Reid Hoffman and Saam Motamedi | The Virtual VC

Hi, this is Chris Yeh, the co author of Blitzscaling and I'm delighted to be joined today by my co author Reid Hoffman and his fellow partner at Greylock, Sam Matamedi. So Reid and Sam, for the audience, maybe you can just introduce yourself briefly.

So this is Reid Hoffman. In addition to being a partner at Greylock, I'm also the co founder of LinkedIn, host of Masters of Scale and not very good at comedy.

And this is Salm Matamidi. I'm one of the partners here at Greylock where I've been for the last four years investing in enterprise software focused on AIML, security infrastructure and SaaS.

So the topic today is of course as always, the COVID 19 pandemic. But we're not going to be talking about infection rates or vaccines or anything like that. We're going to be talking about instead is how the pandemic has changed the nature of making investments and in venture capital. And let's just start with a pretty obvious question that a lot of entrepreneurs have in their minds. Are you still making investments right now? And that's individually and for the firm as a whole?

Well, Sam will obviously talk about this himself, but we've actually both made investments during the time of the pandemic. Obviously, as we're going to be going into in this podcast, it's a little novel and different in some ways, in some ways the same. But broadly speaking, the goal set of a firm like Greylock is still very much the same, which is we make these very early stage investments in seeds, Series A's, Series B's with a goal that these companies in 10 plus years are massive global industry transforming companies. And so with that as a lens, you're still very active in these times. And that part of how you're looking at this, being active is you go look at each, you know, month or quarter, there's a possibly new technology platform, a possibly new bold idea that hasn't occurred to us, that's out in the network that gets to us and we go, oh my God, that's going to be transforming. And so you always want to be active. Right? Just because we've got this thing, which is of course a massive asteroid impact to society and the world. But that doesn't slow down. That's still that desperate need for, for new companies, new products, new services, new jobs, new industries and that idea and that platform may be there.

Yeah, as Reid mentioned, we're absolutely still open for investments. And if you look across our team, we've made a number of Investments since early March when Covid began and we all moved to working from home. And we'll talk a little bit about how the process looks different now with everyone working from home. But the interesting thing is if you look at our investment pacing, there hasn't been any sort of drop off post Covid, and that's both investments in new companies and also putting more capital into some of our existing companies. One of the things that's interesting is the crisis just creates new opportunity and creativity in entrepreneurs. And if you look at the people we're having meetings with, albeit virtually now, you know, every week, we continue to be very impressed by the new opportunities and new companies that are being started. And it's led to a number of very, very early investments in with just one or two people in a slide deck, as well as some companies that are up and running who have seen their business accelerate because of the behavior changes that Covid have brought and us getting to join the journey a little bit later on.

Yeah, part of what Sam's talking about is that acceleration is kind of based early. One of the things that Satya Nadella, who's the CEO of Microsoft, said is that in two months they've seen two years of digital transformation. And obviously given that Greylock's focus is within enterprise software and consumer software, that software transformation has actually been accelerated. And so existing portfolio companies that's range from like, you know, a Roblox and Discord in the entertainment space to Coda have all seen this great acceleration. And then we're also seeing that in our new investments that we're looking at as well.

Now, the usual process for these investments involves a partner meeting, all these folks sitting around a table physically together. The entrepreneurs come in, they're sweating, they make their pitch, there's a whole bunch of discussion. None of that can happen in person right now. So obviously there must be some changes that have happened. Maybe you can share some of the details on how the process of making these investments has changed and how has it been different for companies where maybe you already knew the entrepreneurs and were in process and for things that are completely new and some. Why don't you start off with this one?

Yeah, absolutely. I'd say the fundamentals of our process are unchanged. When we meet a new company and a new entrepreneur, we're focused on first and foremost understanding the person and understanding his or her team. We want to understand the market opportunity, the initial product wedge, and how the business is going to scale. And just as importantly, we want to let the people understand us and what we can bring to the company's investors and partners, to them in their journey. Chris, as you said, we're not sitting around a physical table anymore when we have these conversations, but we're all spending our weeks on video, having entrepreneurs join us and the rest of our partners on Zoom calls, and in many cases, spending more time than we used to before because of the constraints of video as a communication medium. In order to build that shared trust and understanding, a few things I'd say have changed, other than the obvious, which is you're not in person and you're in video. One is, you know, it's. It's a little bit more difficult to truly get to know someone and get a sense for their team and the energy and passion and dream. And so we've done a number of things to try to replace that in a virtual world. One thing I've done on new investments I've made is explicitly spend time on video with other key people in the team, beyond just the founders, to get the sense that we'd normally get from going into someone's office. Another piece is make it easy to be vulnerable and have that shared vulnerability with the entrepreneur. And whether that's breaking bread virtually or sharing something that you have in your house, that's a personal item. When you're both on Zoom, there's different tactics we've been using to build that same level of trust over video.

