Saam Motamedi is a General Partner at Greylock Partners working with enterprise software entrepreneurs at the seed and early stages who are focused on new opportunities in intelligent applications, cybersecurity, AI, and data infrastructure. In 2019 at just 26 years old, Saam became the Greylock’s youngest General Partner in its 54-year history – a remarkable achievement at an institution that had backed Airbnb, AppDynamics, Coinbase, Discord, Figma, Instagram, LinkedIn, among others.
Saam’s portfolio spans 14+ companies with collective valuations exceeding $10 billion. Abnormal Security, which Greylock incubated in its offices in 2018 with Saam as founding investor, grew into a multi-billion-dollar email security powerhouse. Cresta, where he led the Series A in 2019, became the leading generative AI platform for contact centers. Snorkel AI, Braintrust, Orb, and a portfolio of other infrastructure companies position Saam at the center of AI's business model transformation.
We covered:
- Durable components to great firms
- Inside look at how Greylock operates
- Cracking the code on incubations
- Alpha in today’s venture strategies
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Timestamps:
(0:00) Intro
(1:32) Greylock turning 60 this year
(4:11) What’s persisted since 1965
(8:59) Apprenticeship
(11:34) What's durable in venture
(16:29) Greylock’s ethos
(19:33) Incentive misalignments
(24:44) Breadth vs depth in venture
(29:28) Managing the team on inputs
(34:00) Why incubations are so hard
(43:22) Finding alpha
(52:38) Greylock’s approach to portfolio services
(59:18) Assessing wild revenue ramps
(1:08:10) Horizontal vs vertical SaaS
(1:11:34) Friendships and work
(1:16:26) Saam's biological age
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More on Saam:
https://greylock.com/
https://x.com/saammotamedi
More on Jack:
https://www.altcap.com/
https://x.com/jaltma
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