Early Stage Investing with Saam Motamedi

[00:00:00] so welcome everybody to abnormal business school and abnormal business schools, fireside chats, abnormal business school is a series of internal and external programs hosted by. us here at abnormal security to educate the team about leadership and building enterprise software companies. the fireside chat series is one of those programs and it is a recurring series of guest speakers invited to share their knowledge with you about entrepreneurship leadership and investing in enterprise software.

Nimit: We are so excited to be joined by Saam Motamedi today, who is a general partner at Greylock partners, and one of our board members here at abnormal. I will just give you a background on Saam, Saam is a, as I said, a general partner at Greylock and a board member of abnormal security at Greylock.

Saam invests in enterprise software entrepreneurs at the early stages with a focus on applied AI cybersecurity. SAS [00:01:00] and data and machine learning infrastructure prior to Greylock, some was part of the first wave of applied AI companies. As a founder of GRU labs, a ML driven FinTech startup, and a product manager at relate IQ before it was acquired by Salesforce.

Saam holds a bachelor's in computer science from Stanford, where he was a Mayfield fellow. We are thrilled to welcome some to the stage here at abnormal business school. And I'm going to now pass the mic to our hosts, and your CEO, Evan riser to kick off the conversation. 

Evan: Thanks to Nimit for the interaction.

so I'm super excited to have you joining us today and for,people listening in, the purpose of kind of the session today is to have Saam talk as a Saam, as a venture capitalist he's been involved in Abnormal was curious since day one, he's worked with, hundreds of companies and, hundreds of entrepreneurs.

Evan: So I really wanted to have him talk about,what makes you know, great entrepreneurs. And I think specifically for a lot of the [00:02:00] team that is, the joint rural, because they want to see what greatness looks like, With future aspirations of becoming an entrepreneur, want to have some share some thoughts about, how do you, how do you make the most of your time and our enrollment, we learn as much as possible to best prepare you for a future career adventure in entrepreneurship.

So Saam, thank you so much for joining us 

Saam: Thanks for having me Evan, and it's good to virtually see the abnormal team and thank you all for letting us be a part of the journey. I'm really excited for everything the company has done to date and the significant opportunity ahead. 

Evan: Cool. So maybe a kickoff song, maybe you could, I know kinda Nimit gave you an intro, maybe you want to share anything else about yourself and maybe just for context, for other folks that are maybe less familiar with,venture capital, besides, To any of our Miami or, whatever the VC joke of the week is, you may want to share like what,what is venture capitalists do and how do you interact with both, entrepreneurs and, startups like.

Saam: Absolutely. and I am still in San Francisco, so I haven't made anything about to Miami, like the modern, venture capitalists, but,so for background, for folks, as [00:03:00] Evan mentioned, I'm a partner here at Greylock. We're one of the oldest venture capital firms in Silicon valley.

We've been operating for 56 years. today we invest out of our 16th fund. It's a billion dollar vehicle and there's nine partners investing in enterprise and consumer side. And so the way we operate is every individual might make one or two investments a year, typically at the very early stages. for context, when we initially invested in a normal security, Evan and Sanjay, I think had a slide deck, had an initial founding team built a point of view on a 1.0 product and some initial customer conversations.

And for us, that's the stage we love to get involved. So we're looking for the intersection of exceptional founders with exceptional market opportunities. We find that very rarely. We're lucky if we find that once or twice a year. And when we find that we do everything we can to convince those founders to let us be a part of their journeys.

We invest. We typically joined the board and we are working as hard as we can in support and service of the founders and their [00:04:00] teams. And we might invest in a company with one or two people and be involved with that company, not just through IPO, but far beyond, and like over the years to give folks a sense of the companies we've involved with on the enterprise software side.

Workday starting our offices, Palo Alto networks started our offices. We were early investors in Okta, AppDynamics service now, Figma, Dropbox, and many others. And on the consumer side companies like Facebook, Airbnb. LinkedIn, Instagram, Coinbase and others. So we've been lucky to be a part of some pretty fantastic journeys.

And we have the ability to bring the learnings from those journeys to the newer set of companies that we're working with today that, 3, 4, 5 years from now we'll have as big of reputations, if not larger than the set, I just ran through. 

Evan: And so maybe before we dive into the content, can you talk a little bit about,the kind of early stage investing kind of business model of sorts is different than, the majority of investors right.

Where you're not just writing a check, you're really helping build the company and abnormal, and you've been involved in. the [00:05:00] first 10 cyber first 10 seasons I've ever talked to in my life, I think you are you're on nine of those calls. You helped build the product strategy, the product roadmap.

Or at least kind of really early on at the get-go, maybe how is like being an early stage investor, right? there's a lot more than just writing a check and taking some shares of the company. Like you need to talk a little more. 

Saam: Yeah, absolutely. So we think of ourselves. we don't even use the word investments internally.

We use the word partnerships, because when we partner with companies, we are signing up not just to be a financial partner, which absolutely is, is a key piece. But really to be a partner across all aspects of the business. And what would the reason we're able to do that is because of the set of companies we've worked with over the years and the learnings that we've had from working with those companies.

And so in the very early stages, I've, as you mentioned, that might look like a lot of work and support around market discovery and initial idea selection. Leveraging our relationships from a customer perspective to help the company, bootstrap its own customer relationships on the recruiting side, helping, source [00:06:00] that close candidates, both at the IC level and over climate, the executive level as the company begins to scale.

And then as the company progressed, Again, we're partners. And so everything from helping the company attract subsequent financing to continue to scale its organization, to navigate key strategic decisions and corporate and business development opportunities to eventually think about kind of life as a public company.

We, we are,key partners in those decisions. And as such, we, Evan, you said it really well, which is we don't view ourselves as financial investors. That's a piece of what we do, but what we really view ourselves as partners and kind of builders alongside. The founders and their teams. 

Evan: So some, one thing that you and reelected that was really, all that was helpful for me is, when I first started, we were like seven people.

You said, Hey Evan, why don't you take some time? Go meet some executives of companies that are like, 10 X bigger than your a hundred X better than you. So you start building up a sense of what greatness looks like, because it actually, that, that's how I originally met Kevin Moore.

I met Kevin while we were like 10 people knocked to try [00:07:00] to hire him at the time, because I want to get a sense of what is a really, I want it, it says what are we, what do we need to grow into? And so I guess for people, at abnormal or in the audience, that are interested in entrepreneurship, I imagine kind of them hearing your perspective on.

Evan: What does an A-plus entrepreneur look like? just so they can kinda think about how do they, shape their careers and how they take advantage of his main learning options as possible. Can we talk a little bit about, when you're looking for the, you mentioned only invest in one or two companies a year, Which is a different business model than some investors. Presumably a lot of it has to do with the person, your belief and their kind of capabilities and their credibility. They can just maybe talk a little bit about what is an a plus entrepreneur look like in your mind. 

Saam: Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's actually a couple questions in there.

Evans, let me start with, let me start with what are the dimensions we look for in the entrepreneur. And then we can also sequence to how do you, once you get in business with an entrepreneurial hip, help them scale and develop into a world-class leader. So let me start with the. When we're investing at the seed or series a,in companies like when we did not normal, we're really investing in the team and an idea.

So the two [00:08:00] elements we're looking for at the highest level is what's the market that the company wants to go after. And how attractive is that north star? And then how exceptional is the person? And we can talk about both of those elements. Let me start with the second, which is what you asked.

So we w I think of a couple of dimensions when it comes to. What makes someone an exceptional entrepreneur? The first is, does the person have a fundamental market insight? So whether the company is going after an existing market with incumbents, creating a new category, doing something in between, has the entrepreneur landed on an insight?

What customers want, what a superior product institution looks like. And do they have the ability to then go recruit a team and deliver on that market insight? And there are different ways to land on that market insight. Sometimes the founder has domain relevance because, they worked at a previous company that was highly related.

Sometimes they don't have the domain relevance, but they spend time in a highly customer centric way. working with customers to actually identify that market insight, but that's really important. The next piece [00:09:00] is,we use the word learning animal or a learner's mindset inside Greylock and,this has been set off in, but we really believe in investing in slope and not in y-intercept.

When we look at people, if you look at many of the best entrepreneurs we've backed who have gone on to build truly legendary companies, they're actually relatively young, relatively early in their careers. But all along their career. And when we interact with them, it's very clear that they strive to be the very best at what they do.

And they're proactively thinking about how to improve, whether that means surrounding themselves by world-class teammates and advisors, engaging with folks who have done the journey before to learn from them, or again, just working in a highly customer centric way. We see a very strong learners mindset.

The third dimension, which kind of relates to is customer centric. I cannot stress how important it is as an entrepreneur to work in a customer centric way. I think about this as a feedback loop, where you have customers on one side and under the early days, product development on the other side, and the tighter that feedback loop is the [00:10:00] faster you iterate, the faster you will land that product market fit, and then begin to compound,go to market.

And unfortunately we've backed in. And I think other venture capitalists have back many folks who are exceptional engineers or product managers or designers, or go to market thinkers, but don't work with appropriate customer centricity and then fail to actually deliver a solution that a wide set of customers want.

So customer century, season. The next dimension we look at is velocity and iteration speed. If I tell you that, this person has a fundamental market insight, good learner's mindset is working customer centric. Then the question is how fast can they iterate and go around that feedback loop.

And you do see deltas in some entrepreneurs, right? I remember one thing that stood out. And still stands out to us about the abnormal team, but certainly in the early days was just the rate of week over week progress. And, if you think about it, even if you have 1%, 2%, 5% better and faster execution every week, and you compound that over a long enough time horizon, that makes the difference between an exceptional [00:11:00] company and a good company.

So iteration speed is critical. Touch on a few more. And then Evan, we can double click on any of the. th the next piece I think about is storytelling ability, right? So successful company building involves a lot of storytelling and persuasion. You have to persuade multiple constituents groups around the companies, people who you're going to recruit, who are going to come and, dedicate a large part of their careers to working on building the company customers, particularly the early days.

So we're taking a massive career risk to go work with a new startup,business partners, technology partners who are taking similar types of. And investors. And so the best founders are able to consistently inspire and almost drive the inevitability of their visions. and so this idea of storytelling becomes really important and that kind of connects to the next piece, which is,we use the word, a recruiting.

Is this someone, or is this founding teammate group that we'll be able to attract world-class talent to join them in their mission? We've all worked at companies where we've interacted with those people who were like, Hey, if she leaves or [00:12:00] he leaves the company, I'm going to follow that person. That's what we're looking for in a founder.

and then the last two things I would add are,are perhaps obvious, but one is just grit. Like these company journeys, as you all know, Have ups and downs and are really challenging. And so we look for entrepreneurs who have a demonstrated history of grit and getting knocked up at knocked down and getting right back up.

Saam: And I think the last piece is, at Greylock, our objective is really to back and work with people who want to build independent enduring market defining companies that we'll all be proud of for the rest of our lives. That requires a certain type of entrepreneur and a certain type of commitment and thinking around the long-term.

So we use the words like playing the long game internally. We're certainly not doing this for short term results or even medium term results. And we want to work with entrepreneurs and teams who are oriented in a similar way. So those are more dimensions I intended to run through, but those are a few of the things we consider.

I like that framework. that was really good song. It's probably warrants a [00:13:00] blog post or something because it was actually quite insightful. I think there's a myth. th there's like a myth in Silicon valley that like all founders of companies are like, hackers that are, really deep and kind of technology.

Evan: And,if I look at some of those companies, that you mentioned maybe outside of Facebook, a lot of the founders, Entrepreneurs come from actually a pretty wide variety of backgrounds, right? Some are product marketers, some are sales engineers, right? Some are product managers, some are designers, some are software engineers.

when you think, when you are like, Looking at entrepreneurs, I say, yeah. When you talk about like, where do some of the entrepreneurs come from and what are some of the, the things in their journeys that kind of enabled them to build up some of these, skills and experiences, right?

Evan: Whether it's storytelling ability or kind of customer focused work or velocity or grit or ambition, Yeah. Can you talk a little more about what are some of the backgrounds and how do people get it? 