Yeah, Soma said it really well, as usual. And the thing is that. And it's funny because I hadn't really thought of it as a virtual world. When I think of virtual worlds, I think avatars moving around, but we are in this kind of proxy virtual world that SAHM's referring to. And it becomes more important because investing isn't just the intellectual exercise of, you know, kind of like. And it is the intellectual exercise, but like, oh, do I have a big market? Do I have a good product market fit? Do I have a plan for getting there? Do I have the capabilities and the assets in the team and other kinds of things that may play into it. But it's also a, should we go on this journey together? Do we have belief and trust in each other? Because, you know, almost all investments go through a valley of the shadow period where it's pretty stressful. Will we problem solve well together? Will we soldier on and make the thing work? And we'll be, you know, working well together. And so part of that is to actually have that as a bidirectional understanding, a bidirectional relationship, a connection. So you have to work harder at it in this new, you know, virtual environment, this new virtual world. And so the various ways to do it is to try to, you know, it would seem a little artificial, perhaps, if you were meeting at the office the way that we used to, but now it's so important to do that. It's worth taking that little bit of artifice to actually open up and actually connect, which is obviously a little more challenging in today's environment.

And, Chris, the other part of your question was just how it varies across entrepreneurs who are already in the network versus entrepreneurs who are new to the network. And the exciting thing has been, if you look over the last few months, we've made new investments where we've partnered with people who were already known to us or who were in the network, but also ones where we've partnered with people who are outside the network. And we'll talk more about some of the positives of Covid's impact on entrepreneurship and investing. But one thing is to just go back to some of the dynamics Reid was talking about as we as an ecosystem have gotten better around how to do this virtually. It actually levels the playing field from a geographic perspective. And so it used to be much harder for us to build that same level of trust and connection and understanding with someone who couldn't visit us in our offices here in the Bay Area. But now, because we're. We've learned how to do that virtually, it's just as easy for us to talk to an entrepreneur who's somewhere else in the US or somewhere else in the world and build that same level of trust. And some of our investments that we've made since COVID actually are companies where the founders are not in the Bay Area, and we've never met them in person.

You know, in addition, one of the things that SAHM and I and all the other partners are working at is we go, oh, well, here's an interesting opportunity to have a more geographic diversity. We're also trying to make, you know, because obviously to today's times, we're trying to make efforts at broader diversity as well. Like, we're kind of trying to say, okay, what are the ways that we can. We're canvassing how do we meet people of color, entrepreneurs, you know, women entrepreneurs. How do we make sure that that's included in this as well? Because in the same way that you have geographic diversity, you may also get some of these other parts of diversity. And the partnership as a whole feels very strongly on this question, that if you're not part of the solution these problems, you're part of the problem. And so we're all working on it with some real vigor. So that's part of the reason why the GEO also gives you these lenses into these other social challenges that we might be able to make some headway on.

And it sounds like even though obviously this pandemic has increased the hardship, made it more challenging, there are silver linings, as you point out, the ability to invest independent of geography and the ability to level the playing field for folks that couldn't necessarily come here to the Bay Area and see you folks in person. So I'm glad to hear that there are some benefits. Now the other thing of course is that the pandemic may have changed some of the spaces and themes that you're looking at. Are there things where before the pandemic you weren't looking but all of a sudden now this is an area that you're exploring. How. How has the pandemic changed the investing theses?

Well, one of the things that I think is kind of funny is everyone presumes because this asteroid has hit society, has caused a major public health crisis, an impact possibly equivalent to the Great Depression in economics. Real configuration of service industry has created extra pain and suffering within the essentially the service industry and a lot of people who work in those industries to say look, everything's changed. And actually in fact there are some things like we look at telehealth a little bit more we wrote about that week or two ago, but actually in fact because it's a 10 plus year, where is the world moving to? Not just in the time of the pandemic and the time of COVID but in general in work, in entertainment and life. Actually in fact broadly speaking all of the same kind of world trends are the same. What's changed a little bit is like well what does the next couple years look like? Do you have an accelerated way of getting on market like telehealth? Is the market being conditioned or is regulation changing because of where we are? But those are I think some of the very broad themes.

