Silicon Valley legend Kleiner Perkins was written off. Then an unlikely VC showed up
Independently and immediately, a flood of people reached the same conclusion: This had to be a mistake.
It was the summer of 2017, and as word spread that Mamoon Hamid was joining venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, some people wondered if it was a joke, or “fake news.” And they didn’t hold back.
“I got calls from friends in the venture business, other GPs [general partners], asking: ‘Are you sure this is happening? Is this real?’” Hamid recounts. “People kept asking: ‘What are you doing?’”
One concerned friend even asked Hamid if he’d already signed anything (he had).
Hamid had helped build one of Silicon Valley’s buzziest new VC firms, Social Capital, leading a string of wins including investments in Box (one of 2015’s biggest IPOs) and Slack (at the time valued at $5.1 billion). Kleiner Perkins on the other hand, was widely viewed as an institution in decline, a bit like the largest gold-plated ship of a 19th-century fleet—grand for where it had been, but not for where it was heading.
By all accounts, Hamid—measured and soft-spoken, inclined to listen before speaking—was doing something irrational, especially in Silicon Valley, where many people would rather start something new than fix something broken. Venture capital firms don’t turn around, generally speaking. Typically when their golden era fades, the founders retire, and they wind down the firm. VC turnaround stories are all but unheard-of.
But Kleiner Perkins was not just any firm to Hamid. The firm had been the inspiration that led him to a career in venture capital, and John Doerr, the legendary Kleiner rainmaker who made early bets on Google, Amazon, and Netscape, had been his role model.
Meanwhile, Social Capital, the firm Hamid helped start in 2011, had its own issues. Chamath Palihapitiya, Hamid’s cofounder, was reportedly growing disenchanted with the traditional venture investing model, leading to friction with limited partners (Social Capital has since become a private office).
Still, says one VC insider, it would have much been easier for Hamid to start his own fund than embark on a fix-it job. Hamid told his wife, Aaliya, a doctor, to give him 18 months to prove himself.
Eight years later, signs of the Hamid era at Kleiner are everywhere, from the physical layout of the office to the firm’s narrowed focus. For the first time since Hamid took the helm, Kleiner opened its doors to a journalist, giving Fortune a rare opportunity to sit in on partner investment meetings and interview the founders and limited partners (LPs) that work with the firm. Kleiner’s investor team has both longtime stalwarts and new blood—including former Dropbox exec Ilya Fushman; its roster of portfolio companies includes some of the hottest AI names; and, according to many inside and outside the firm, the team’s operational metabolism has been dialed-up.
“What came across to me about KP was this combination of having this great brand, but having a lot of the energy and the hunger of being a startup firm—nothing was taken for granted,” says Parker Conrad, cofounder and CEO of Rippling, which Kleiner backed in 2019.
As is the case with many turnarounds, Kleiner hasn’t tried to turn back the clock and create a replica of its former self, but instead has evolved to find its footing in a new landscape. It now competes for deals with a broad array of financial heavyweights, from Wall Street banks to sovereign wealth funds. The new Kleiner is smaller and more focused than its previous incarnation—more boutique than mega. Now, as the AI boom inflates funding rounds and valuations to nosebleed levels, and raises the stakes for the VCs betting on startups, Hamid has the chance to show whether the firm he’s rebuilding can be truly competitive and define Silicon Valley’s next big chapter.
Hits and misses
Roughly a decade ago, Kleiner Perkins seemed to be at the end of a narrative arc that began 46 years earlier.
The year that Tom Perkins and Eugene Kleiner started their namesake VC firm—1972—was one that minted many classics. The Godfather premiered, David Bowie dropped The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, and Atari launched Pong, the first blockbuster video game.
Kleiner Perkins quickly made its own mark. Perkins picked the firm’s first big winner, investing $100,000 in Genentech, which would ultimately proffer a reported 42x return. Other hits followed, including Tandem Computers, along with new partners, with Frank Caufield and Brook Byers joining in 1977. But it was the addition of John Doerr, an engineer and marketing manager from chipmaker Intel, that transformed Kleiner into a global business superstar. Doerr was known as intellectually boundless and possessed a kind of charisma that was rooted in sincerity. He emerged as the firm’s dotcom rainmaker, backing Amazon, Google, Sun Microsystems, Compaq, and Netscape, among others. Sebastian Mallaby, in his VC tome, The Power Law, writes there was a common understanding that Kleiner’s portfolio accounted for “as much as a third of the market value created from the internet.”