Saam: Yeah, absolutely. So I'd start by saying, as you just,astutely observed, there's no single answer to that question.

And the great news is there's a massive diversity of backgrounds, both across almost every dimension, right? [00:14:00] Across functional experience, across years of experience across domains. And so I do fundamentally believe you can develop these core tenants. Independent of where you are on any of these factors that said we do see some common patterns, right?

One fallacy that, I, or myth that I see in Silicon valley is, the best way to start a company. If you want to start a company and go start it today, and you hear many people say this and lots of folks starting companies, I've made that mistake myself. You and me both Evan and lots of people rush to do it out of college.

And then they rushed to do it a few years after, after a few years of work experience. And, and there's this again, a trope where it's like the best way to do, to learn how to build a company is just by starting a company. And I could not disagree with this more. So to me, like when I think about the ideal background, You don't want to learn how to start a company.

You want to learn how to start a successful company. And,and it's very hard to learn how to start a successful company if you haven't worked at a successful company. And so if you go back to that framework of, markets and exceptional people, let's [00:15:00] put aside the market piece for a second, then the question, because.

If I'm evaluating you as an entrepreneur, can you do the core job and entrepreneur needs to be able to do, and I think of that as being, having two core chapters, and this is overly reductionist, but it's a, it's a simplifying framework. The first chapter is can you go from market insight to repeatable product market fit?

you come to me tomorrow and you say, Hey, Sam, I want to start a new CRM company and go after, after Salesforce. And so then the question becomes, okay, what's the approach you're going to take? You have that. Can you over one to two year period, go from that insight to 1.0 product built delivered successfully to 10 plus enterprise customers.

Saam: And have you learned enough about the customer emotion that you can then go build a sales and marketing a team in motion that can scale your offering? That is one of the hardest things to do in Silicon. And the best way to learn how to do that is to be part of a company that is traversing, that journey.[00:16:00] 

One of the things I love about enterprise software or let me actually just say B2B software,investing is it's highly. If you look at many of the best entrepreneurs there, they actually come from backgrounds where they worked at a B2B software company. And before they started their company, they weren't a founder, but they were a key early team member.

They saw that journey of getting to repeatable product market fit, and then they were able to develop and learn a set of playbooks and then go take that set of playbooks and apply it to a new domains. if you asked me to draw the archetype of a founder, who I would, if I could synthetically create that I would love to back the archetype is someone who joins a B2B software and I'll speak about B2B founders because that's where I operate.

But I'm happy to talk about consumers where there's some slight differences and a lot of similarities, but for B2B, the architect would be someone who's worked at a B2B software company. They joined that company, sub 25 sub $50 million of right. They were a key customer centric part of [00:17:00] that company, whether it's on the go-to-market team or on the product and engineering team, but they have understanding of how those two things connect and how they operate together to drive customer value.

And they've worked at an organization that not just was successful, but was successful in a highly system oriented and excellence and process oriented. And they've done that for some period of years where they were a key driver of that story, because if that person walks into our office and is pitching us on a new idea, we need to talk about the idea and get the mutual comfort around.

But we can be very confident that if the north star is good, the person understands the playbooks processes, behaviors that are necessary to go from that market insight to kind of repeatable product market fit. And Evan, I think your background and Sanjay's background,as founders out of normal is a very good example of this, right?

both in it for you personally, having done startups in the past, then having joined TellApart as a product manager, having been a part of that journey as that [00:18:00] business scale to, a hundred million dollars plus in revenue Sanjay, obviously having been there very early and part of that journey, the set of learnings and playbooks and systems that you all developed there.

Saam: Then when we met you and we were, you had come up with the idea for. There was no risk in our minds because, and by the way, interestingly to notice those companies are not even perfect analogies for one another there's dramatic differences, but you had worked in a customer facing role. You had been a part of getting a product to repeatable product market fit and scaling revenues.

You would learn how to recruit and build teams. So we weren't taking any risks on any of those dimensions when we back to you. 

Evan: So w one kinda just fall question that I have to imagine. Some people in the audience are asking this, right? You talk about, looking for entrepreneurs that come from like systems oriented process, focused playbooks, that's like the, if you look at how startups are represented in media, It's all about hacking it together and scrapping your way through. So can you maybe just comment on what's the why behind. 

Saam: Yeah. It's [00:19:00] again like the, it comes back to mythology, myths in the media. And I think some companies succeed despite what they do in the early days, not because of what they do, because just the market pool can be so powerful.

Yeah. Again, I think the great thing about working in B2B software is you get to work hand in hand with the customers that you're trying to serve. And if you listen to them correctly, they will help you navigate to where you need to go. Like at some level it's exceptionally simple. And so then the question is Evan, if you and I are both entrepreneurs and we go into 50 customer meetings, how do we get the maximum amount out of those customer meetings?

I'm reflecting right now. I remember when you and Sanjay had just, maybe you hadn't been formally incorporated at normal security yet, but were doing your problem discovery. You had built this framework and I think it have been codified in a set of spreadsheets of how you extracted information from a customer.

Saam: And so when you went in and you talked to a CSO and at the time, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you were starting very high level and trying to understand their overall problems. And then also with an email security, their overall problems, [00:20:00] you've had an approach and a system to actually extract meaningful signal from that conversation.

And then you went and repeated that with a hundred plus customers. And that enabled you after 3, 4, 5 month periods. To with high conviction say, Hey, this is exactly what we should go build. And this is what customers most need today. And also here's the product sequencing and strategy that enables us to go from where we're starting to something.

That's going to be a very significant platform over time. Now, if we ran that same experiment with 10 different sets of entrepreneurs and they weren't the same hundred conversations, we would have very different results because different entrepreneurs would approach those meetings very differently.

So that's one example of a system. If you will. And by the way I learned from, I think both, myself and my partner, she learned from the way you and Sanjay approached that. And now when we are looking at new companies in different markets, we encourage folks to apply a similar system, right?

Saam: So I can imagine if I'm someone working at a normal security and there's now tens of these systems across different parts of the business, if I can pay attention and understand [00:21:00] why these systems exist. And why they lead to excellent, kind of execution. And then I can go take those and apply those to new problems spaces.

At some point in the future. When I'm a founder, I have such a leg up relative to the next entrepreneurial.

Evan: one of our files. Now we'll go into the next set of topics, but other myths, right? You think about either entrepreneurship or venture capitalists or starting companies that, you think are kind of misunderstood by people that 

Saam: aspire to be entrepreneurs. Yeah. look, a couple of things, right?

One is I want to go back to. When is the right time to start a company and what should people get done before they start a company? And there may be different levels of awareness of what's going on in the broader venture capital market today. But I'd say the headline is there's never been more capital in, in the VC market.

It's never been easier to get funded as an entrepreneur. And, and there, there have never been more companies raising venture capital than there are today in 20. And I think a lot of people look at this and say, that's amazing. And I [00:22:00] can, I can go as a new person in and start a company and I can raise capital and I can get going.

And actually there is truth to that, but in many ways it's a trap and it's a trap because there's a misalignment between the entrepreneur and the average venture capitalist. And here I'm speaking in generalities. The trap is the average venture capitalist might make, for might make 30, 40, 50 investments in a calendar year.

And so whether or not one particular company is successful is less relevant than the portfolio being appropriately composed, such that maybe five of those companies end up going on to be successful. As the entrepreneur, it's actually very relevant to you, whether or not you end up starting one of the five that are successful instead of one of the, one of the 45 that go to mediocre or bad outcomes.

Saam: And I think, and by the way, when we talk about bad outcomes, I think, and I speak this with the humility of having gone through a bad outcome, myself personally, as an entrepreneur, the risk in a bad outcome is not just if the company doesn't succeed because it's never that binary [00:23:00] it's that, you go start a new country.

The market was not thought through correctly. The 1.0 product was not thought through crock correctly, but given the frothiness of the market, you have no trouble raising venture capital. You'd start building product. Maybe you land a customer or two, but nothing has been architected to actually scale.

You go raise more venture capital, you go hire 50 people and something you fast forward, six years, you're a complete zombie. The company is not growing areas. And, you've spent six exceptionally productive years of your life on this business. That's ultimately going to go to a bad outcome and I'm not trying to scare people from starting companies.

People starting companies is the lifeblood of our business. What I'm saying is. It w starting a company is a really big commitment in the medium success case. It's a decade plus commitment and the ultra success case, it's a multi-decade commitment. And in the fail case, it's not you take a job and after a year it doesn't work out.

It's a multi-year commitment. And then you end up getting your quiet Aqua hired into a business. And then there's multiple years there as well. And so really, I wish if I could change one thing about Silicon valley, it would be that people [00:24:00] orient less on. Let me start a company as quickly as I can and orient more on how do I, if my goal is to be a successful entrepreneur, not just on first, my goal should be to be a successful entrepreneur.

And I want to do that on a reasonable timeline. And so what do I do in the next few years to maximize my probability of getting to that goal? I think if you frame it as such, in most cases, what you'll see is the immediate optimal action is not to start the. The immediate optimal action is to go find an exceptionally high quality company that has product market fit.

That is going to enable you to work in a customer centric way and works with this system, the system oriented approach to building so that you can go and over a two to three-year period. De-risk a couple of fundamental things. One is you can, de-risk a lot of the understanding of. And by the way, if anything goes wrong, you're not the founder of that business.

And so you haven't signed up for the multi, five, 10 plus year commitment. You can eject out of that. And hopefully things don't go wrong, but also just one thing [00:25:00] worth noting. Your downside is more capital. The second. By definition. If that company you pick has, does that culture, you will end up meeting the people who will go on to be your co-founders, who you may go work for, who may come work for you.

And the, and again, an Evan, you can, I'm sure speak to this, but just the value of having an initial team that has all worked together, I can not understate that value and it turns out other entrepreneurial. Builders go to market folks. They tend to gravitate to these types of companies as well.

So that's the second piece. And then the third piece is, and depending on how long you play out that journey at the company, you also get to see the next couple of levels of scale. Such that when you're the primary founder, it's not your first time seeing it. It's your first time perhaps driving it as the founder, but you've seen it play out before and hopefully you can avoid a bunch of mistakes.

Saam: And so even if I go, if I say today, I'm going to go do that. I'm going to go do that for four or five years and start the company five years later than I initially intended. my odds of being successful when I started that company or orders of magnitude higher. And we see that [00:26:00] again and again, in our.

so I think that's a really big myth. and then the second myth,the, I am not a huge fan of, is like the whole lean startup,build something that a few friends want and then quickly iterate your way to greatness. And the reason for that is it goes back to.

when we were talking about fundamental market insights, which is when I showed up at Greylock over five years ago, the first thing I did was I looked through our entire 20 years of modern software investing. And I ranked every company. We were in on a number of dimensions, right market quality of the team revenue.

Saam: When we invested attractiveness of the financing deal, et cetera, the dimension that most correlated to success was quality of the market operator. You could have a team of people who had been serial entrepreneurs that built things for, that had sold for north of a billion dollars, but they picked a bad market and the business went to zero.

And conversely, you could have someone who is much less proven, but they picked an exceptional market and the company did very well. And and that merits a whole nother conversation that we can get into today or later on, like how do you even pick a good market? And haven't, maybe you should [00:27:00] teach the master class on that because I think you and Sanjay and team have done an excellent job of that.

But I think the ma, but I would really urge people. To not execute the lean startup playbook because you really risk landing at local optimize instead of maximum global optimums. I think the economical thing is you go build something for pain point. You have personally felt for maybe a few of your friends have felt.

And the question becomes is that actually like a sufficiently widespread and deep enough of a pain point to build a 1,000 billion dollar business. And if it's not, why bother? Because if you're going to go dedicate multiple decades of your life, you should go build something where the market will support in the success case, a large, independent public scaling company.

So I wish entrepreneurs would be much more thoughtful around market selection early on. and better understood how much leverage that will give them if they get it right downstream in the journey. Yeah. 

