Well, I'm really excited to invite our next guest speakers, Mamoon Hamid and Arvind Jain. I don't think they need any introduction, but I will do some. Arvind Jain is the founder and CEO of Glean and one of the fastest growing enterprise AI companies in the world. Before Glean, he spent over a decade at Google as a distinguished engineer working on search, maps, and YouTube. Mamoon is the managing partner at Kleiner Perkins, the firm that backed Google, Amazon, Green Tech. So yeah, please help me in welcoming them. Moderating them will be Mubarak Imam, one of our closest advisers. Thank you.
I was curious if you want to start by sharing something about each other that you know but the audience might not know, to help them know you better about each other.
Well, I think let me just share something that people may actually know, but for us, Mamoon has been an integral part of the Glean journey. They're known in the market as the first investors, but they were also the first feeders to us. We had a hungry bunch of engineers, we needed food, and we were actually able to bootstrap in Kleiner Perkins' office and eat in their kitchen. So that's a fact that I wanted to share with everybody.
Let's see about Arvind. You can probably tell already from the 30 seconds of him speaking that he's extremely humble and modest, but he's also figured out a way to be in the right companies at the right time. He was at a company called Akamai, which anyone who followed Akamai saw the rise and not the fall because it's still around and it's a big public company. And then after that he went to Riverbed, and then he went to Google very early. And then he started a company, Rubrik, and then he started Glean before it was obvious that Glean was an obvious idea and opportunity. So Arvind is at the right place at the right time not because he's lucky but because he's skillful.
So, Mamoon, you were born in Lahore and grew up in Frankfurt. And back then, immigrants were still relatively new in Germany. And I was curious if you could talk a little bit about what it was like to grow up as a teenage Muslim boy of Pakistani origin in Germany.
Well, Germany did have a mass migration of Turks after World War II. So I was lucky enough to have lots of other Muslims that are Turks there in Frankfurt. But it was, you didn't think too much about it when you were growing up. I think that's all you know. Germany in the 70s and 80s — I was born in 1978, so really the 80s — and West Germany in the 80s split up from East Germany. But Frankfurt, cities like Frankfurt, actually had a large number of Muslims, and we had our own community of Pakistanis. We'd go to each other's homes on weekends. And yes, you went to school with German kids and you played soccer with German kids, and then you saw each other in Pakistani homes. So we had, I feel like, a pretty traditional Pakistani upbringing even though we lived in Frankfurt, Germany. And in fact, when we moved to Pakistan when I was 10 years old, which were really formative years for me, you realize like, wow, we're sort of old-fashioned because my parents came to Germany in the early 70s. And now that we went back in the early 90s, they were still living in the early 70s, right? But it was a wonderful upbringing. I mean, I would not exchange anything. And I never felt like I may have been an outsider, but it never felt that way. Because I think you just look at the opportunity as a kid in front of you. And it was amazing.
And Arvind, your journey to the US was different. You'd grown up in a small town, then moved to Delhi, and then you'd come to the US. What about Mamoon's story resonates and what feels different?
Yeah, I think for me it's the same way. I came to the US in the mid-90s, and I actually moved to Seattle, so there was not that large of an Indian community, but there was some. And we would do the same — I was also in school, so I studied with Americans, everybody else, but then there was always this other community of my friends, most of them having immigrated from India. So yeah, I think it's very similar to your experiences. I never really felt that I was out of place. In fact, it actually felt like the best of all the worlds — you get to actually still spend time with people of the same background, but yet you get to enjoy some of the new things you get here.
That's wonderful. In case the crowd hasn't noticed yet, both of them are incredibly humble people, and I'm really curious if you can talk a little bit about your values. Which ones of your immigrant values have you held on to, and what new values have you adopted living now in the US?
Yeah, as an immigrant, my parents to Germany and then me further to America, there's always this — you're trying to play it safe. You're just trying to make it enough to support your family, support your parents, make a life of your own. And I think that's great, and many immigrants live that way. But I think once you get to Silicon Valley, your mindset really does change. And you feel like you have to go for it and really go for the — I'm not sure what the American dream is anymore, but what I perceive to be the American dream, really the Silicon Valley dream, which is to think big, that anything is possible. And with your talent and skill and the air that occupies Silicon Valley, you can do anything you want. And I always say that in Silicon Valley, ordinary people do extraordinary things. And I think that's something that, as sort of the true immigrant mentality that I probably shed, was that anything was possible. And I think we do see it here in this room, all of you. And what immigrants can do when they have meritocracy and capital and other talent around them — you can build some pretty incredible companies.
And I never really thought of me possessing some immigrant characteristics. I don't think anybody thinks, oh, I'm an immigrant, I need to actually work this way or that way. But I think there are certain things that you sort of have in your mindset — you've come far from your home, you want to make it big, you want to succeed, and for that you have to work hard. And so those are the things that I've actually always sort of kept with me. I've kept working hard, even if I don't need to, because I think that desire to win, that desire to succeed, and prove to the world — I think that's one thing that drives me.
Thanks. There's a question that almost every admit to the business school here answers, which is: what matters to you most and why? And I'm curious what that is for each of you.
Actually, sorry, I missed —
What matters to you most and why?
What matters to you most? Well, I think in the context of work or even personal life, this answer changes for everybody as they get older. For me right now, the most important thing for me is to actually have this feeling of, well, number one, that I'm having fun doing things that I actually like, that I'm doing, and number two, that I'm actually making an impact. Because that feeling of pride of making an impact actually is very satisfying personally to me.
