Kleiner Perkins

“Speaking of high IP businesses, literally, like, three weeks ago, Etched raised at ten billion. Today, they've announced they've raised seven hundred million at twenty-one billion from Jane Street, Kleiner, Sequoia, Andreessen.”

“Four hundred million at a 3.8 billion dollar valuation led by Index, Kleiner, Sequoia, Dimension.”

“So if you look at my 2001 PowerPoint presentation, which was the pitch to Kleiner Perkins, who was my first investor, John Doerr, the summary page puts out a data center, it puts out a bloom box, powering the data center, the waste heat providing the cooling f…”

“So my first investment when I was at Kleiner Perkins was SpaceX. And it was at an over a hundred billion dollar valuation.”

“I think it happened like within an eight hour timeframe where we got The term sheet from climate.”

“I was working really closely with Arvind at Glean. It's actually the last incubation that we've done here.”

“It was the most torrential growth I think I've ever seen in a KP company. It was insane.”

“Inside the KP portfolio, ok, are top eight companies. Let's take five exec roles across the top eight companies. Companies like Rippling and Glean, ok. 38 out of 40 of those roles, ok, those executives report to the CEO for the first time in their career.”

“You are gonna get kicked out of the Kleiner Perkins holiday party, which is the stodgiest of, I mean, very much fun. Really looking forward to it. I love Kleiner Perkins. I mean, you get the John Doorky. No, I love it. It's a highlight of my year, but it is th…”

“I think it's really challenging to be like a seven hundred million dollar fund. Now I think you're either a really massive, powerful platform like an Andreessen or a GC Or you just have the legacy cachet, like a Sequoia or a Kleiner, or you have to be a boutiq…”

“Everyone thinks of her as this quantitative investor. You know, she had the, her time as an equity researcher at Morgan Stanley during the.com. Bubble. And then she came to Kleiner Perkins, obviously, and everyone talks about these DCF models she creates and a…”

“And then the thirty-two billion dollar round of OpenAI came around when I was at Kleiner Perkins, and all of a sudden I was like, oh man, this structure seems really gnarly. You know, they're gonna have to convert this somehow, it's a non-profit, they're selli…”

“One of like the first investment that that I did at Kleiner Perkins when I came back in, was SpaceX at a hundred and fifty billion dollars.”

“Topic number one, Everett Randall joins Benchmark. Benchmark don't add partners very often. It's a big news announcement that he's joining. Joins Benchmark as their latest GP. He was with Kleiner and he was with Founders Fund before.”

“You got, you can't walk into the partners and not have anthropic or open AI on the website. It's not enough. Yeah. It's a low, I think it's a logo deal.”

“Mamoon, the work he's done over at Kleiner is like, to me, Incredibly inspirational. I mean, I felt like Kleiner had really lost his way at one point in time. And honestly, in some weird way, it kind of saddened me because I, they were such an important firm i…”

“The fund multiple is 18 X. Greylock, who did the series A is sitting on an 11 X fund. They did the series A out of a six hundred million dollar fund. KP, which did the series B is sitting on a 10 X fund out of a seven hundred million dollar fund, which is just…”

“The round, the first round that Kleiner did was at four 50, probably 500 post, so four X plus or minus.”

“Yale was already an investor with some of the preeminent firms in Silicon Valley and Boston. Sequoia, Kleiner, Perkins, Mayfield, people like that.”

“When I started, if you were a smart guy in Silicon Valley, you crawled on your hands and knees up Sand Hill Road to Sequoia or Kleiner Perkins and begged them to invest. They'd invest Three million dollars and own 30% of your company. Now it's the other way ar…”

“Famously, Kleiner and Sequoia end up splitting the deal, and Michael Moritz and John Doerr, the two most legendary VCs in the world, they team up, they join forces, they split the deal, and they both join the board of Google at the Series A.”

“They just... Paid a hundred million dollar post for a Series A company with no revenue.”

“And I owned, by the way, a lot of the company, because we, when Kleiner put on eight million, they were very adamant, our main investor, to say, this company's doing well, do not dilute, like, let's just raise with debt. So we took on debt, because we had a pl…”

“And there were some dogs in there, some cleantech shit that Kleiner Perkins sold me that was just a flaming bag of turds on your front porch.”