I really, couldn't agree with you more song, cause like I've personally fallen for this trap and if you look at my resume, I wasted probably almost a decade of my life in this middle decade,many years in this kind of [00:28:00] zombie state where, you know, one of my last company is, we ha we built a product.

Evan: Cause like I knew the use case, we sold to a couple of customers. Fast forward three years later, 20 customers, a million dollars in revenue. Tina's still like 12 people and, my, my own personal development and it really hit a flat line in various ways. And we were very lucky, Through kind of random chance we got bought by, TellApart, but it was, in hindsight, That was not an effective use of, my life, our career. And it wasn't, it was,it could have been avoided with a little bit of upfront thought and planning. Both in terms of my own personal development, as well as the market selection.

So maybe switching gears som, but I think still in this thread,if I'm a. If I'm an abnormal employee today, I'm a software engineer or a product manager or a account executive. I'm trying to, I want to go start a company, Four years down the road. And I'm hearing your advice and I hear you, we gotta, I gotta listen to learn.

I got to optimize for customer focus and velocity and grit and just become a learning machine. What do I do, How do I really take advantage of this? Yeah, how do [00:29:00] I take advantage of the environment? And then what would be your advice to aspiring entrepreneurs that are at companies like abnormal or, or similar?

Saam: It's a great question. So I'd say, I wish I was at an abnormal when I was an aspiring entrepreneur, because I think I brought,is exactly at this moment in time and over the coming quarters and years at this inflection point where. The company has exceptionally strong product market fit and repeatability.

And now the question is both across product, go to market all aspects of the organization. How do we build the foundation for an execute against plans, scale and very few companies. And by the way, including, in, in the portfolio we're involved with are in the top venture capital firms ever get to this point.

With the opportunity and headroom ahead. So first is I'd be really excited, to be at a company like this and very greedy around what I could learn from this set of circumstances. There's a couple of things that come to mind first is, networking with my colleagues, right? So I think again, if I want to go to a company in four years, five years, six years from [00:30:00] now, three years from now, A big question is going to be, who do I want to go do with that with?

And that's something that you want to de-risk right. and I've, and I won't speak for you, but my sense is, as I think about the founding team of abnormal, the fact that the group had worked together, what gave everyone kind of pairwise confidence that they wanted to go and bark and what at the time was like a crazy journey.

And so maybe I will turn the question back to you and just think of asking you like what you all did while you were at TellApart and Twitter that helped foster that trust. But I think there's a lot to be said for going deep, working on important projects, succeeding with people to build those bonds that enable you some point downstream to say, Hey, we want to go do something together.

And we're confident in each other as a group to go do this as a team. So I think that's one piece. The second piece is being really intensive. Around observing, learning, and executing on what are the systems and processes that are leading to success so that you actually understand them and are, and can implement them yourself [00:31:00] in a net new environment that might have some slight differences.

So whether that's. How what's the, one relationship I find fascinating is the relationship between the product team and the go to market team customers. Because again, that feedback loop is the lifeblood of an innovative,an innovative business and company like abnormal. So what are specifically the things the team is doing and have been implemented at a process level to tighten that feedback loop as much as possible and how do you really go learn and, those things so that when you start your own company, you can implement those things.

So I think taking a vested interest in that. The third piece is, weather and the tactics are slightly different depending on the function you're in. But the overall goal is the same, which is. one of the things that's challenging as a founder is you need to be well-rounded right.

most great founders do have something that they are exceptional at. And then they're good enough at the other pieces, but you do have to be good enough at the other pieces. And so the great thing is if you're an engineer, you're working with some of the best people and go to market and Silicon valley, [00:32:00] how can you go learn from them?

Saam: Not that not so that you can go execute on their role, but so that you have an understanding of what great looks. So that, downstream, when you start your own company and it's on you to go recruit people, to build the, go to market organization, how are you going to. identify how are you going to vet and how are you going to attract those people to join your company?

And the flip is also true, right? If you're on the go-to-market side, what makes abnormals product teams so successful? What are the dimensions around process, talent culture? How do you go learn from those things? Observe the way that team interfaces with customers so that when you start your company and build the product side of the organization, you can do the same things.

So I think that piece is really. And then I think the last piece, which is less. Specific just being successful in a future journey as a founder and just something we should all aspire to are in our roles is how do you become a part of something truly exceptional, right? And that, that can apply at different levels of scope.

Like one scope [00:33:00] is certainly the organization is maximally successful, but I think there are a narrower scope. so one example would be like, if you were, if four years from now, you were talking to me about starting a company and I called five people out abnormal. What I want to hear is, Hey, like Sally, Bob, like they were exceptional.

The company would not be where it is. If it wasn't for these specific things, that person did a particular product that they help build and launch, a particular set of customers that they help close and make successful. There are all these moments in these journeys where, things tip the right way.

You unlock such compounding value. And there are people inside these companies that. Often being around and driving those moments and those people end up becoming exceptional entrepreneurs that folks like I want to invest in and partner with and others want to go work with. And I'll save, Evan, the embarrassment, when we called around on the abnormal founding team, we heard.

Truly just incredible stories of the impact that they had in their prior organizations. So striving to have that level of kind of three [00:34:00] Sigma impact is very important. 

Evan: And maybe some just a little more practically, So you mentioned earlier, like some of the qualities that for entrepreneurs, you meant.

Being, very customer focused, being really good at being ever recruiting and storytelling. if you're a, if you're a junior software engineer today and you're not in a lot of sales meetings, you're not involved in a lot of interview processes. Like how do you're not doing big product strategy, roadmap reveals right to the board or whatever, whenever it is right.

what are, how do you go level up in those areas? How do you get more exposure? How do you dig into that? You can really be learning as much as possible to best start building up your kind of entrepreneurship. 

Saam: Yeah. I think, whether or not there's direct interface into those things in your specific role today is not an excuse to not be developing those skills.

That's the way I think about it. And so let's just take the two that you brought up storytelling and customer centricity, right? So I'll start with customer centricity. Just because I'm not sitting in a customer meeting doesn't mean I can't work in a customer centric way. So tactically, how do I go [00:35:00] understand why we're making the product decisions that we're making?

How do I pressure test them with the team that is making those decisions to confirm that they actually are oriented optimally against what the customers want? How do I understand how the team is making decisions around customer segmentation and then mapping that against product requirements and features?

I don't need to be the one doing that work, but I need to understand that work and there's, and there really isn't any excuse. I have the curiosity and desire to go understand it. And then, I would challenge the premise of the question to some degree and say look, just because you're not in customer meetings doesn't mean you can't be an advocate for the customer.

can you go, can it, what are other ways that you can go get, exposure to how customers think, can you read customer oriented materials? there's especially insecurity. There's so much content out there on how CSOs think and how they operate and what their challenges are and what their team's challenges are that you could build someone and Evan.

you do this to some degree, like you can build some understanding of it before you've even talked to customers. And so challenge yourself to develop as much empathy for the customer as you can, even if you're not in, in a [00:36:00] formal customer meeting context would be an example in the customer centricity side, on the storytelling.

I would bet every single person inside abnormal security as a group of constituents that they're working with, that they want to persuade, in the pursuit of some shared goals. And even if you're not doing recruiting a really good way to think about storytelling is how do you talk about and drive the importance of your work inside the organization.

And if you, if there's something you believe, and again, I'll just pick on the. let's say junior earlier, career engineer example, I'm sure there are points of views that one might have on like things that should be built or the way things should be done. And working on your skill of how do you get the data to actually convince your teammates that's what should happen.

Saam: And first start operating in that scope. And then over time you broaden that scope both with internal constituents and then external constituents, recruits and others. Those are the types of things that would tactically be oriented on. 

Evan: I want to transition to some of the audience questions in a sec, and then we got a bunch, but,and any other advice you have for, people at the company [00:37:00] today, or, maybe guests that are joining from normal, who are maybe they found a good place to be to work, If they're surrounded by good team, what else can they, if they want to come pitch you and, three, four years, right? what can other people be doing to really maximize their credibility? So they really hit your checklist of a years of things. I look for entrepreneur.

Oh, the other advice you share other kinds of, pro tips. 

Saam: Yeah. it's a good question. we've touched on a number of things. we've touched on a lot of things at the individual level. I want to go back to the organization level for a moment and just say that, the best way to set yourself.

Is for abnormal, and this may sound self-serving, it's really not. It's for abnormal to become as, successful and important and foundational of a company as possible. And here's why right. Just think about it, Let's say a normal goes on and by the way, we a hundred percent have the opportunity to go on and become the largest security company.

in the world over time, if we go on to become that now fast forward, Five years from now, when you're starting your company. So when you come and pitch me and you pitched three other VCs, first of all, you were a part of building the [00:38:00] most important security company in the world. The credibility that establishes for you is massive.

Saam: When you go talk to customers and you say, Hey, you don't have normal security. The vendor that's driving you a ton of value. And you really love, I was a part of building that and the customer is trying to evaluate you. And you're a brand new start. I cannot underemphasize the level of trust that will instantly earn you because the customer will say, Hey, I was really successful at that other vendor.

I remember I started working with that vendor when they were still on, relatively unknown and early. And thank God I did that. And I extend and I associate some of that trust with you as the person. And then when you go recruit people like you come to me and you're like, Hey, som come join the company.

And I say, Wow. you were part of building this thing. That was pretty fantastic, pretty important. And so it's highly likely that you will be able to do the same thing in this not new space. So I actually do think that is in some ways, the higher bid on all of this. And, and the thing I want to say is, it comes back to like iteration speed as something, and velocity is something we look for in entrepreneurs.

we need that at all. everyone in the company is an entrepreneur, right? And so [00:39:00] we need that at all levels of the organization. Every point of incremental performance that we drive in ourselves will compound to become very significant and exponentially help us separate from the pack of other companies, both direct competitors, adjacent companies, et cetera.

Saam: And so I think that's one thing I would really hit home because I think it's going to serve the organization and the organization's mission. Which is then going to serve you. And also as an individual, that's the kind of above and beyond work that then when I call Evan to reference, someone is an entrepreneur, he's going to talk about, or others inside the organization are going to talk about.

So I think that's a big one. And the second one I've already said, I just want to say it again. Is. Appreciate kind of the gravity and specialness of the moment. Like very few companies get to the strength of product market fit with the right product offering and the level of market pool and the top of quality of what we're working on that abnormal hasn't a lot of that is due to good work.

And some of that is due to [00:40:00] good fortune of the way the threat landscape has evolved over the last, even since the company got started. And so w we're all self included sitting at this exceptional moment in time where we are going to, we are on part of a slope and hopefully we'll continue on a slope that so few companies ever are on.

And so I think it's important to recognize the gravity and uniqueness of that. And for that to drive, one's perceptiveness around the things that can be learned that can be learned both by studying the way the organization is working the systems, the processes, the playbooks, and then by continuing to improve those things, because you will get the leverage here.

But you also, you have a test bed to build really the best in class versions of these things so that when you go and bark on your own adventure, you can pick them up and go apply them to a net new company.

Evan: That's really good advice. I wish I listened to this about 10 years ago. but maybe next life. so let me, I want to go over some of the, so the questions from the audience, and, oh, nice. Okay. So Sam's got this [00:41:00] pulled up. Okay. so I'm use this term world-class I use the term world-class and we describe it to to, I use it to me and kinda like the best, the basketball.

you use that phrase what does that mean to you? And,and also I know at the grade partnership, you guys are talking a lot about. Is this really world-class right. Like how do you define that? What is that? 

Saam: It's a good question. When I think of class, I think of what is the top, pick percentage 1% 0.1% of executing on any particular function.

and we didn't talk about what founders can do to scale themselves into effective CEOs and leaders, but I'll touch on that and connect it back to this. Which is. When you're a founder you're, as I said, you might be world-class at one thing. Hopefully we're close to world-class at something and you're good enough at a number of things.

Saam: And then what ha what has to happen for you to be a successful founder and for the organization to successfully scale is you have to go attract world-class in all of these dimensions around yourself and hire people who are much, much better than you at these dimensions. What that requires is an understanding of what world-class looks like.

