KPCB
Kleiner Perkins general partner Mamoon Hamid.
- Kleiner Perkins general partner Mamoon Hamid is one of the firm's top enterprise investors, and on Tuesday announced he was joining the board of multi-cloud networking startup Alkira after leading an investment in the company.
- But Hamid has had to adjust his deal sourcing strategies in the past month as travel has been widely ground to a halt in the United States and in-person networking meetings have all but stopped.
- Hamid told Business Insider that "serendipity isn't happening right now," which is how he met Alkira cofounder and CEO Amir Khan years before he was fundraising.
- Hamid, who is a longtime enterprise investor within Kleiner Perkins, has been impressed with the reliability of enterprise software like Zoom that he has had to use for remote board meetings.
- Click here for more BI Prime stories.
Mamoon Hamid is still spending a lot of time on his phone.
The Kleiner Perkins general partner told Business Insider that, although he is currently under his state's shelter-in-place order, the way he communicates with the founders of his portfolio companies hasn't changed all that much. If anything, he spends more time calling and texting for real-time updates instead of waiting for a virtual board meeting, he said.
"We operate on texts and phone calls on a daily basis, and there are multiple touch points in a given week," Hamid told Business Insider. "I already spend more time on the phone or texting with Amir [Khan] than in person, and that cadence is the same."
Khan, the founder Hamid referred to, is the latest to join Hamid's roster of portfolio company executives. On Tuesday, Hamid and Khan announced that Kleiner Perkins had led the Series A funding round for Khan's multi-cloud networking startup Alkira, and that Hamid would be joining the board.
"We have built a very strong relationship over the last year and a half," Khan said of Hamid. "We know each other so well that we can sign each other how we are thinking about the next steps."
The two men met at an event several years ago, Hamid said, and have spent the last 18 months working together in a semi-formal fashion. Both are networking veterans, with Hamid as a longtime enterprise investor at Kleiner and Khan running portions of some of the biggest networking companies of the last three decades.
But Hamid said that this kind of melding of the minds and in-person networking that the venture industry is built on is at risk in what he has dubbed the new "work from home era." With more states prolonging shelter-in-place orders, the odds that Hamid would naturally bump into a budding entrepreneur and hit it off are getting smaller by the day.
"The first time we met Amir was at an event, and that's not happening right now," Hamid said. "It changes that dynamic for sure. Folks might be thinking about their Series A and using introductions from their seed investors, but serendipity isn't happening right now. Things are different."
That change fundamentally shifts the dynamic between investor and entrepreneur, Hamid explained, and has forced him and his peers to reevaluate how to source new deals. Many, like Hamid, have chosen to spend more time with current founders in their portfolios and reinvest if needed, or take warm introductions from their extensive professional networks.
"There are many touchpoints before you invest in the company," Hamid said. "In our prior world, that was mostly face-to-face, but the current environment changes that quite a bit with less face-to-face interactions."
Partner meetings, pitch meetings, and board meetings are now all happening on Zoom, Hamid said. The video conferencing company has been a hit among founders and investors alike, and has been one of those rare tech companies that successfully bridged enterprise and consumer investing circles, though mostly through necessity in the current environment.
Although the dynamic is different on a video call instead of a phone call or in-person meeting, Hamid's leadership has largely remained unchanged, he said, both as an investor and board member. And the boon to companies like Alkira and Zoom, brought about by a remote work setting, has only strengthened Hamid's investment thesis.
"We are all doing Zoom calls and using Slack, and none of this stuff has gone down," Hamid said. "I have had zero hitches for software not working, and that's all running on the cloud and in some cases on multi-cloud. This kind of infrastructure is really working for our world right now. Our heavy investment over the last decade is working for the world right now, and that thesis we believe in absolutely applies today."