it starts to take off a little bit. And but it's the end is so small. And if there's one learning I've had over my career, like, or one thing I've used a lot is small and high engagement is a really good signal to invest in a company and get early, get an earlier, not competitive, better pricing, all the things I come with it, hence better returns for our investors. And, you know, you ask like, so what are the things that unifying sort of archetypes here?

54:41I would say one is the product obsessed founder. And the other archetype is the Parker at Ripley, and Casder at applied intuition is visionary. But the one thing they're better at than being a visionary is just an execution machine and run through brick walls, will the future towards themselves like, like you think about what Parker's built with Ripley, like this compound startup beyond just an HRI asked to finance cloud to IT and literally like 25 different products now, is you kind of have to will that to your way, the world your way to do that. And the same thing with what Casder has done and applied to tuition, going into automotive and selling software and the the automotive industry is like, you say that's like a DLA.

55:33You don't even go there as a startup. And what he did with the vision and selling and being very methodical and surgical about how to pursue his customer base and becoming sort of a de facto solution for like almost the whole automotive industry. How do you figure out when you're spending time with a founder, whether they are one of these things? Like, is it intuition? Is it like you've been doing this for a long enough that you have a strong intuition? Is there some process to it? Do you just know it when you see it? Like is there anything learnable from you about finding these founders? Because obviously it's, we all know these people now, but at the time you did it, other people got to meet them too and not everybody saw the exact same thing.

56:13I'm looking for intentions, like true intentions. Like you really want to be doing this and doing this for the next decade of your life. How do you figure that out? Just when conversations and things that are said, even unsaid body language, what motivates you, what drives you, why you're willing to commit your life to this. You sacrifice family, other things in life to go do this. It's a bit of like the genocic law around like the person. You know, you've been, I'm an engineer by trade, but like I look for the EQ and like use the EQ I have to figure out some of those things of the other person.

56:55Yeah, like good people, moral compass, nor star. Like you sort of like, are you doing it for the money? Are you doing it for fame? Are you doing it for power? We talked about this earlier. Or do you just really want to solve problems that exist in the world and you're uniquely capable of solving these problems? You talked about how you know, series A is the thing you care the most about. Obviously, the context that you're running the firm in is both like storied firm with, you know, infinite sort of brand and access both to entrepreneurs and dollars. And you also have, you know, the sort of keys to do what you'd like with the firm.

57:34And so you could have run a lot of different strategies here. And you've picked a particular one. Can you describe the strategy that you, you know, would say you're running and why you picked that for KP? Yeah. As I mentioned, we have an early stage fund today that's $800 million. And the strategy there is we invest in about 35 companies per fund. And in order to return a five X on that fund, we need to have, you know, that be a four billion dollars, which means that that basket of companies has to be worth 40 billion in us own 10 % of it. Yep. Okay. For the math, the work for us. And the simple math out of the 35 companies need to have two fund returners that get you pretty close to the five X.

58:19So that's one part of the strategy. The other is we have a select fund, which is today, it's a billion, 1 .2 billion. And half the dollars typically go into our best companies like Figma, Ripling, and Glean, and Harvey and others. And so where we double down, use it as a vehicle to double down into companies, we're already on the boards of we're already heavily involved. All the resources of kind of Perkins are being applied to it. And we just see that this is just has greatness written all over it. And sometimes you can sort of preempt it and do it very easily with the founders where it's easy for them.

58:57It's easy for us. And we want to give them give them more. We've done that many times in the last few fund cycles. Like it's literally it's like half the fund is those companies. And that's the other half is then things that we missed at the series A or B. You know, we see a large swath of the companies, inevitably we're going to miss and not pick wealth at the A and the B. And if we really kick ourselves like we'll do like one to two of those a year where we we missed out on the A and the B and we're going to do it out of the growth fund. And so this allows the one partner group to do invest out of both funds.

59:33And it keeps it still very manageable. We all are based in one office. Well, two offices. Sam just going mental park. We all go to the office on Monday's and mental park for partner meetings. We all sit together and we get to see each other like multiple times a week. And that's by design. It's by like trying to use a table like this to make good decisions sitting around the table, debating, discussing making decisions together. I don't know if this is fair, but it almost seems like what I'm hearing is like as big and impactful as possible constrained by this one table situation. Yeah. And I think just to take that in the context of we're in San Francisco right now.

1:00:10And if we all know what's going on in San Francisco, in fact, like in this like five block radius of here, lots of incredible stuff is happening. And if even just half of all the amazing stuff that happened in tech still comes from San Francisco to San Jose and we're there, that's plenty of pie to eat. Yeah. You don't need a Europe office. You don't need to be all over the world. Yeah. To maybe to wrap up, I'd be curious to hear and I haven't gotten spend a ton of time with you outside of this. And so I'm just interested. What else in your life is important to you and like how that balances with, you know, your work, which obviously is of course very central to, you know, your life.

1:00:50Yeah. The only thing that's more important to the work that I do is obviously my family. I wife and for beautiful children. And I was telling you earlier, I got to go for Hodges this year. So the pilgrimage to Mecca that every Muslim is supposed to do once in their lifetime. And it was quite the the spiritual journey for me, especially in a time when a lot of life hit us in our family actually. And so faith is really important to me. And it's also deeply rooted into every encounter that I have with every person. Part of the beauty of Hodges that it is two million people who come from all walks of life.

1:01:31And they have all the different skin tones in the world. But yet in front of God, we're all one and we're all the same. And it's just roots you into how do you treat each other as human beings. And it is sort of the more compass that I have around like every interaction matters whether be with a six -year -old child or a 30 -year -old, you know, a billionaire founder. And how do you treat each other? How do you give them the respect, the dignity, and the attention in that moment in time. And so I've sort of tried to live my life. And it's a I get to remind myself of that, you know, through through faith every day that, you know, there's a there's a reason you're you're supposed to do things a certain way.

1:02:16And a decorum and an etiquette and a way of life that, you know, just shows gratitude but also, you know, shows up. And I think I try to bring the best version of me to every meeting. It's not possible. But it is part of like the I think of it put myself in the shoe of founder. Typically pitching to VCs is like a really it's like the biggest thing you could be doing in that moment in time. And it's intimidating. You're trying to raise capital. You're putting yourself out there. And if I can make them feel just a little bit more comfortable and more respected and acknowledge the work that they're doing and the all the blood sweat and tears that they're putting into this and the family sacrifice they're making.

1:03:03And just like empathize with that and have some humility around what they're trying to do. I think we can just make that experience a lot more. Just just better follow us. Yeah, well that's awesome. Well, thanks for sharing that and really appreciate making time for this again. This was this was great. Thank you, Jack.