So if you pick any [00:42:00] function, you take. And enterprise sales, who's built the very best enterprise sales teams, right? At different levels of scale. we were lucky to be working with some of those people at abnormal today. And then Evan from early on before, before he, when he started the company before we had a customer, much less a sales team, Evan asked myself and others around the company, Hey, who are the very best leaders in this, in these functions.

And can you introduce them to me? Not because I want to hire them today, but because I want to develop my own understanding of what that looks like, so that when I need to hire, I can look for it. So you met Kevin, you met folks who led, go to market at service now and Informatica and all these top organizations.

And So that, that, that's how I think about world class. And I think there are different companies that are world-class at different things. and so for example, I think when you think about sales actually service now does rank very high. the organization that Frank is not building at snowflake ranks very high.

Salesforce has always had a tremendous, ability and marketing broadly. And I think I've been, you've met leaders on the marketing side and others. [00:43:00] that's what we mean when we say world-class. Cool. That's 

Evan: helpful song. so kinda the next question was around kind of career frameworks that you've developed, And maybe life frameworks and,just to embarrass you a little bit som since, you're trying to, you said nice things about me. but,when I think about you and you, how to your career, right? you have a very steep curve. And you've really accomplished a lot.

And, even just knowing you for the last, several years, Just I feel like the rate in which you're learning and developing kind of gathering wisdom, Is, is, higher than probably almost anyone else I've met. So like, How do you know when you think about you have a different career path, right?

Evan: That probably almost everyone at the company, but yeah. Any kind of frameworks that you've used to help inform how you spend your time, where you focus your learning, to help you learn and grow. 

it's a good question. so I think there are like general frameworks and then functional frameworks.

Saam: So for example, we talked, something I spend a lot of time on is how to pick people to work with. and I'll be honest, like I think that is the hardest thing in Metro capital. Every single one of our mistakes, particularly [00:44:00] on companies that we could have invested in partnered with that we didn't, that went on to be very significant and we underestimated the person.

And so I walk you through my latest version of that framework, but I'd say that's a work in progress. and I'll talk about a market framework as well, but then there's also general framework. So in the general frameworks and just around career building, w one thing I really focus is focus on is non-linearity and growth and learning, right?

I one of my first managers told me something to the effect of in most jobs, you work for a year and you've get a year's worth of learning and good jobs. You work for a year and you get three years worth of learning. And in exceptional jobs, you work for a year and you get 10 years worth of learning.

And I like the more I'm in this business. of technology both personally, and also seeing people like you and others develop their own career paths. I cannot stress how much I believe in this framework. And so every career junction I've looked for, for these non-linear learning opportunities, and then you would ask what characterizes a nonlinear learning opportunity?

And to me, like there are two things. One is. The organization is going through dramatic and fluxion [00:45:00] on whatever dimension is relevant for the type of organization. So for example, like when I, my, my first job in technology was, in product management at a company called relate IQ, which was an early, kind of intelligence CRM player.

And I joined that company when it was 40 people, just post product market fit. And over the course of my time there, my responsibility, literally 10 X, not because. I, inherently deserve 10 X the scope, but the business was growing so quickly that they had no choice, but to expand the scope of everyone at the company.

And so I look back and I'm like, wow, I spent two years there, but I feel like I saw much more than that. And so one is you want the organization to be like that. And then the second. You could have two people do the exact same job at the exact same company and person one could extract a lot more learning and career development out of it than person two based on their attitude and the way they approach the job.

So it comes back to like, When I was like, I relate IQ, for example, I spent a lot of time thinking about the frameworks on how the company was doing certain things. [00:46:00] And I think I understood those frameworks better than perhaps others who just didn't have the same level of curiosity around them.

Hey, like why do what. Why is this the approach we take to making product decisions? Why do we involve customers at these junctions and not in these other directions and not all of those things may be correct. But the fact that I actually took interest in learning those things meant I extracted and absorb more from that a work experience than perhaps others.

Saam: So I'd say, look for nonlinearity is one general heuristic. I think the second year of stick is I look for working in organizations where everyone I work with is better than me in some domains. Because that means I can learn from everyone I'm working with. And so I always say to friends who are interviewing, the best interviews are the ones where you work out and you're like, I'm not sure I did a great job.

And it feels like everyone who was interviewing me as much smarter than I am. And whether it was that related IQ, the company I founded joining Greylock and the entrepreneurs they work with and every single one of these contexts, I'm working with people that I learned. And I it's just like a great hack, because if you surround yourself with people who are world-class at what they [00:47:00] do, you get to learn at least what world-class looks like across these different functions.

So those are two general frameworks. I'd say my two most relevant frameworks for company buildings. Since I know that's something folks are interested in. One is the dimensions around how to develop yourself as an entrepreneur. The second is around markets, right? and maybe I'll give like the 32nd version of my framework for markets and then we can have a longer conversation.

But market selection is everything. And roughly when I look at markets. Three types of markets. I want to invest in or build companies against. One is what I'd call existing markets, where you're running a replacement play. So this is where you have a large incumbent with meaningful market penetration.

And the great thing about running this play is you're not taking any market risk, empirically that customers will pay for a solution in this area. And the revenues are large enough to support a significant company. So then the question just becomes, how are you going to overtime replace the incumbent and the best companies that are.

Are typically writing some change in the landscape, either in the customer's problem or in the technology [00:48:00] that allows them to deliver a step function, superior solution. That is non-trivial for the incumbent to deliver because of the architectural decisions the incumbent has made. and they initially might live alongside the incumbent.

But over time they replaced the incumbent and Palo Alto looked like that. Workday look like. And that leads to really big markets. The second is emerging markets. So these are markets where there isn't an incumbent because there's some new customer behavior that's developed, but that customer behavior is going very quickly.

And so you build a company that exploits the, or takes advantage of the growth of that behavior. So I'll give you all an example insecurity, which is five, six years ago. This market emerged around container security, with the rise of Kubernetes and Docker and these things, and that wasn't an, a market that existed historically, but as customers began to modernize infrastructure, doing things like container scanning became really important.

And so the entrepreneurs who observe. And built companies into that growing trend. And so that's the second type we like. And then the third type I don't like, which is what I'd call new market creation, where [00:49:00] you're betting that there's going to be some behavior change that doesn't yet exist. And some companies do succeed that way. But what I would say to anyone who wants to start a company in the future is if you pick one of the ideas in the first two buckets, your probability of success going in is his step function. So that's the framework around picking markets. 

Evan: Yeah. I w I would say also in terms of even picking careers, I do think like I've really started appreciate this in the last, five years, but picking a market is really important for us.

Unexpected reasons, right? Being accountable in a good market, that's going through like this platform shift or this combine a reset mutation of sorts like that causes companies to be, higher growth than normal. The high growth attracts people that want to go into high growth environments who want to learn and grow.

And those as a certain type of person or personality, a certain type of. And those people attract other people like them. And so they're I think looking for the markets is like a good, leading indicator right. Of the type of, the type of team and culture.

They'll ended up being, I think it, those opportunities, like you said, for a couple of [00:50:00] reasons, To create a environment and kind of learning, learn and grow a lot. Absolutely. So we got five minutes left. We get, there's 10 more questions. you want to do a quick kind of lightning round for some of this.

Saam: Okay. 

I don't totally understand this question, but would you look at a potential entrepreneur from a successful startup, like abnormal differently than other backgrounds? in a related AI cyber subject matter. So if you had maybe one entrepreneur that had like really high domain expertise for some, with no domain expertise, but a successful background, how do you wait the two 

Saam: good question?

The answer would be nuanced, but I, but if I was to simplify, I would orient more towards the successful background than the domain background with the bet being that if you have an understanding around these core principles and frameworks of problem discovery, customer identification, we're building product in a customer centric way, and you've done that in domain X.

I'd rather bet that you can learn domain Y then take someone from domain. Why, but who doesn't actually understand those fundamentals. [00:51:00] Cool. 

Evan: Okay. I'm going to pick and choose some of these questions. one, one question is, basically like a. Oh, what kind of sounds you're like, shouldn't we be a little skeptical of venture capitalists given they're on like a ton of different board seats.

How is Greylock different about that? 

Saam: Yeah,you should be, and that is, they shouldn't be skeptical of, venture capitalists. when I talked to an entrepreneur and I haven't, we may have talked about this one when you all were deciding, if you wanted to partner with us, the first thing I say is any VC partner you're considering working with.

Don't just look at like the one amazing company they're involved with. Go look at all the companies that are involved with talk to the entrepreneurs who are on both w who both have been part of successful companies and companies that didn't work out and also look at what their quote unquote hit rate is.

So for example, like at Greylock, we pride ourselves, especially on the enterprise side of the business and you can go look at myself or others in our backgrounds. Most of the companies we're involved with probably 70 to 75% plus. On the enterprise side, go on to have successful outcomes. And the reason for that is not because we're magicians, but it's because we are [00:52:00] highly selective.

Saam: We only make one or two investments a year and we hold a really high bar around the quality of entrepreneur and deploy the market opportunity. And then we do a lot of work to help maximize the probability of that. Company's success. 

Evan: Yeah. And that's when I first met a sheen, that was one of the things that attracted me to him.

he was on, I think eight boards at the time. And, I asked, one of my friends at gray locker said, Hey, what's a shame, his track record. And the response was, I don't know if you've ever he's ever lost a dollar. So I think that, yeah, unlike a. my guess is unlike some firms, You guys are very focused. And it's different than separately. putting a checks, a bunch of companies and see what the portfolio yields. Which is a business model, but it's different. okay. Got time for maybe one more. What is, what's the number one mistake in entrepreneur?

Saam: Number one mistake is, is building a product nobody wants as trite as that sounds. I think the most common reason why a company we back does not succeed is because they pick a poor market opportunity. And [00:53:00] by the way, that might mean people still want the product. There are many forms of poor market opportunities.

It could be that the customers want the product or not. Attractive customers to go acquire because they can't spend a lot of money on the product. It could be that the there's a small set of customers that need the product, but it's too small of a set to actually build a scaling business. It could be that they're building a developer oriented tool where, it's useful, but it's very hard for them actually to drive commercial value around what they're doing.

So there's nuance in. Statement, but at the highest level, it would be, booming a product that people don't want to consistently buy and pay significant amounts of money for. Okay. 

Evan: I gonna sneak one final way. And so like maybe outside of, let's say you're in a good market, you got a great product.

There's some teams and cultures that don't succeed. Despite those things, what are the most important parts of, building the team, building the culture that also enable that success because not all about, product market. 

Saam: Absolutely. There are a couple, I say different successful companies actually have different cultures.

And so that is actually one thing that's exciting for us as we [00:54:00] get to work with companies that are oriented differently, but then there are some shared characteristics across the successful companies. And this is in no particular order, but the things that immediately come to mind, one is desire for excellence.

And oneself and in each other, right? The best companies and teams hold them, everyone is holding themselves accountable and their teammates accountable to playing at an A-plus level. The second is, I've used this word a lot, but really high customer centricity at a cultural. And you see it, right?

Some companies, they applaud things that are massive. Customer wins. Some companies apply things that are massive technology wins, and those things are not necessarily biometric, but it's slightly different. It leads to different behaviors depending on what the culture rewards. the, 

Evan: I got to cut you off there.

I also got to keep you on those two, because those are also our core values. So we'll just go with those as being the only two important things outside of our other three core values. I know we're out of time, so I'm sorry to cut you off, but. Really appreciate you taking the time to join us and looking forward to, you coming back and share more of your advice and wisdom with us.

So thanks so much for 

Saam: [00:55:00] Thanks Evan for having me. And it's good to see everyone virtually and yeah, thanks again for letting us at Greylock to be a part of the journey. And we're so excited for the opportunity ahead at abnormal. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. I'll just one last thing.

We're going to send you a feedback, form, in as soon after this meeting. So please take a look at that. and that's it. Thank you all for your time. Thank you. So thank you, Evan. Bye-bye.

