The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 67 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 5 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Hamid: Kleiner Perkins avoids backing great founders in bad markets
“Bad markets, the structure of industries where margins are compressed and customers are bad, life's just too hard that way... Probably not.”
Hamid: Invested in Slack at a $250M valuation on $500k ARR
“It was 500 K of ARR at the time... Two hundred fifty million post.”
Hamid: Data-driven VC sourcing platforms are mostly BS
“I think it's mostly BS. Yeah. Yeah. I think 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-”
Hamid: Incumbents and VCs are over-investing in AI due to FOMO
“Everyone's over-investing right now into this cycle, and because none of us can miss, whether it's the large incumbents, Or us as venture investors back in companies.”
Hamid: Kleiner Perkins reserves a 'YOLO bucket' for rule-breaking deals
“And in some ways we have a, what we call like a Yolo bucket in our funds and where you just have this extreme conviction around the founder and the company where you're sort of willing to break the rules.”
Hamid: AI middleware is overinvested and its value will be fleeting
“There's a lot of time being spent on a lot of the middle layer between the foundation models and the applications. And I think in the middle layers, middleware, things that allow you to use those models better, faster, cheaper and build applications on top. So…”
Hamid: OpenAI will figure out gross margins and become highly profitable
“Today it's not a great business, but, you know, I think they're smart enough to figure out how they can get to a gross margin that will allow them to be a highly profitable business over time.”
Hamid: LLM token prices will fall another 10x-20x within two years
“So, will it go down to the next two years? I don't know, but it will probably go down by 10 X or 20 X”
Hamid: Tech sector will gain $10 trillion in annual spend within decade
“So, 10 trillion of annual spend will get created for technology companies over the next decade.”
Hamid: AI revenue will justify CapEx by expanding into global labor markets
“I think the revenue will be there for, because again, we're not just tackling software, linear software, as I call it. We're tackling Like labor, and labor shortages, and things that humans can do, but it's the worst part of their job, or we don't have enough …”
Hamid: Venture capital is a business that does not scale with headcount
“It's, we think it's a business that doesn't scale, actually.”
Hamid: FTC and Lina Khan did not block the Adobe-Figma deal
“I don't think, ah, a lot of us put a lot of the blame on Lena Khan, poor Lena Khan because, you know, in our own experience, that's not, that was not the issue for Adobe Figma. It wasn't Lena, ah, or the FTC, ah, there were other issues. So I think it's broadl…”
Hamid: Valuing early-stage startups on revenue multiples is a mistake
“Yeah, I think it's really a mistake to look at revenue multiples at like half a million.”
Hamid: Current AI ground-floor value creation will never be repeated
“We will not see this sort of like, At the ground floor level value creation in our lifetimes ever again.”
Hamid: VCs Return More by Holding Winners for Decades
“And in many cases, you don't even want to distribute in those eight years because think about how much you would have made if you would have stayed in, in, in Amazon or Facebook or Google over the course of time it probably would have been much better for thos…”
Hamid: Airbnb Will Become a Property Manager and Housing Platform
“I think over time, Airbnb is probably going to take over, like, where people just live. Like, they will become the property manager for people who own homes, and it will become the place, like, the Craigslist for people who want to find a home.”
Hamid: AI cycle is 10x larger than the 1997 internet boom
“We're in the midst of a super cycle like none we've seen before. The AI super cycle, as you know, and it reminds me of the time when I first came to Silicon Valley in 1997. I was 19 years old, and it was all just roses all around me. It was the rise of the int…”
Hamid: AI applications will create trillions in value over next decade
“There are so many things to build on top of this infrastructure, all these frontier models that is going to create so many trillions of value over the next decade.”
Kleiner Perkins focuses AI investments on co-pilots for top-earning professions
“We've invested in a lot of application layer companies, and that are solving very specific pain points. And the way we've looked at it pretty simply is, if you think about, we took actually the top 20 jobs in the US, and who makes the most? Simple. And it's do…”
Hamid: Kleiner Perkins needs 15-20% ownership on $5M-$10M early-stage checks
“Because as you know, Harry, you know, we have to get our ownership at the early stages where you're investing five to ten million dollars for 15 to 20% for the math to work for our funds.”
Hamid: AI SaaS startups command $300 to $500 monthly per seat
“What we're seeing right now is that you have seat-based pricing that was like, 30 dollars a month, 40 dollars a month, and now you're getting 300 dollars a month, 400 dollars a month, even 500 dollars a month for the software.”
Hamid: LLM token prices dropped 200x over the last 18 months
“In the last 18 months the price of a token has gone down by 200 X”
Hamid: Aaron Levie's Box IPO dilution led VCs to re-up founder equity
“Aaron has done a great PSA for founders with his equity stake at the IPO, where I think we as investors, board members have done a way better job making sure that our founders get re-upped when, especially when they dip below a certain threshold.”