Reid said it really well, which is I think one of the key headlines is given that we're really long term investors and often aspire to be part of company journeys for 10 years plus the headline a lot of the themes haven't changed but I think there's change then there's acceleration and what certainly has happened and Reid referenced this earlier with the Microsoft data point is you've taken a number of trends we've been tracking and we've been investing in and entrepreneurs have been starting companies in and you've radically accelerated them. And when you accelerate these trends, it both makes the existing opportunity set more exciting. It also creates new opportunities because people have to adjust to these behavior changes much faster than they thought they would. I'll start by talking a little bit about those changes on the enterprise side of our business and then want to ask Reid about it on the consumer side. On the enterprise side, the main thing that's happened as we've referenced, is the acceleration of digital transformation and taking 10 year digitization roadmaps and compressing them into 1 to 2. That's had an impact across all the sectors we invest in. Two that are interesting to me. One is security. As people have moved from working in offices to working from their home offices, the way you approach security as an enterprise has changed. The priority around remote access has increased significantly. And now that all communication is on zoom or email, chat, sms, the security and integrity of these distributed channels of communication is much more important. And so we've seen acceleration in our portfolio in companies that are helping address these challenges and also are seeing new companies get formed taking these challenges head on. I think the second piece is just the future of work and productivity. Again, you take people collaborating in a conference room around a whiteboard and you put them all in separate homes. A whole new set of tooling has to get created to make people just as productive and creative as before. If you go up and down the productivity stack, whether it's documents, design tools, slides, all of these areas are being reimagined to be browser first and collaborative by default. And I'm looking forward to seeing more and more tools come up because I think it's also going to make the way we work here at Greylock more productive.

Yeah. And I think one of the things there's some investments we've made recently in this which are not announced yet. There's others that are part of the portfolio like Coda and others in terms of this reconfiguration. And part of I think the reconfiguration is like Coda is turning it into a platform so that you can actually run the way you want to work. You can configure it to the things that you're trying to do now within the consumer side, I'd say that part of what's happening broadly and I guess you could say consumer generally and then marketplaces, because one of the things that SA mentioned, consumer generally, is like actually in fact, suddenly it's like, what we thought is that you're going to need a whole bunch of things delivered, software delivered virtually, and that's just being accelerated. So, you know, there's a ton more need for, okay, what, what do we have for entertainment? What are our kids doing when they're sheltered in place? What kinds of things are helpful to them in terms of education? What kinds of things are helpful them in terms of entertainment, engagement and all of that. And I think that that's kind of broadly across media and a bunch of other things is happening now within marketplaces. One of the things that's kind of an interesting surprise is obviously everyone has seen the kind of ground zero of the asteroid is like the travel industry. And part of the thing that's been very interesting is see how robust and adaptive Airbnb has been. Because Airbnb essentially by having a network and having essentially all of these hosts who are essentially developers and then kind of reconfigure to, well, what is the new travel pattern and what they're finding and they've seen, you know, really robust domestic recovery in, in the US and, and in Europe. What they're finding is that actually, in fact now, as opposed to international travel, people are doing more 200 to 600 mile travel. They actually prefer houses versus hotels because as opposed to like the same thing like why you don't go to a concert is you don't want to be in a small aggregated place with a whole bunch of people. I can actually have space for this. And so Airbnb has actually had, you know, like after the asteroid hit, the recovery has been much faster because of a network property. And that's of course part of the digital transformation that you're seeing within the consumer side. Because the transformation you're seeing is like actually, in fact, more of these things happen through networks as a platform of which marketplace is one of them, and that those networks are actually more resilient and more adaptive and more innovative more quickly. And that's what, you know, we've had the pleasure and honor of seeing the, you know, amazing team at Airbnb pivot and execute towards by being really well connected with their hosts and the travelers and, and, and being a high repository of trust there.

Reid, one thing I'm curious about is as you think about this, the US and a lot of the world more broadly, consumers being in some version of shelter at home, how do you think about the new behaviors that are getting unlocked? And then how should entrepreneurs think about which behaviors are going to persist post pandemic versus what's going to be more temporary but not a long term enduring opportunity.