[00:00:00] so welcome everybody to abnormal business school and abnormal business schools, fireside chats, abnormal business school is a series of internal and external programs hosted by. us here at abnormal security to educate the team about leadership and building enterprise software companies. the fireside chat series is one of those programs and it is a recurring series of guest speakers invited to share their knowledge with you about entrepreneurship leadership and investing in enterprise software.

Nimit: We are so excited to be joined by Saam Motamedi today, who is a general partner at Greylock partners, and one of our board members here at abnormal. I will just give you a background on Saam, Saam is a, as I said, a general partner at Greylock and a board member of abnormal security at Greylock.

Saam invests in enterprise software entrepreneurs at the early stages with a focus on applied AI cybersecurity. SAS [00:01:00] and data and machine learning infrastructure prior to Greylock, some was part of the first wave of applied AI companies. As a founder of GRU labs, a ML driven FinTech startup, and a product manager at relate IQ before it was acquired by Salesforce.

Saam holds a bachelor's in computer science from Stanford, where he was a Mayfield fellow. We are thrilled to welcome some to the stage here at abnormal business school. And I'm going to now pass the mic to our hosts, and your CEO, Evan riser to kick off the conversation. 

Evan: Thanks to Nimit for the interaction.

so I'm super excited to have you joining us today and for,people listening in, the purpose of kind of the session today is to have Saam talk as a Saam, as a venture capitalist he's been involved in Abnormal was curious since day one, he's worked with, hundreds of companies and, hundreds of entrepreneurs.

Evan: So I really wanted to have him talk about,what makes you know, great entrepreneurs. And I think specifically for a lot of the [00:02:00] team that is, the joint rural, because they want to see what greatness looks like, With future aspirations of becoming an entrepreneur, want to have some share some thoughts about, how do you, how do you make the most of your time and our enrollment, we learn as much as possible to best prepare you for a future career adventure in entrepreneurship.

So Saam, thank you so much for joining us 

Saam: Thanks for having me Evan, and it's good to virtually see the abnormal team and thank you all for letting us be a part of the journey. I'm really excited for everything the company has done to date and the significant opportunity ahead. 

Evan: Cool. So maybe a kickoff song, maybe you could, I know kinda Nimit gave you an intro, maybe you want to share anything else about yourself and maybe just for context, for other folks that are maybe less familiar with,venture capital, besides, To any of our Miami or, whatever the VC joke of the week is, you may want to share like what,what is venture capitalists do and how do you interact with both, entrepreneurs and, startups like.

Saam: Absolutely. and I am still in San Francisco, so I haven't made anything about to Miami, like the modern, venture capitalists, but,so for background, for folks, as [00:03:00] Evan mentioned, I'm a partner here at Greylock. We're one of the oldest venture capital firms in Silicon valley.

We've been operating for 56 years. today we invest out of our 16th fund. It's a billion dollar vehicle and there's nine partners investing in enterprise and consumer side. And so the way we operate is every individual might make one or two investments a year, typically at the very early stages. for context, when we initially invested in a normal security, Evan and Sanjay, I think had a slide deck, had an initial founding team built a point of view on a 1.0 product and some initial customer conversations.

And for us, that's the stage we love to get involved. So we're looking for the intersection of exceptional founders with exceptional market opportunities. We find that very rarely. We're lucky if we find that once or twice a year. And when we find that we do everything we can to convince those founders to let us be a part of their journeys.

We invest. We typically joined the board and we are working as hard as we can in support and service of the founders and their [00:04:00] teams. And we might invest in a company with one or two people and be involved with that company, not just through IPO, but far beyond, and like over the years to give folks a sense of the companies we've involved with on the enterprise software side.

Workday starting our offices, Palo Alto networks started our offices. We were early investors in Okta, AppDynamics service now, Figma, Dropbox, and many others. And on the consumer side companies like Facebook, Airbnb. LinkedIn, Instagram, Coinbase and others. So we've been lucky to be a part of some pretty fantastic journeys.

And we have the ability to bring the learnings from those journeys to the newer set of companies that we're working with today that, 3, 4, 5 years from now we'll have as big of reputations, if not larger than the set, I just ran through. 

Evan: And so maybe before we dive into the content, can you talk a little bit about,the kind of early stage investing kind of business model of sorts is different than, the majority of investors right.

Where you're not just writing a check, you're really helping build the company and abnormal, and you've been involved in. the [00:05:00] first 10 cyber first 10 seasons I've ever talked to in my life, I think you are you're on nine of those calls. You helped build the product strategy, the product roadmap.

Or at least kind of really early on at the get-go, maybe how is like being an early stage investor, right? there's a lot more than just writing a check and taking some shares of the company. Like you need to talk a little more. 

Saam: Yeah, absolutely. So we think of ourselves. we don't even use the word investments internally.

We use the word partnerships, because when we partner with companies, we are signing up not just to be a financial partner, which absolutely is, is a key piece. But really to be a partner across all aspects of the business. And what would the reason we're able to do that is because of the set of companies we've worked with over the years and the learnings that we've had from working with those companies.

And so in the very early stages, I've, as you mentioned, that might look like a lot of work and support around market discovery and initial idea selection. Leveraging our relationships from a customer perspective to help the company, bootstrap its own customer relationships on the recruiting side, helping, source [00:06:00] that close candidates, both at the IC level and over climate, the executive level as the company begins to scale.

And then as the company progressed, Again, we're partners. And so everything from helping the company attract subsequent financing to continue to scale its organization, to navigate key strategic decisions and corporate and business development opportunities to eventually think about kind of life as a public company.

We, we are,key partners in those decisions. And as such, we, Evan, you said it really well, which is we don't view ourselves as financial investors. That's a piece of what we do, but what we really view ourselves as partners and kind of builders alongside. The founders and their teams. 

Evan: So some, one thing that you and reelected that was really, all that was helpful for me is, when I first started, we were like seven people.

You said, Hey Evan, why don't you take some time? Go meet some executives of companies that are like, 10 X bigger than your a hundred X better than you. So you start building up a sense of what greatness looks like, because it actually, that, that's how I originally met Kevin Moore.

I met Kevin while we were like 10 people knocked to try [00:07:00] to hire him at the time, because I want to get a sense of what is a really, I want it, it says what are we, what do we need to grow into? And so I guess for people, at abnormal or in the audience, that are interested in entrepreneurship, I imagine kind of them hearing your perspective on.

Evan: What does an A-plus entrepreneur look like? just so they can kinda think about how do they, shape their careers and how they take advantage of his main learning options as possible. Can we talk a little bit about, when you're looking for the, you mentioned only invest in one or two companies a year, Which is a different business model than some investors. Presumably a lot of it has to do with the person, your belief and their kind of capabilities and their credibility. They can just maybe talk a little bit about what is an a plus entrepreneur look like in your mind. 

Saam: Yeah, absolutely. And I think there's actually a couple questions in there.

Evans, let me start with, let me start with what are the dimensions we look for in the entrepreneur. And then we can also sequence to how do you, once you get in business with an entrepreneurial hip, help them scale and develop into a world-class leader. So let me start with the. When we're investing at the seed or series a,in companies like when we did not normal, we're really investing in the team and an idea.

So the two [00:08:00] elements we're looking for at the highest level is what's the market that the company wants to go after. And how attractive is that north star? And then how exceptional is the person? And we can talk about both of those elements. Let me start with the second, which is what you asked.

So we w I think of a couple of dimensions when it comes to. What makes someone an exceptional entrepreneur? The first is, does the person have a fundamental market insight? So whether the company is going after an existing market with incumbents, creating a new category, doing something in between, has the entrepreneur landed on an insight?

What customers want, what a superior product institution looks like. And do they have the ability to then go recruit a team and deliver on that market insight? And there are different ways to land on that market insight. Sometimes the founder has domain relevance because, they worked at a previous company that was highly related.

Sometimes they don't have the domain relevance, but they spend time in a highly customer centric way. working with customers to actually identify that market insight, but that's really important. The next piece [00:09:00] is,we use the word learning animal or a learner's mindset inside Greylock and,this has been set off in, but we really believe in investing in slope and not in y-intercept.

When we look at people, if you look at many of the best entrepreneurs we've backed who have gone on to build truly legendary companies, they're actually relatively young, relatively early in their careers. But all along their career. And when we interact with them, it's very clear that they strive to be the very best at what they do.

And they're proactively thinking about how to improve, whether that means surrounding themselves by world-class teammates and advisors, engaging with folks who have done the journey before to learn from them, or again, just working in a highly customer centric way. We see a very strong learners mindset.

The third dimension, which kind of relates to is customer centric. I cannot stress how important it is as an entrepreneur to work in a customer centric way. I think about this as a feedback loop, where you have customers on one side and under the early days, product development on the other side, and the tighter that feedback loop is the [00:10:00] faster you iterate, the faster you will land that product market fit, and then begin to compound,go to market.

And unfortunately we've backed in. And I think other venture capitalists have back many folks who are exceptional engineers or product managers or designers, or go to market thinkers, but don't work with appropriate customer centricity and then fail to actually deliver a solution that a wide set of customers want.

So customer century, season. The next dimension we look at is velocity and iteration speed. If I tell you that, this person has a fundamental market insight, good learner's mindset is working customer centric. Then the question is how fast can they iterate and go around that feedback loop.

And you do see deltas in some entrepreneurs, right? I remember one thing that stood out. And still stands out to us about the abnormal team, but certainly in the early days was just the rate of week over week progress. And, if you think about it, even if you have 1%, 2%, 5% better and faster execution every week, and you compound that over a long enough time horizon, that makes the difference between an exceptional [00:11:00] company and a good company.

So iteration speed is critical. Touch on a few more. And then Evan, we can double click on any of the. th the next piece I think about is storytelling ability, right? So successful company building involves a lot of storytelling and persuasion. You have to persuade multiple constituents groups around the companies, people who you're going to recruit, who are going to come and, dedicate a large part of their careers to working on building the company customers, particularly the early days.

So we're taking a massive career risk to go work with a new startup,business partners, technology partners who are taking similar types of. And investors. And so the best founders are able to consistently inspire and almost drive the inevitability of their visions. and so this idea of storytelling becomes really important and that kind of connects to the next piece, which is,we use the word, a recruiting.

Is this someone, or is this founding teammate group that we'll be able to attract world-class talent to join them in their mission? We've all worked at companies where we've interacted with those people who were like, Hey, if she leaves or [00:12:00] he leaves the company, I'm going to follow that person. That's what we're looking for in a founder.

and then the last two things I would add are,are perhaps obvious, but one is just grit. Like these company journeys, as you all know, Have ups and downs and are really challenging. And so we look for entrepreneurs who have a demonstrated history of grit and getting knocked up at knocked down and getting right back up.

Saam: And I think the last piece is, at Greylock, our objective is really to back and work with people who want to build independent enduring market defining companies that we'll all be proud of for the rest of our lives. That requires a certain type of entrepreneur and a certain type of commitment and thinking around the long-term.

So we use the words like playing the long game internally. We're certainly not doing this for short term results or even medium term results. And we want to work with entrepreneurs and teams who are oriented in a similar way. So those are more dimensions I intended to run through, but those are a few of the things we consider.

I like that framework. that was really good song. It's probably warrants a [00:13:00] blog post or something because it was actually quite insightful. I think there's a myth. th there's like a myth in Silicon valley that like all founders of companies are like, hackers that are, really deep and kind of technology.

Evan: And,if I look at some of those companies, that you mentioned maybe outside of Facebook, a lot of the founders, Entrepreneurs come from actually a pretty wide variety of backgrounds, right? Some are product marketers, some are sales engineers, right? Some are product managers, some are designers, some are software engineers.

when you think, when you are like, Looking at entrepreneurs, I say, yeah. When you talk about like, where do some of the entrepreneurs come from and what are some of the, the things in their journeys that kind of enabled them to build up some of these, skills and experiences, right?

Evan: Whether it's storytelling ability or kind of customer focused work or velocity or grit or ambition, Yeah. Can you talk a little more about what are some of the backgrounds and how do people get it? 