As the new millennium began, Doerr, then running the firm, began to shift Kleiner’s focus to cleantech investments, which he vowed would be “bigger than the internet.” There were a few winners like Bloom Energy (Kleiner owned 15% at its 2018 IPO) and SolarCity (acquired by Tesla in 2016 for $2.6 billion). But there were also some epic losses, including the troubled Fisker Automotive, which filed for bankruptcy in 2013, and MiaSolé, a solar startup reportedly once valued at $1 billion that sold to a Chinese company for a cratered $30 million.
Internal tension about direction and leadership succession festered within the firm. Vinod Khosla, a hard-charger known for backing Juniper Networks—a $3 million investment that famously returned $7 billion for Kleiner—eventually left to set up his own shop. And a gender discrimination lawsuit filed by Ellen Pao, a junior partner, tarnished the firm’s reputation even though Kleiner ultimately won the case.
It’s no mystery then, why limited partners in the mid-2010s saw Kleiner as unsteady at best, grim at worst. The brand had retained some of its power, buying time, but patience also wore thin. One longtime institutional LP told Fortune that, around 2015, it was considering moving on from the storied firm.
“I looked at KP and said, ‘Great brand, but where are the returns?’ And it’s been dilutive to our returns for a long period of time,” the LP says. “At some point, you have to make hard decisions. We went in and had those conversations. This is a world where people don’t really walk away from these venture firms. So, they said, ‘Give us one more cycle. We’re making this right. We’re going to make sure this gets stewarded into the next generation.’”
Ted Schlein, a Kleiner partner and an advisor who’s been at the firm since 1996 and who himself was hired by firm cofounder Brook Byers, describes the challenges of operating a venture firm that succeeds over the long term: You need to get into the right deals and have the right team in place to chase those deals, all while not killing each other, he says.
“There’s a collection of people that have to make good decisions together over and over, over and over again,” Schlein says. “And that’s hard. You have to get the right group. I always describe it this way: You need a group of partners where everyone cares about what each of the others has to say about a given topic.”
‘I want to control my destiny’
Schlein had begun courting Hamid for the top job while he was still at Social Capital. For months, they met quietly at the bucolic Allied Arts Guild in Menlo Park, mostly just talking. Schlein had known of Hamid since his early days at U.S. Venture Partners, where he worked for Schlein’s father, and was struck by the contradictions Hamid embodied: competitive, yet kind; ambitious, but with a light touch.
Those characteristics were likely part of Hamid’s makeup early on. He grew up first in Germany, then in Pakistan until he was 13. His family fell on hard times when his father’s salary transitioned from German deutsche marks to Pakistani rupees.
“There’s one moment I remember … One day at dinner, there’s just not enough food on the table,” Hamid says. “I felt that, in my life, I want to control my own destiny.”
Hamid, now 47, recounts it now in a way that’s thoughtful and matter-of-fact. His family ultimately recovered and Hamid eventually went to the U.S., studying engineering at Purdue before attending Harvard Business School. Harvard was the only business school he applied to for one reason—it was where Doerr had gone. At 24, Hamid believed that venture capital, for all its chaos, was a path to autonomy, where a successful track record became a permanent credential. And in 2003, he was fixated on Kleiner Perkins.
“I would study the bios of John Doerr and Vinod Khosla, who was still at Kleiner at the time,” Hamid recalls. “And I thought, ‘Okay, they’re both electrical engineers; they both worked at semiconductor companies; and they both went to business school … I applied to one business school, so it was high-stakes, and you had to write about an individual. And my essay was that I wanted to work at Kleiner Perkins, and emulate the career of John Doerr.”
In his first few weeks at Kleiner, Hamid committed to meeting everyone in the firm—from receptionists to executives—focusing on learning from both current and former employees to understand the firm’s history and challenges. During this time, he also began looking at deals and potential hires. Hamid had an eye toward bringing on another partner who’d be his counterpart, sounding board, and sometime foil. And there was really only one person he’d been eyeing from the moment he joined Kleiner: Ilya Fushman, the former head of product at Dropbox who was then at Index Ventures.
Fushman and Hamid had been tangentially circling each other for a long time. They’d been serving on the Slack board together. And, in a massively unlikely twist of fate, they had been indirectly connected years earlier, thousands of miles away from Silicon Valley. Fushman went to grade school in Germany with Hamid’s sister, and the two knew of each other vaguely. Neither is inclined to talk about this connection as dramatic or fated, but it highlights an essential truth—that the two share unconventional immigrant stories: Born in the Soviet Union, Fushman spent his early years in the Russian city of Kazan, among the last cities before Siberia. Raised by a family of Jewish academics who ultimately immigrated to the U.S., Fushman followed in their footsteps to a point, getting a PhD in physics from Caltech before joining Dropbox, back when its staff numbered 50 people.
