Mamoon Hamid

I liked facts. So much so that I used to read encyclopedias and memorize the facts in them. I vividly remember wishing there would be a way to think of a fact prompt and ask a computer to provide the answer, rather than flipping through hundreds of pages looking for the answer. (This was in the 80s.) I believed in the power of technology, but I didn’t expect that wish to come so soon. I was also in a hurry as a kid. I skipped three years of school along the way and graduated college when I was 19. I have since learned to enjoy the journey, rather than just focusing on the destination.

I grew up in a fairly traditional Pakistani home in Frankfurt, Germany. My father was a banker, and my mother gave up her career to raise four children. I have three sisters—one older, two younger. I’m grateful for the years of being the sole brother, which made me the person I am today. My views in life and work (especially in healthcare) are informed by my brilliant wife, who has forged new ground as a physician and entrepreneur. Together, we’re trying to make our biggest daily investment a success — raising four children (three girls and a boy).

I came to Silicon Valley as an engineer in 1997. It was in the middle of the first internet boom and I was getting exposed to all kinds of cool products and companies. I was buying books on Amazon, and using Google to search the web. Many of the coolest products and impactful companies had VCs, and an in many cases, it was Kleiner Perkins. As I studied the VCs behind these companies, many of the most successful ones turned out to be engineers turned venture investors, so I naively thought I could be one of them one day. The job of investing in products and companies that could harness the power of technology for positive change in the world seemed like a good way to spend your working hours.

My role is to be the blind-spot monitor—someone who helps at the earliest stages of a company, enabling founders to see things they don’t know they are supposed to encounter. Once we’ve invested and made the pact to serve one of our companies, there is no job too small for me. Founders don’t have time to waste, so I try to provide real-time feedback, whether it is something big or small. Small things compounded get big quickly, so it’s important for startups to course correct quickly.

I love the German notion that “we work so that we can live” (and not the other way around). So if we’re working already, why not work with great tools that get the job done, and give us joy. This is a theme I’ve been a fan of for the past 15 years, and has led to investments in companies like Box, Yammer, Intercom, Slack, Figma, Glean, and Coda. There is so much impact that technology-enabled solutions can deliver for us to self-actualize.