Saam: Yeah, absolutely. So I'd start by saying, as you just,astutely observed, there's no single answer to that question.

And the great news is there's a massive diversity of backgrounds, both across almost every dimension, right? [00:14:00] Across functional experience, across years of experience across domains. And so I do fundamentally believe you can develop these core tenants. Independent of where you are on any of these factors that said we do see some common patterns, right?

One fallacy that, I, or myth that I see in Silicon valley is, the best way to start a company. If you want to start a company and go start it today, and you hear many people say this and lots of folks starting companies, I've made that mistake myself. You and me both Evan and lots of people rush to do it out of college.

And then they rushed to do it a few years after, after a few years of work experience. And, and there's this again, a trope where it's like the best way to do, to learn how to build a company is just by starting a company. And I could not disagree with this more. So to me, like when I think about the ideal background, You don't want to learn how to start a company.

You want to learn how to start a successful company. And,and it's very hard to learn how to start a successful company if you haven't worked at a successful company. And so if you go back to that framework of, markets and exceptional people, let's [00:15:00] put aside the market piece for a second, then the question, because.

If I'm evaluating you as an entrepreneur, can you do the core job and entrepreneur needs to be able to do, and I think of that as being, having two core chapters, and this is overly reductionist, but it's a, it's a simplifying framework. The first chapter is can you go from market insight to repeatable product market fit?

you come to me tomorrow and you say, Hey, Sam, I want to start a new CRM company and go after, after Salesforce. And so then the question becomes, okay, what's the approach you're going to take? You have that. Can you over one to two year period, go from that insight to 1.0 product built delivered successfully to 10 plus enterprise customers.

Saam: And have you learned enough about the customer emotion that you can then go build a sales and marketing a team in motion that can scale your offering? That is one of the hardest things to do in Silicon. And the best way to learn how to do that is to be part of a company that is traversing, that journey.[00:16:00] 

One of the things I love about enterprise software or let me actually just say B2B software,investing is it's highly. If you look at many of the best entrepreneurs there, they actually come from backgrounds where they worked at a B2B software company. And before they started their company, they weren't a founder, but they were a key early team member.

They saw that journey of getting to repeatable product market fit, and then they were able to develop and learn a set of playbooks and then go take that set of playbooks and apply it to a new domains. if you asked me to draw the archetype of a founder, who I would, if I could synthetically create that I would love to back the archetype is someone who joins a B2B software and I'll speak about B2B founders because that's where I operate.

But I'm happy to talk about consumers where there's some slight differences and a lot of similarities, but for B2B, the architect would be someone who's worked at a B2B software company. They joined that company, sub 25 sub $50 million of right. They were a key customer centric part of [00:17:00] that company, whether it's on the go-to-market team or on the product and engineering team, but they have understanding of how those two things connect and how they operate together to drive customer value.

And they've worked at an organization that not just was successful, but was successful in a highly system oriented and excellence and process oriented. And they've done that for some period of years where they were a key driver of that story, because if that person walks into our office and is pitching us on a new idea, we need to talk about the idea and get the mutual comfort around.

But we can be very confident that if the north star is good, the person understands the playbooks processes, behaviors that are necessary to go from that market insight to kind of repeatable product market fit. And Evan, I think your background and Sanjay's background,as founders out of normal is a very good example of this, right?

both in it for you personally, having done startups in the past, then having joined TellApart as a product manager, having been a part of that journey as that [00:18:00] business scale to, a hundred million dollars plus in revenue Sanjay, obviously having been there very early and part of that journey, the set of learnings and playbooks and systems that you all developed there.

Saam: Then when we met you and we were, you had come up with the idea for. There was no risk in our minds because, and by the way, interestingly to notice those companies are not even perfect analogies for one another there's dramatic differences, but you had worked in a customer facing role. You had been a part of getting a product to repeatable product market fit and scaling revenues.

You would learn how to recruit and build teams. So we weren't taking any risks on any of those dimensions when we back to you. 

Evan: So w one kinda just fall question that I have to imagine. Some people in the audience are asking this, right? You talk about, looking for entrepreneurs that come from like systems oriented process, focused playbooks, that's like the, if you look at how startups are represented in media, It's all about hacking it together and scrapping your way through. So can you maybe just comment on what's the why behind. 

Saam: Yeah. It's [00:19:00] again like the, it comes back to mythology, myths in the media. And I think some companies succeed despite what they do in the early days, not because of what they do, because just the market pool can be so powerful.

Yeah. Again, I think the great thing about working in B2B software is you get to work hand in hand with the customers that you're trying to serve. And if you listen to them correctly, they will help you navigate to where you need to go. Like at some level it's exceptionally simple. And so then the question is Evan, if you and I are both entrepreneurs and we go into 50 customer meetings, how do we get the maximum amount out of those customer meetings?

I'm reflecting right now. I remember when you and Sanjay had just, maybe you hadn't been formally incorporated at normal security yet, but were doing your problem discovery. You had built this framework and I think it have been codified in a set of spreadsheets of how you extracted information from a customer.

Saam: And so when you went in and you talked to a CSO and at the time, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you were starting very high level and trying to understand their overall problems. And then also with an email security, their overall problems, [00:20:00] you've had an approach and a system to actually extract meaningful signal from that conversation.

And then you went and repeated that with a hundred plus customers. And that enabled you after 3, 4, 5 month periods. To with high conviction say, Hey, this is exactly what we should go build. And this is what customers most need today. And also here's the product sequencing and strategy that enables us to go from where we're starting to something.

That's going to be a very significant platform over time. Now, if we ran that same experiment with 10 different sets of entrepreneurs and they weren't the same hundred conversations, we would have very different results because different entrepreneurs would approach those meetings very differently.

So that's one example of a system. If you will. And by the way I learned from, I think both, myself and my partner, she learned from the way you and Sanjay approached that. And now when we are looking at new companies in different markets, we encourage folks to apply a similar system, right?

Saam: So I can imagine if I'm someone working at a normal security and there's now tens of these systems across different parts of the business, if I can pay attention and understand [00:21:00] why these systems exist. And why they lead to excellent, kind of execution. And then I can go take those and apply those to new problems spaces.

At some point in the future. When I'm a founder, I have such a leg up relative to the next entrepreneurial.

Evan: one of our files. Now we'll go into the next set of topics, but other myths, right? You think about either entrepreneurship or venture capitalists or starting companies that, you think are kind of misunderstood by people that 

Saam: aspire to be entrepreneurs. Yeah. look, a couple of things, right?

One is I want to go back to. When is the right time to start a company and what should people get done before they start a company? And there may be different levels of awareness of what's going on in the broader venture capital market today. But I'd say the headline is there's never been more capital in, in the VC market.

It's never been easier to get funded as an entrepreneur. And, and there, there have never been more companies raising venture capital than there are today in 20. And I think a lot of people look at this and say, that's amazing. And I [00:22:00] can, I can go as a new person in and start a company and I can raise capital and I can get going.

And actually there is truth to that, but in many ways it's a trap and it's a trap because there's a misalignment between the entrepreneur and the average venture capitalist. And here I'm speaking in generalities. The trap is the average venture capitalist might make, for might make 30, 40, 50 investments in a calendar year.

And so whether or not one particular company is successful is less relevant than the portfolio being appropriately composed, such that maybe five of those companies end up going on to be successful. As the entrepreneur, it's actually very relevant to you, whether or not you end up starting one of the five that are successful instead of one of the, one of the 45 that go to mediocre or bad outcomes.

Saam: And I think, and by the way, when we talk about bad outcomes, I think, and I speak this with the humility of having gone through a bad outcome, myself personally, as an entrepreneur, the risk in a bad outcome is not just if the company doesn't succeed because it's never that binary [00:23:00] it's that, you go start a new country.

The market was not thought through correctly. The 1.0 product was not thought through crock correctly, but given the frothiness of the market, you have no trouble raising venture capital. You'd start building product. Maybe you land a customer or two, but nothing has been architected to actually scale.

You go raise more venture capital, you go hire 50 people and something you fast forward, six years, you're a complete zombie. The company is not growing areas. And, you've spent six exceptionally productive years of your life on this business. That's ultimately going to go to a bad outcome and I'm not trying to scare people from starting companies.

People starting companies is the lifeblood of our business. What I'm saying is. It w starting a company is a really big commitment in the medium success case. It's a decade plus commitment and the ultra success case, it's a multi-decade commitment. And in the fail case, it's not you take a job and after a year it doesn't work out.

It's a multi-year commitment. And then you end up getting your quiet Aqua hired into a business. And then there's multiple years there as well. And so really, I wish if I could change one thing about Silicon valley, it would be that people [00:24:00] orient less on. Let me start a company as quickly as I can and orient more on how do I, if my goal is to be a successful entrepreneur, not just on first, my goal should be to be a successful entrepreneur.

And I want to do that on a reasonable timeline. And so what do I do in the next few years to maximize my probability of getting to that goal? I think if you frame it as such, in most cases, what you'll see is the immediate optimal action is not to start the. The immediate optimal action is to go find an exceptionally high quality company that has product market fit.

That is going to enable you to work in a customer centric way and works with this system, the system oriented approach to building so that you can go and over a two to three-year period. De-risk a couple of fundamental things. One is you can, de-risk a lot of the understanding of. And by the way, if anything goes wrong, you're not the founder of that business.

And so you haven't signed up for the multi, five, 10 plus year commitment. You can eject out of that. And hopefully things don't go wrong, but also just one thing [00:25:00] worth noting. Your downside is more capital. The second. By definition. If that company you pick has, does that culture, you will end up meeting the people who will go on to be your co-founders, who you may go work for, who may come work for you.

And the, and again, an Evan, you can, I'm sure speak to this, but just the value of having an initial team that has all worked together, I can not understate that value and it turns out other entrepreneurial. Builders go to market folks. They tend to gravitate to these types of companies as well.

So that's the second piece. And then the third piece is, and depending on how long you play out that journey at the company, you also get to see the next couple of levels of scale. Such that when you're the primary founder, it's not your first time seeing it. It's your first time perhaps driving it as the founder, but you've seen it play out before and hopefully you can avoid a bunch of mistakes.

Saam: And so even if I go, if I say today, I'm going to go do that. I'm going to go do that for four or five years and start the company five years later than I initially intended. my odds of being successful when I started that company or orders of magnitude higher. And we see that [00:26:00] again and again, in our.

so I think that's a really big myth. and then the second myth,the, I am not a huge fan of, is like the whole lean startup,build something that a few friends want and then quickly iterate your way to greatness. And the reason for that is it goes back to.

when we were talking about fundamental market insights, which is when I showed up at Greylock over five years ago, the first thing I did was I looked through our entire 20 years of modern software investing. And I ranked every company. We were in on a number of dimensions, right market quality of the team revenue.

Saam: When we invested attractiveness of the financing deal, et cetera, the dimension that most correlated to success was quality of the market operator. You could have a team of people who had been serial entrepreneurs that built things for, that had sold for north of a billion dollars, but they picked a bad market and the business went to zero.

And conversely, you could have someone who is much less proven, but they picked an exceptional market and the company did very well. And and that merits a whole nother conversation that we can get into today or later on, like how do you even pick a good market? And haven't, maybe you should [00:27:00] teach the master class on that because I think you and Sanjay and team have done an excellent job of that.

But I think the ma, but I would really urge people. To not execute the lean startup playbook because you really risk landing at local optimize instead of maximum global optimums. I think the economical thing is you go build something for pain point. You have personally felt for maybe a few of your friends have felt.

And the question becomes is that actually like a sufficiently widespread and deep enough of a pain point to build a 1,000 billion dollar business. And if it's not, why bother? Because if you're going to go dedicate multiple decades of your life, you should go build something where the market will support in the success case, a large, independent public scaling company.

So I wish entrepreneurs would be much more thoughtful around market selection early on. and better understood how much leverage that will give them if they get it right downstream in the journey. Yeah. 