Fushman admits to initially being bemused when he heard Hamid was leaving Social Capital to join Kleiner, a “historic brand” with an “unclear, uncertain future.”
But as he talked to Hamid, Fushman started to feel the pull himself. “There aren’t that many iconic tech turnarounds; there are perhaps a few,” says Fushman. “But I thought: ‘If we do this, it would be pretty amazing.’ That’s worth dedicating yourself to, and it’s worth leaving a great firm for.”
Both Hamid and Fushman are earnest without being saccharine, and each will tell you plainly if they think something is nonsense—and their respect for one another is so clear it almost goes without saying: Hamid brings a (strangely) simultaneously ruthless and gentle approach to building companies, while Fushman, a blunt, straight-talking academic, is all precision and thoroughness. (Winston Weinberg, CEO of legal AI unicorn Harvey, told Fortune that Fushman is consistently the board member he can rely on to know decks inside and out.)
Hamid, a religious Muslim, also exudes a spirituality that stands in contrast to many of his peers. It’s not direct, but it is subtext in how he thinks and the quiet role he plays in a venture landscape that’s increasingly loud, politicized, and crass.
“People don’t expect VCs to talk about faith, and how it drives their values, how they show up in the world, and the way they treat people,” says Arianna Huffington, who’s working with Hamid at her current company, Thrive Global. “You know how a lot of VCs and tech leaders think that, because we live in frenetic times, they need to match the frenetic pace of the times? It’s actually the opposite—the more frenetic the times, the more exponential the change, the more important it is to actually find that centered place in ourselves. And that is Mamoon.”
Culture shift
Hamid and Fushman quickly sought to reboot the Kleiner culture, instituting firm-wide offsites for the first time (including the front desk); nixing cubicles in favor of an open office plan that promoted collaboration; and introducing a mission: “Be the first call for founders who want to make history, and partner with them as company builders in pursuit of that goal.”
There were some bumps early on. Mary Meeker, the well-respected Wall Street analyst who had become a late-stage rainmaker at Kleiner by backing Facebook and Uber, reportedly bristled at the newcomers’ approach and soon left to start her own firm, Bond Capital.
Hamid and Fushman replenished the ranks with new blood, even as the firm has made a point to stay small (there are currently five partners at Kleiner versus the 10 there were right before Hamid joined).
The most consequential hire in recent years: Leigh Marie Braswell—a math whiz kid from rural Alabama whose career started at Scale AI, when its staff numbered fewer than 10 people—who joined Kleiner from Founders Fund in 2023. Braswell thinks the ways Kleiner has stayed small have been uniquely helpful in winning AI deals.
“When you think about partnering with the very best founders in AI right now, it’s frequently a competitive situation,” she says. “What do they prioritize? It’s one of the hardest parts of the job, being really honest with yourself about what these founders actually want. It’s a combination of a good relationship with an individual and the individual’s firm … and that’s something that doesn’t scale.”
Two of Kleiner’s recent AI exits—Windsurf and Neon—are linked to Braswell, who’s been whispered about across the industry as a star in the making. Ultimately, however, it was Hamid’s first deal at Kleiner that, years later, would cement the firm’s turnaround.
The returns
Dylan Field met Hamid when he was still at Social Capital—and though he wasn’t sure if Hamid was interested in investing in his startup, he sensed a connection.
“He understood our product immediately when others didn’t,” Field, the cofounder and CEO of Figma, says, over the phone. “Everyone that encountered it didn’t get it. Mamoon treated it like it was the most obvious thing.”
Field, drawn to Hamid’s “laid-back style” that could be “very competitive and intense” when it needed to be, stayed in touch as Hamid transitioned to Kleiner. In his first deal at Kleiner, Hamid led Figma’s $25 million Series B. And last year, Figma went public at a $19.3 billion valuation, in one of the highest-profile IPOs of the year. Even as Figma’s stock has taken a hit, at the current price the multiple from the initial investment is roughly 90x, and is right up there with Kleiner’s best-ever returns, including Amazon, Google, and Juniper, the firm says. Not including Figma—or any of the firm’s other promising AI-era investments like Vlad Tenev’s Harmonic, Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence, Synthesia, Glean, Anthropic, and Applied Intuition—Kleiner has now returned $13 billion to its LPs since 2018.