“He said, look, I really want to have 27%. I love this deal. I want to work with you. I'll go down to 25. And I said, how about you give me an extra two million bucks and we'll give you the 27. He said, done.”

“It was the first venture-backed company to raise a hundred million bucks and go bankrupt, the GO Corporation.”

“I think everybody else, the, how much of an institution you build, if the people change the funds ranking changes. Like Kleiner Perkins used to be one of the top funds. They then went down, right? That cycle keeps repeating in the Valley as well by sees the on…”

“As personal a relationship as I have with each founder I work with, I have to remind myself that I was representing Kleiner Perkins on the board of all these companies that I served on, and I think with that, now that I've moved over to Lightspeed, there's thi…”

“You can think of carry similar to the way a startup employee vests equity, right? So they, they're given an equity grant. That equity grant vests over some time period over multiple years. You can think of venture carry as similar. And so the reason for that, …”

“There's a recent investment that I made before leaving Kleiner Perkins that of course I'm really excited about. And it hasn't been announced yet, so I can't name the name of the company, but I think it does speak to this, which is this company is building in, …”

“When we were at Kleiner Perkins, it was something that we, it was kind of a red line that we wouldn't cross. And the reason for that is because we invested in so few companies and we go so deep with each of those companies that In our mind, it was just too har…”

“We're currently deploying out of, this is our 21st venture fund, KP 21 it's eight hundred million dollars on the venture side, and then on the growth side, we have a 1.2 billion dollar growth fund that we call Select, Select Three.”

“We've got this now core team of nine investors. We each have majors and minors. We're very collaborative with each other. And we're generalists sort of across early, early in growth.”

“Outside of those, you know, we're tending to write checks that are at least a million dollars or up. And then it tends to be on the growth side, you know, our growth fund's a little over a billion dollars. And so we don't want to be like way too concentrated. …”

“The triple, triple, double, double, double, sass thing is like, you throw it out the window, you know, it's like, there's a new, it's like, 10 x.”

“I am a predominantly outbound investor. Like the vast majority of my investments have come from me reaching out to an entrepreneur and trying to basically get in front of what they're doing.”

“We invested in Glean or I should say, I mean, it was more of a, we kind of incubated Glean. So we had a big role of like getting Glean off the ground.”

“I think the only area that we don't have anything in right now that's like very obvious is, is is customer support. And so, you know, we have a growth fund. We're looking”

“We do this thing, portfolio review, and it's, like, every, I think every quarter. We go through all of our, or most of our investments and like glean does this thing where it will like summarize a lot of our board decks into like, okay, here's like the key met…”

“Conway's law exists for venture firms for sure, which means that you like, you invest your org chart. And it's like very hard to you know, have an investment strategy or a portfolio construction strategy. That doesn't match the size and kind of scope of your t…”

“The 19 seventies venture finally began to take form, and Henry Hillman and my father were anchor investors in Kleiner Perkins Fund One, and a few years later in KKR Fund One.”

“My first week at Kleiner working on a deal with John Doerr, and we were doing diligence on a company And he was in this diligence document at three in the morning.”

“They've now raised more than five hundred million dollars from investors such as OpenAI, Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, GV, Bloodgill, and me.”

“And I didn't frankly think there was much difference between Bessemer and Sequoia and Kleiner at the time, and General Atlantic and TCV, other than some people wrote bigger checks and smaller checks.”

“He gets the 250 K. So that's how Ron Conway gets in on this deal.”

“This was good technology Kleiner Perkins benchmark were investors John Doerr, Bruce Dunleavy were on the board acquired by Motorola. And it was a half a billion dollar exit for the company.”

“On the supply side. We had net negative churn. So not only were the, like, our talent cohorts were growing every single month when you looked at our waterfall.”

“That almost like destroyed their brand for like a decade.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“We built an internal CRM at Kleiner Perkins, and I think it sort of cost us many millions of dollars, and then ongoing millions of dollars a year to just upkeep.”

“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.”

“Because our growth fund, even, half of the dollars are allocated towards, not allocated, but half those dollars are invested in our best companies from our early stage funds.”

“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 …”

“Or another example is Syed Ali at Aleph. You know, I think we did that also at, like, 35 post. And Syed had come off of a company just sold for six billion dollars.”

“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-”

“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…”

“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 …”