I really, couldn't agree with you more song, cause like I've personally fallen for this trap and if you look at my resume, I wasted probably almost a decade of my life in this middle decade,many years in this kind of [00:28:00] zombie state where, you know, one of my last company is, we ha we built a product.

Evan: Cause like I knew the use case, we sold to a couple of customers. Fast forward three years later, 20 customers, a million dollars in revenue. Tina's still like 12 people and, my, my own personal development and it really hit a flat line in various ways. And we were very lucky, Through kind of random chance we got bought by, TellApart, but it was, in hindsight, That was not an effective use of, my life, our career. And it wasn't, it was,it could have been avoided with a little bit of upfront thought and planning. Both in terms of my own personal development, as well as the market selection.

So maybe switching gears som, but I think still in this thread,if I'm a. If I'm an abnormal employee today, I'm a software engineer or a product manager or a account executive. I'm trying to, I want to go start a company, Four years down the road. And I'm hearing your advice and I hear you, we gotta, I gotta listen to learn.

I got to optimize for customer focus and velocity and grit and just become a learning machine. What do I do, How do I really take advantage of this? Yeah, how do [00:29:00] I take advantage of the environment? And then what would be your advice to aspiring entrepreneurs that are at companies like abnormal or, or similar?

Saam: It's a great question. So I'd say, I wish I was at an abnormal when I was an aspiring entrepreneur, because I think I brought,is exactly at this moment in time and over the coming quarters and years at this inflection point where. The company has exceptionally strong product market fit and repeatability.

And now the question is both across product, go to market all aspects of the organization. How do we build the foundation for an execute against plans, scale and very few companies. And by the way, including, in, in the portfolio we're involved with are in the top venture capital firms ever get to this point.

With the opportunity and headroom ahead. So first is I'd be really excited, to be at a company like this and very greedy around what I could learn from this set of circumstances. There's a couple of things that come to mind first is, networking with my colleagues, right? So I think again, if I want to go to a company in four years, five years, six years from [00:30:00] now, three years from now, A big question is going to be, who do I want to go do with that with?

And that's something that you want to de-risk right. and I've, and I won't speak for you, but my sense is, as I think about the founding team of abnormal, the fact that the group had worked together, what gave everyone kind of pairwise confidence that they wanted to go and bark and what at the time was like a crazy journey.

And so maybe I will turn the question back to you and just think of asking you like what you all did while you were at TellApart and Twitter that helped foster that trust. But I think there's a lot to be said for going deep, working on important projects, succeeding with people to build those bonds that enable you some point downstream to say, Hey, we want to go do something together.

And we're confident in each other as a group to go do this as a team. So I think that's one piece. The second piece is being really intensive. Around observing, learning, and executing on what are the systems and processes that are leading to success so that you actually understand them and are, and can implement them yourself [00:31:00] in a net new environment that might have some slight differences.

So whether that's. How what's the, one relationship I find fascinating is the relationship between the product team and the go to market team customers. Because again, that feedback loop is the lifeblood of an innovative,an innovative business and company like abnormal. So what are specifically the things the team is doing and have been implemented at a process level to tighten that feedback loop as much as possible and how do you really go learn and, those things so that when you start your own company, you can implement those things.

So I think taking a vested interest in that. The third piece is, weather and the tactics are slightly different depending on the function you're in. But the overall goal is the same, which is. one of the things that's challenging as a founder is you need to be well-rounded right.

most great founders do have something that they are exceptional at. And then they're good enough at the other pieces, but you do have to be good enough at the other pieces. And so the great thing is if you're an engineer, you're working with some of the best people and go to market and Silicon valley, [00:32:00] how can you go learn from them?

Saam: Not that not so that you can go execute on their role, but so that you have an understanding of what great looks. So that, downstream, when you start your own company and it's on you to go recruit people, to build the, go to market organization, how are you going to. identify how are you going to vet and how are you going to attract those people to join your company?

And the flip is also true, right? If you're on the go-to-market side, what makes abnormals product teams so successful? What are the dimensions around process, talent culture? How do you go learn from those things? Observe the way that team interfaces with customers so that when you start your company and build the product side of the organization, you can do the same things.

So I think that piece is really. And then I think the last piece, which is less. Specific just being successful in a future journey as a founder and just something we should all aspire to are in our roles is how do you become a part of something truly exceptional, right? And that, that can apply at different levels of scope.

Like one scope [00:33:00] is certainly the organization is maximally successful, but I think there are a narrower scope. so one example would be like, if you were, if four years from now, you were talking to me about starting a company and I called five people out abnormal. What I want to hear is, Hey, like Sally, Bob, like they were exceptional.

The company would not be where it is. If it wasn't for these specific things, that person did a particular product that they help build and launch, a particular set of customers that they help close and make successful. There are all these moments in these journeys where, things tip the right way.

You unlock such compounding value. And there are people inside these companies that. Often being around and driving those moments and those people end up becoming exceptional entrepreneurs that folks like I want to invest in and partner with and others want to go work with. And I'll save, Evan, the embarrassment, when we called around on the abnormal founding team, we heard.

Truly just incredible stories of the impact that they had in their prior organizations. So striving to have that level of kind of three [00:34:00] Sigma impact is very important. 

Evan: And maybe some just a little more practically, So you mentioned earlier, like some of the qualities that for entrepreneurs, you meant.

Being, very customer focused, being really good at being ever recruiting and storytelling. if you're a, if you're a junior software engineer today and you're not in a lot of sales meetings, you're not involved in a lot of interview processes. Like how do you're not doing big product strategy, roadmap reveals right to the board or whatever, whenever it is right.

what are, how do you go level up in those areas? How do you get more exposure? How do you dig into that? You can really be learning as much as possible to best start building up your kind of entrepreneurship. 

Saam: Yeah. I think, whether or not there's direct interface into those things in your specific role today is not an excuse to not be developing those skills.

That's the way I think about it. And so let's just take the two that you brought up storytelling and customer centricity, right? So I'll start with customer centricity. Just because I'm not sitting in a customer meeting doesn't mean I can't work in a customer centric way. So tactically, how do I go [00:35:00] understand why we're making the product decisions that we're making?

How do I pressure test them with the team that is making those decisions to confirm that they actually are oriented optimally against what the customers want? How do I understand how the team is making decisions around customer segmentation and then mapping that against product requirements and features?

I don't need to be the one doing that work, but I need to understand that work and there's, and there really isn't any excuse. I have the curiosity and desire to go understand it. And then, I would challenge the premise of the question to some degree and say look, just because you're not in customer meetings doesn't mean you can't be an advocate for the customer.

can you go, can it, what are other ways that you can go get, exposure to how customers think, can you read customer oriented materials? there's especially insecurity. There's so much content out there on how CSOs think and how they operate and what their challenges are and what their team's challenges are that you could build someone and Evan.

you do this to some degree, like you can build some understanding of it before you've even talked to customers. And so challenge yourself to develop as much empathy for the customer as you can, even if you're not in, in a [00:36:00] formal customer meeting context would be an example in the customer centricity side, on the storytelling.

I would bet every single person inside abnormal security as a group of constituents that they're working with, that they want to persuade, in the pursuit of some shared goals. And even if you're not doing recruiting a really good way to think about storytelling is how do you talk about and drive the importance of your work inside the organization.

And if you, if there's something you believe, and again, I'll just pick on the. let's say junior earlier, career engineer example, I'm sure there are points of views that one might have on like things that should be built or the way things should be done. And working on your skill of how do you get the data to actually convince your teammates that's what should happen.

Saam: And first start operating in that scope. And then over time you broaden that scope both with internal constituents and then external constituents, recruits and others. Those are the types of things that would tactically be oriented on. 

Evan: I want to transition to some of the audience questions in a sec, and then we got a bunch, but,and any other advice you have for, people at the company [00:37:00] today, or, maybe guests that are joining from normal, who are maybe they found a good place to be to work, If they're surrounded by good team, what else can they, if they want to come pitch you and, three, four years, right? what can other people be doing to really maximize their credibility? So they really hit your checklist of a years of things. I look for entrepreneur.

Oh, the other advice you share other kinds of, pro tips. 

Saam: Yeah. it's a good question. we've touched on a number of things. we've touched on a lot of things at the individual level. I want to go back to the organization level for a moment and just say that, the best way to set yourself.

Is for abnormal, and this may sound self-serving, it's really not. It's for abnormal to become as, successful and important and foundational of a company as possible. And here's why right. Just think about it, Let's say a normal goes on and by the way, we a hundred percent have the opportunity to go on and become the largest security company.

in the world over time, if we go on to become that now fast forward, Five years from now, when you're starting your company. So when you come and pitch me and you pitched three other VCs, first of all, you were a part of building the [00:38:00] most important security company in the world. The credibility that establishes for you is massive.

Saam: When you go talk to customers and you say, Hey, you don't have normal security. The vendor that's driving you a ton of value. And you really love, I was a part of building that and the customer is trying to evaluate you. And you're a brand new start. I cannot underemphasize the level of trust that will instantly earn you because the customer will say, Hey, I was really successful at that other vendor.

I remember I started working with that vendor when they were still on, relatively unknown and early. And thank God I did that. And I extend and I associate some of that trust with you as the person. And then when you go recruit people like you come to me and you're like, Hey, som come join the company.

And I say, Wow. you were part of building this thing. That was pretty fantastic, pretty important. And so it's highly likely that you will be able to do the same thing in this not new space. So I actually do think that is in some ways, the higher bid on all of this. And, and the thing I want to say is, it comes back to like iteration speed as something, and velocity is something we look for in entrepreneurs.

we need that at all. everyone in the company is an entrepreneur, right? And so [00:39:00] we need that at all levels of the organization. Every point of incremental performance that we drive in ourselves will compound to become very significant and exponentially help us separate from the pack of other companies, both direct competitors, adjacent companies, et cetera.

Saam: And so I think that's one thing I would really hit home because I think it's going to serve the organization and the organization's mission. Which is then going to serve you. And also as an individual, that's the kind of above and beyond work that then when I call Evan to reference, someone is an entrepreneur, he's going to talk about, or others inside the organization are going to talk about.

So I think that's a big one. And the second one I've already said, I just want to say it again. Is. Appreciate kind of the gravity and specialness of the moment. Like very few companies get to the strength of product market fit with the right product offering and the level of market pool and the top of quality of what we're working on that abnormal hasn't a lot of that is due to good work.

And some of that is due to [00:40:00] good fortune of the way the threat landscape has evolved over the last, even since the company got started. And so w we're all self included sitting at this exceptional moment in time where we are going to, we are on part of a slope and hopefully we'll continue on a slope that so few companies ever are on.

And so I think it's important to recognize the gravity and uniqueness of that. And for that to drive, one's perceptiveness around the things that can be learned that can be learned both by studying the way the organization is working the systems, the processes, the playbooks, and then by continuing to improve those things, because you will get the leverage here.

But you also, you have a test bed to build really the best in class versions of these things so that when you go and bark on your own adventure, you can pick them up and go apply them to a net new company.

Evan: That's really good advice. I wish I listened to this about 10 years ago. but maybe next life. so let me, I want to go over some of the, so the questions from the audience, and, oh, nice. Okay. So Sam's got this [00:41:00] pulled up. Okay. so I'm use this term world-class I use the term world-class and we describe it to to, I use it to me and kinda like the best, the basketball.

you use that phrase what does that mean to you? And,and also I know at the grade partnership, you guys are talking a lot about. Is this really world-class right. Like how do you define that? What is that? 

Saam: It's a good question. When I think of class, I think of what is the top, pick percentage 1% 0.1% of executing on any particular function.

and we didn't talk about what founders can do to scale themselves into effective CEOs and leaders, but I'll touch on that and connect it back to this. Which is. When you're a founder you're, as I said, you might be world-class at one thing. Hopefully we're close to world-class at something and you're good enough at a number of things.

Saam: And then what ha what has to happen for you to be a successful founder and for the organization to successfully scale is you have to go attract world-class in all of these dimensions around yourself and hire people who are much, much better than you at these dimensions. What that requires is an understanding of what world-class looks like.