These returns have come from the exits of companies like AppDynamics, Beyond Meat, DoorDash, Nest, Peloton, Pinterest, Slack, Spotify, Twilio, Uber, and UiPath. In some cases, these are investments the current team made, like Robinhood, or deals that the team shepherded through, like Square. The firm is also now invested in some of the AI era’s brightest stars, from AI medicine startup OpenEvidence, valued at $12 billion, to legal AI company Harvey, valued at $8 billion. (Doerr remains chairman of Kleiner, and still helps close deals with Hamid and the team—the most recent example: Doerr was in the room when OpenEvidence presented for the Series B round that Kleiner went on to lead.)
The firm has raised more than $6 billion in capital across several funds in the Hamid-Fushman era, and is currently raising more capital, a source familiar with the matter says. (Kleiner declined comment.) The rumored new round is expected to be slightly larger than Kleiner’s last round in 2024, which included the $825 million KP21 fund focused on early-stage investments and the $1.2 billion KP Select III, aimed at “high inflection deals” (basically, follow-ons and deals with startups Kleiner has built relationships with).
It’s a hard thing, to define what changed from the inside, but speaking to a long stretch of Kleiner watchers and employees, one thing is clear: The culture of the firm did change, in a way that’s hard to quantify but real. The firm-wide offsites and agreed-upon mission certainly helped, but Hamid and Fushman aren’t afraid to have a little fun—as evidenced by the ’80s movie theme they created for the KP Select III fund: Kleiner Perkins, they said, was going back to the future.
Whereas a rigid framework of subgroups and rules once restricted the investments that Kleiner partners could make, the small team of partners now has access to any of the funds. Investing decisions are conviction-based, with a sponsoring partner presenting before the other partners (all physically present in the same room), but there is no voting.
“We have more latitude for healthy debate,” says Josh Coyne, a partner at Kleiner since 2017, hired right around the time Hamid showed up (and still there). “I think there was more hierarchy in the earlier days, and that’s shifted quite a bit.”
One person who’s been directly linked to Kleiner for a long time thinks the key thing that Fushman and Hamid fixed is speed—VC has become increasingly fast-paced, with founders expecting rapid decision-making. In 2018, Hamid and Fushman instituted a new scout fund precisely to solve this problem, hastening the decision process at Kleiner from weeks to days in one fell swoop. The firm also narrowed its focus: After Meeker left, Hamid felt strongly that Kleiner needed to return to its early-stage origins, both for near-term agility and long-term performance.
“Kleiner definitely got beat up a little bit—that they weren’t as nimble as they should have been,” the person notes. “And maybe they weren’t. You’ve got to keep up with your founders … I see Ilya and Mamoon understanding that speed.”
Back to the future
Can a (comparatively) small firm compete with giants?
As has always been the case in the venture business, the connection between the founder and the investing partner is key. And by staying lean and focused, Hamid is betting on predictability and quality control.
“We’d rather stay small than have more people who dilute the brand out there,” he says on the topic of expanding the firm’s ranks. The firm’s partners are “meeting with founders, and they’re providing an impression of what Kleiner Perkins is. And if that’s not the right impression, we’d rather not have it.”
The institutional LP representative who’s long watched Kleiner, and once threatened to leave altogether, believes that the firm is moving in the right direction, in part on the back of Hamid’s undeniable success. The question isn’t if Hamid is one of the great investors of his generation, but where he fits in that paradigm.
“He’s gonna be in the pantheon,” the LP says. “You can be a demigod, or you can be a god. He’s on Mount Olympus, but the question is: Where?”
Though that is, in the end, the biggest challenge Kleiner faces from here: That it can’t just be Hamid, that in a changing venture landscape, rife with megacap firms and commoditized capital, there is little margin for error. To stay competitive, Kleiner will need every partner plugged into the pipeline of game-changing startups and visionary founders.
“I think you just have to be paranoid,” Hamid says. “Never be satisfied, because then laziness creeps in. The day I tell myself, ‘We’re on the right track,’ is where I lose the discipline.”
Kleiner is operating with less capital and a smaller margin for error than its larger rivals. But with that risk comes more returns-based upside. And Kleiner needs winners to be not only the VC firm of the past, but of the future.
In other words, Hamid needs to do what he did eight years ago, and continue to stun his peers.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com