I would say what matters to me most — it starts with faith. Then it extends to family. And then right after that, it's the people that I made a commitment to. My founders, the CEOs I work with — that I'm there for them day and night, to serve them, to be at their disposal. And yeah, it's my work really, my craft, my passion, which is to work with people like Arvind.
And Arvind, since you're on that list of people that matter most to Mamoon, you talked about in one of your earlier interviews that you felt a deep connection, a deep personal connection. What about Mamoon drew you?
This is like therapy. Yeah, I don't think I've ever told him that, so he will hear it for the first time also. When I was starting Glean, the idea itself was something that I think everybody rejected. We're building a search product for businesses, and everybody else who tried to do that before us had failed. So it was not an interesting idea, it was not a new idea, but it was a big problem, and it meant to me personally something that I felt would really change how people work and make them happier. So I wanted to do it. And when I met Mamoon, the first thing I got from that conversation was empathy — understanding me and why I wanted to solve it, and actually that belief. And I think I could also tell that he was not really thinking about the idea as much as he was thinking about would he want to partner with me, which was important to me. And I felt that. So that was an important thing for me — to actually have that personal relationship that we're going to grow over time, to have somebody who believed in what I wanted to do. And then I think the other thing was — the way these things work is when we meet for the first time, we actually talk to a lot of people whom we know in common, and we learn about each other through that common network. And what I learned from that was a lot of great things about Mamoon, which we've seen now over the last seven years of partnership — that continuous support, you can always bank on him for any sort of challenges you're going through. You know that we'll have that support individually as we go through the struggle, and they're going to be a partner for us for the long term. And then of course, I feel that comfort — we are in the Indo-Pak forum here. Sometimes there are tensions, challenges between two nations, but of course I've never seen any tension or challenge between two individuals from these two countries in the subcontinent. And for me, I felt that connection — anybody from the subcontinent, you feel like we have somewhat shared values, upbringing, and it just creates an extra comfort, which is why we actually launched into a partnership.
And Mamoon, I remember you mentioning that nearly 50% of the founders that you've funded are Indian or of Indian origin. What do you think — and I think Arvind shared a classic example of one of your strong traits, which is empathy — what have you sort of done to win the hearts and minds of founders, or especially Indian founders, where sometimes there might be that tension initially that's subtle, but to sort of put that at ease? And what can we learn from that more generally in how people live in the two countries?
I think just to talk numbers — of the founders that we back, I think about almost 60% are immigrants. And let's just say half those are of Indian backgrounds, and maybe my weighting is slightly more towards Indian, Pakistani, or let's just say South Asian backgrounds. So I think that's just probably raw numbers, and just given my own background, maybe I have an affinity towards founders from South Asia — from India, Pakistan. And I've backed lots of Pakistani founders as well. And those are just the numbers. I would just say that immigrants make great founders. There's just something about upbringing. They come here for education. They want to make the most of that time. They're 6,000, 7,000 miles away from their families, and their opportunity cost is being with their families. And they came here for a reason. And so there's a real reason why immigrants make amazing founders. So I haven't — I don't think I've ever thought about it from a, am I backing Indian founders, or do I have a relationship or kinship? Of course we have kinship. We share very similar values and language and arts and media culture. And so there's so much that's shared. And my job is to capture not just the minds of these people, but also the hearts — to make sure that they feel like I'm going to be a great partner for them. Our mission at Kleiner Perkins is to be the first call for founders, and I can only be the first call for founders if they feel like they can relate to me, or I can relate to them and understand them and empathize with them. And so I think there's something to be said about having shared values and shared upbringing and shared mission. And so I think that naturally manifests itself into about half the founders that I work with being of Indian descent.
That's great. And are there any areas you avoid discussing? You guys obviously have a very deep partnership and friendship.
I'll start. I don't think we've ever discussed politics.
Yeah, we haven't. I think we actually — well, if that's the question, like what we don't discuss, I think we almost discuss nothing beyond — I think we're too focused on work. Most of the times, it's just only talking about how to make the product better, how to succeed more as a company. I mean, that's the lion's share of what our partnership is like. But of course, we do — yeah, I don't know, actually. I guess I should just also admit that I probably don't have other topics to talk about.
I was probably happy — yeah, we don't have time to waste on stuff that's irrelevant to building an amazing business. And that's how we further the world. And I think honestly, that's the truth — we could talk about other stuff, and I'm sure we'd have a lot of points of view. But I think there's certain things that we can control and certain things that we can't control. On the things that we can control, we work on really hard.
Yeah. Well, I think I should just share — there's this thing about what do you know about each other that other people don't know. And I think I should just mention on the concept of what do you talk about. The complaint that I get at home or from all my friends is I just don't talk. Because — so I think sometimes as an entrepreneur you just get singularly focused on how are you going to succeed, how are you going to bring a great product to people, how are you going to add value to them. So yeah, it does dominate most of our conversations.
On the latter, I was just going to say I'm married to an entrepreneur, and so that resonates very deeply on a personal level.
Yeah, even I think with your husband, I don't think we talk politics ever.
I don't think you want to start talking to him about politics, Mamoon, but that's a whole separate topic.
Okay. All right. Well, and by the way, I also have a word limit. My wife's sitting here in the audience, and she says by 8:00 p.m., when it's time to just have a conversation with her, I've run out of words because I've been talking to Arvind. Yeah.
So, Arvind, you've had an incredible storied career — switching to work and business. At Microsoft, then for over a decade at Google, founding Rubrik, and then starting Glean. I'm really curious what motivates you.
