Masters in Business · Friday, July 3, 2026
Mamoon Hamid details Kleiner Perkins' strategic shift in 2017-2018 back to a smaller, nimble partnership focused on early-stage Series A investing. This move aimed to recapture the firm's historical success, emphasizing technical expertise and operator experience in backing technology's impact on humanity, with a current focus on AI startups.
“If I look back at the decades of being probably the most successful venture capital firm throughout the seventies, eighties, nineties, and even the early two thousands, the one thing that defined Kleiner Perkins was it was a small partnership of seven ish or so partners who sat around a table in Menlo Park, meeting companies and having healthy discourse and debate about what companies to invest in and what the future of technology would bring to the world.”
“And we went back to the future in twenty seventeen and eighteen to that model, and today our partnership is six partners and then we have three more investment professionals, so we're a very small, nimble team.”
“So the early stage fund is Seed Series A mostly and maybe some bees, and then the Growth fund is b c's all the way to.”