So if you pick any [00:42:00] function, you take. And enterprise sales, who's built the very best enterprise sales teams, right? At different levels of scale. we were lucky to be working with some of those people at abnormal today. And then Evan from early on before, before he, when he started the company before we had a customer, much less a sales team, Evan asked myself and others around the company, Hey, who are the very best leaders in this, in these functions.

And can you introduce them to me? Not because I want to hire them today, but because I want to develop my own understanding of what that looks like, so that when I need to hire, I can look for it. So you met Kevin, you met folks who led, go to market at service now and Informatica and all these top organizations.

And So that, that, that's how I think about world class. And I think there are different companies that are world-class at different things. and so for example, I think when you think about sales actually service now does rank very high. the organization that Frank is not building at snowflake ranks very high.

Salesforce has always had a tremendous, ability and marketing broadly. And I think I've been, you've met leaders on the marketing side and others. [00:43:00] that's what we mean when we say world-class. Cool. That's 

Evan: helpful song. so kinda the next question was around kind of career frameworks that you've developed, And maybe life frameworks and,just to embarrass you a little bit som since, you're trying to, you said nice things about me. but,when I think about you and you, how to your career, right? you have a very steep curve. And you've really accomplished a lot.

And, even just knowing you for the last, several years, Just I feel like the rate in which you're learning and developing kind of gathering wisdom, Is, is, higher than probably almost anyone else I've met. So like, How do you know when you think about you have a different career path, right?

Evan: That probably almost everyone at the company, but yeah. Any kind of frameworks that you've used to help inform how you spend your time, where you focus your learning, to help you learn and grow. 

it's a good question. so I think there are like general frameworks and then functional frameworks.

Saam: So for example, we talked, something I spend a lot of time on is how to pick people to work with. and I'll be honest, like I think that is the hardest thing in Metro capital. Every single one of our mistakes, particularly [00:44:00] on companies that we could have invested in partnered with that we didn't, that went on to be very significant and we underestimated the person.

And so I walk you through my latest version of that framework, but I'd say that's a work in progress. and I'll talk about a market framework as well, but then there's also general framework. So in the general frameworks and just around career building, w one thing I really focus is focus on is non-linearity and growth and learning, right?

I one of my first managers told me something to the effect of in most jobs, you work for a year and you've get a year's worth of learning and good jobs. You work for a year and you get three years worth of learning. And in exceptional jobs, you work for a year and you get 10 years worth of learning.

And I like the more I'm in this business. of technology both personally, and also seeing people like you and others develop their own career paths. I cannot stress how much I believe in this framework. And so every career junction I've looked for, for these non-linear learning opportunities, and then you would ask what characterizes a nonlinear learning opportunity?

And to me, like there are two things. One is. The organization is going through dramatic and fluxion [00:45:00] on whatever dimension is relevant for the type of organization. So for example, like when I, my, my first job in technology was, in product management at a company called relate IQ, which was an early, kind of intelligence CRM player.

And I joined that company when it was 40 people, just post product market fit. And over the course of my time there, my responsibility, literally 10 X, not because. I, inherently deserve 10 X the scope, but the business was growing so quickly that they had no choice, but to expand the scope of everyone at the company.

And so I look back and I'm like, wow, I spent two years there, but I feel like I saw much more than that. And so one is you want the organization to be like that. And then the second. You could have two people do the exact same job at the exact same company and person one could extract a lot more learning and career development out of it than person two based on their attitude and the way they approach the job.

So it comes back to like, When I was like, I relate IQ, for example, I spent a lot of time thinking about the frameworks on how the company was doing certain things. [00:46:00] And I think I understood those frameworks better than perhaps others who just didn't have the same level of curiosity around them.

Hey, like why do what. Why is this the approach we take to making product decisions? Why do we involve customers at these junctions and not in these other directions and not all of those things may be correct. But the fact that I actually took interest in learning those things meant I extracted and absorb more from that a work experience than perhaps others.

Saam: So I'd say, look for nonlinearity is one general heuristic. I think the second year of stick is I look for working in organizations where everyone I work with is better than me in some domains. Because that means I can learn from everyone I'm working with. And so I always say to friends who are interviewing, the best interviews are the ones where you work out and you're like, I'm not sure I did a great job.

And it feels like everyone who was interviewing me as much smarter than I am. And whether it was that related IQ, the company I founded joining Greylock and the entrepreneurs they work with and every single one of these contexts, I'm working with people that I learned. And I it's just like a great hack, because if you surround yourself with people who are world-class at what they [00:47:00] do, you get to learn at least what world-class looks like across these different functions.

So those are two general frameworks. I'd say my two most relevant frameworks for company buildings. Since I know that's something folks are interested in. One is the dimensions around how to develop yourself as an entrepreneur. The second is around markets, right? and maybe I'll give like the 32nd version of my framework for markets and then we can have a longer conversation.

But market selection is everything. And roughly when I look at markets. Three types of markets. I want to invest in or build companies against. One is what I'd call existing markets, where you're running a replacement play. So this is where you have a large incumbent with meaningful market penetration.

And the great thing about running this play is you're not taking any market risk, empirically that customers will pay for a solution in this area. And the revenues are large enough to support a significant company. So then the question just becomes, how are you going to overtime replace the incumbent and the best companies that are.

Are typically writing some change in the landscape, either in the customer's problem or in the technology [00:48:00] that allows them to deliver a step function, superior solution. That is non-trivial for the incumbent to deliver because of the architectural decisions the incumbent has made. and they initially might live alongside the incumbent.

But over time they replaced the incumbent and Palo Alto looked like that. Workday look like. And that leads to really big markets. The second is emerging markets. So these are markets where there isn't an incumbent because there's some new customer behavior that's developed, but that customer behavior is going very quickly.

And so you build a company that exploits the, or takes advantage of the growth of that behavior. So I'll give you all an example insecurity, which is five, six years ago. This market emerged around container security, with the rise of Kubernetes and Docker and these things, and that wasn't an, a market that existed historically, but as customers began to modernize infrastructure, doing things like container scanning became really important.

And so the entrepreneurs who observe. And built companies into that growing trend. And so that's the second type we like. And then the third type I don't like, which is what I'd call new market creation, where [00:49:00] you're betting that there's going to be some behavior change that doesn't yet exist. And some companies do succeed that way. But what I would say to anyone who wants to start a company in the future is if you pick one of the ideas in the first two buckets, your probability of success going in is his step function. So that's the framework around picking markets. 

Evan: Yeah. I w I would say also in terms of even picking careers, I do think like I've really started appreciate this in the last, five years, but picking a market is really important for us.

Unexpected reasons, right? Being accountable in a good market, that's going through like this platform shift or this combine a reset mutation of sorts like that causes companies to be, higher growth than normal. The high growth attracts people that want to go into high growth environments who want to learn and grow.

And those as a certain type of person or personality, a certain type of. And those people attract other people like them. And so they're I think looking for the markets is like a good, leading indicator right. Of the type of, the type of team and culture.

They'll ended up being, I think it, those opportunities, like you said, for a couple of [00:50:00] reasons, To create a environment and kind of learning, learn and grow a lot. Absolutely. So we got five minutes left. We get, there's 10 more questions. you want to do a quick kind of lightning round for some of this.

Saam: Okay. 

I don't totally understand this question, but would you look at a potential entrepreneur from a successful startup, like abnormal differently than other backgrounds? in a related AI cyber subject matter. So if you had maybe one entrepreneur that had like really high domain expertise for some, with no domain expertise, but a successful background, how do you wait the two 

Saam: good question?

The answer would be nuanced, but I, but if I was to simplify, I would orient more towards the successful background than the domain background with the bet being that if you have an understanding around these core principles and frameworks of problem discovery, customer identification, we're building product in a customer centric way, and you've done that in domain X.

I'd rather bet that you can learn domain Y then take someone from domain. Why, but who doesn't actually understand those fundamentals. [00:51:00] Cool. 

Evan: Okay. I'm going to pick and choose some of these questions. one, one question is, basically like a. Oh, what kind of sounds you're like, shouldn't we be a little skeptical of venture capitalists given they're on like a ton of different board seats.

How is Greylock different about that? 

Saam: Yeah,you should be, and that is, they shouldn't be skeptical of, venture capitalists. when I talked to an entrepreneur and I haven't, we may have talked about this one when you all were deciding, if you wanted to partner with us, the first thing I say is any VC partner you're considering working with.

Don't just look at like the one amazing company they're involved with. Go look at all the companies that are involved with talk to the entrepreneurs who are on both w who both have been part of successful companies and companies that didn't work out and also look at what their quote unquote hit rate is.

So for example, like at Greylock, we pride ourselves, especially on the enterprise side of the business and you can go look at myself or others in our backgrounds. Most of the companies we're involved with probably 70 to 75% plus. On the enterprise side, go on to have successful outcomes. And the reason for that is not because we're magicians, but it's because we are [00:52:00] highly selective.

Saam: We only make one or two investments a year and we hold a really high bar around the quality of entrepreneur and deploy the market opportunity. And then we do a lot of work to help maximize the probability of that. Company's success. 

Evan: Yeah. And that's when I first met a sheen, that was one of the things that attracted me to him.

he was on, I think eight boards at the time. And, I asked, one of my friends at gray locker said, Hey, what's a shame, his track record. And the response was, I don't know if you've ever he's ever lost a dollar. So I think that, yeah, unlike a. my guess is unlike some firms, You guys are very focused. And it's different than separately. putting a checks, a bunch of companies and see what the portfolio yields. Which is a business model, but it's different. okay. Got time for maybe one more. What is, what's the number one mistake in entrepreneur?

Saam: Number one mistake is, is building a product nobody wants as trite as that sounds. I think the most common reason why a company we back does not succeed is because they pick a poor market opportunity. And [00:53:00] by the way, that might mean people still want the product. There are many forms of poor market opportunities.

It could be that the customers want the product or not. Attractive customers to go acquire because they can't spend a lot of money on the product. It could be that the there's a small set of customers that need the product, but it's too small of a set to actually build a scaling business. It could be that they're building a developer oriented tool where, it's useful, but it's very hard for them actually to drive commercial value around what they're doing.

So there's nuance in. Statement, but at the highest level, it would be, booming a product that people don't want to consistently buy and pay significant amounts of money for. Okay. 

Evan: I gonna sneak one final way. And so like maybe outside of, let's say you're in a good market, you got a great product.

There's some teams and cultures that don't succeed. Despite those things, what are the most important parts of, building the team, building the culture that also enable that success because not all about, product market. 

Saam: Absolutely. There are a couple, I say different successful companies actually have different cultures.

And so that is actually one thing that's exciting for us as we [00:54:00] get to work with companies that are oriented differently, but then there are some shared characteristics across the successful companies. And this is in no particular order, but the things that immediately come to mind, one is desire for excellence.

And oneself and in each other, right? The best companies and teams hold them, everyone is holding themselves accountable and their teammates accountable to playing at an A-plus level. The second is, I've used this word a lot, but really high customer centricity at a cultural. And you see it, right?

Some companies, they applaud things that are massive. Customer wins. Some companies apply things that are massive technology wins, and those things are not necessarily biometric, but it's slightly different. It leads to different behaviors depending on what the culture rewards. the, 

Evan: I got to cut you off there.

I also got to keep you on those two, because those are also our core values. So we'll just go with those as being the only two important things outside of our other three core values. I know we're out of time, so I'm sorry to cut you off, but. Really appreciate you taking the time to join us and looking forward to, you coming back and share more of your advice and wisdom with us.

So thanks so much for 

Saam: [00:55:00] Thanks Evan for having me. And it's good to see everyone virtually and yeah, thanks again for letting us at Greylock to be a part of the journey. And we're so excited for the opportunity ahead at abnormal. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. I'll just one last thing.

We're going to send you a feedback, form, in as soon after this meeting. So please take a look at that. and that's it. Thank you all for your time. Thank you. So thank you, Evan. Bye-bye.

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