Hamid: Avoid founders who rely on top-down market mapping
“I don't like the, we looked at the landscape, and we discovered that this is a great place to build a business. Like, we did a whole market mapping exercise, And the TAM is going to be X billion dollars and, you know, we've got yeah, it is that sort of like th…”
Hamid: Kleiner Perkins co-led Glean's early round at $35M post-money
“We'll be back to Arvind Glean. We did it as a co-led it with Lightspeed at 35 post. And Arvind is a G. You know, he started Rubrik. He's like one of the, you know, Google fellow type of person. He raised a lot. He's like fifteen million at 35 post, so gave up …”
Hamid: Early-stage VC firms should not use voting structures
“Yeah, I don't believe in voting structures for early stage venture capital. I think you have to have, allow every partner to put themselves on the line with their conviction that they've built up over a year sometimes weeks sometimes, but you have to give into…”
Hamid: Outcome scenario planning in venture capital is false precision
“It's such false precision that I think it's, it feels like busy work actually.”
Hamid: KP's Figma deal was contentious at $500k ARR and $110M valuation
“You know, actually Figma was quite contentious. Yeah, it was, yeah. Because to your point, around like half a million of AR at a 110, 15 post, whatever it was at the time it was really like the same thing. There's Envision, there's Sketch. This company's been …”
Hamid: VCs lack neuroplasticity to switch between early and late stages
“I think generally speaking, though it's hard to have the neuroplasticity to one day think about you know, 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, you kno…”
Hamid discloses $30 million loss on shutdown startup Tally
“Thirty million or so, and that's multiples of the largest loss prior to that, so you know, I don't wear this badge of honor of, like, losing a lot.”
Hamid: Kleiner Perkins will not expand into a massive capital accumulator
“I don't think we want that at all. I think we love where we are today. We really do, and I don't try to, I'm not BSing you. You're a long time friend, and I believe in venture, early stage venture being a beautiful asset class, especially if you can follow the…”
Hamid: Kleiner Perkins' $600M fund will strictly focus on Series A
“We want to focus on early stage, which is really truly series A and be the first partner to a great founder and then help them on that journey, which is typically a multi-year, if not a decade plus long journey.”
Hamid: VCs should leave 20% of their strategy open to serendipity
“Part of, like, I'd say, 20% of the time, you don't want to have a strategy, because there is so much Serendipity in what we do, and so much luck involved in what we do.”
Hamid: Series A valuations jumped from $10M to $30M in ten years
“Valuations at the Series A are banded, and I remember doing investments 10 years ago when a Series A was 10 pre, and now a Series A is 30 pre, and you just have to write bigger checks now to get to the same level of ownership, and that has a, has had a true im…”
Hamid: Kleiner allocates over half of $600M fund to initial checks
“But yeah, in that six hundred million, there is a substantial amount that is reserved for following rounds. But I would say more than half of the dollars are allocated to the first check that we write.”
Hamid: Startups should promote early internal leaders over hiring external executives
“And the same applies to some very passionate leaders you may have who may not have seen company go from a hundred to a billion in revenue, but they've been really great leaders along the way. And I've actually seen it myself where There's folks that you doubte…”
Social Capital Splits Fund Between Long-Gestation and Fast-Growth Bets
“What we have a very deliberate approach of sort of half of our investments are in those longer gestation cycle businesses, and the other half are in more predictable enterprise software and consumer businesses, where it's more apparent much faster that these b…”
Hamid: Public Market Scrutiny Stops Tech Companies From Pursuing Bold Experiments
“When money is available at will at great valuations for these companies so that they can experiment and do autonomous vehicles and You know, when you spend five hundred million on a project that Wall Street just like, this is stupid, and why are you doing this…”
Hamid: AI medical transcribers must achieve 99% accuracy to be viable
“You can't have a medical transcriber that's 87% good, ok? It has to be close to like 99% good. And that actually requires real Technical depth and adeptness.”
Hamid: Every major enterprise CIO is funding AI proofs of concept
“We're in this era of doing a bunch of proof of concepts. You're just trying out all this cool stuff that's come into existence in the last two years and seeing, what can I do with it? And every CIO at every large company is spending real money doing POCs.”
Hamid: AI agents will replace human customer support within 10 years
“I think we will hopefully never talk to a customer support agent ever again. Like someone you call for the airlines, like, you know, help me my flight, I need to upgrade it, or I need to change my seat, or can you cancel it because I can't go? You know, the ba…”
Hamid: Box was one week from running out of cash before IPO
“I've had companies that are one week away from cash out become public companies.”
Hamid: Box raised 2008 bridge financing at a $25M valuation
“We got to invest more dollars in the box at a twenty-five million dollar valuation. More, like, every incremental dollar or, you know, two, three million dollars in bridge that was being done was done at that valuation.”
Hamid: Sell startups at the local maximum of market-perceived value
“Local maxima that I think about sometimes with companies where this is sort of the local maximum in terms of perceived value by the market for a company, and that's a great time to sell, and so now you have to figure out when is the local maximum for a company…”
Hamid: Yammer's $1.2B sale freed him to invest in Slack
“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,…”
Hamid shares entry valuations for Slack, Figma, and Rippling
“Probably Slack, I would say, you know, even at the 250 post that's, you know, with all the dilution over time and, If you take the twenty-seven billion or some other number that's a, obviously, a good, great multiple. Figma, you know, the initial investment wa…”
Hamid: 15-year hold on a 70x multiple deal yielded only 15% IRR
“There's one investment I remember doing early days of USVP, Where we did it at, I think, TenPost. And it was a three million dollar check for like 30% of the company. And that company, about a year and a half ago, the founder CEO, Steve Flagg, still a friend, …”