So one is everyone's going to be forced to use online a lot more. So they'll experiment a lot, they'll see things. And so the things that are like before, I just wouldn't adapt like telehealth, like I'm a chronic disease person or a more elderly person in those cases. I don't want to use newfangled technology. I just want to go see my gp, right in this case, general practitioner, not general partner. And I'll do that. But all of a sudden, oh my God, I can't do that, but I can do it. Oh, and actually now I can actually do this really quickly and easily. And, and so that's the conditioning of the market. So there'll be times where I wouldn't have necessarily tried to adopt something, but when I've adopted it, I will then keep doing it because it's actually in fact better than the thing was before. And it just was a resistance to adopting it. And that's the thing that both changes now and then persist. The thing that doesn't persist as much is the fact that people say, well, we're now going to have distributed work and that's the whole thing. And maybe, you know, distributed work or remote work will go from, you know, 5%, which is over 4 to 10 or 20, and maybe, you know, some percentage of organizations beyond the previous handful of companies that were like the world of the distributed work companies. You know, we're automatic, we're 37 signals, we're GitLab. Like where are the, where the thing. Actually, in fact, I think there will be the same drives will be, no, no, we'll get back to the office, we'll be doing these things. And so there's reasons why those drives are there. Like a lot of people work more effectively there. There's energy and innovation that works together. But like the question is. So that doesn't mean that they, they're all the way there, but like which things they'll then persist. What will persist is more use of the tools that when they work well, more use of kind of the asynchronous kind of knowledge management or workflow tools, you know, and that's on the work side. And the same thing is true on the entertainment side, which is the. Okay, so I actually got used to like, maybe because I'm at home, I got more, that much more. I get more bored of TV or more bored of the general thing. So I start experimenting with Things like caffeine. And I go, okay, what's a social TV like? I want to see new things. Oh, this is really great. Or I'm going to go do more games. I'm going to do more. Like, I hadn't really thought of myself as a games player, but now I'm going to play more games. And then the ones that will stick are the ones that have a natural play still that after I've been. I've been encouraged to try something because the dynamics but still play in my life as I'm going forward. And that's obviously somewhat of an a judgment of art and a judgment of a theory of human nature, because the numbers will be a little strange one way or the other when you're in the time of the pandemic.

And it really does feel like one of the things that emerges from this is you can think of it as one of several things. There are a class of things where they are essentially a substitute for something that we can't currently do. So we can't currently do face to face meetings. So we have more zoom meetings, we have more video meetings as a result. There's another set that I think you referred to, Reid, where something is essentially a better replacement. And the reason it wasn't adopted before was due to inertia or legacy or attitudes. But now that the pandemic has smashed through those things, people realize this is actually a true replacement and it is in fact superior to what we were doing before. And those things will tend to be very persistent. But then there's that third category that you referred to with things like your entertainment, where it is a chance to form a new habit. And the real question becomes, is not that? Is this habit better than what came before? Because oftentimes in entertainment, that's kind of a judgment call. It's more like, does it form a durable habit? Is it something that people are going to keep doing after things go back to normal? And that's the question in your mind, is it a replacement? Is it a substitute? Is it an enduring habit? So the next question is something which touches on again, the process of interacting with these different entrepreneurs. So you've changed some of the themes and spaces, but are you also changing the questions that you ask founders? Are you looking for new things during this pandemic that you didn't look for before? And. And are founders asking different questions of you?

Yeah, it's a great question. And I'm going to start the answer sort of the same way Reid started the answer to the themes Question, which is the headline is a lot's the same. And if you think about the questions we're asking companies and the questions companies and entrepreneurs are asking us, a lot of it looks very similar to what we've been asking in the past, really trying to understand the fundamentals of someone's market in someone's business and, and for entrepreneurs understanding what an investor is going to bring to the company beyond capital. That said, there are some things that are different post pandemic and I'd call out two. One is we think a lot more about how our company's operating in the middle of the pandemic. And you know, I think Reid referenced this earlier, like there are some companies like GitLab that have been operating fully remotely, you know, since they got started. For many companies, this is a very new thing. And whether these companies have gone from being all in the office to being all remote or, or being somewhat distributed, some in the office, some remote, depending on where in the world they are and the shelter in place guidelines, it's a new challenge to how you run your teams. And so we're spending a lot of time with CEOs and understanding, hey, what does your weekly all hands look like now? How do you measure morale, how do you measure productivity and energy across your teams and how are those things trending? And that's a piece that we spent less time on before the pandemic. I think the second is on the capitalization side. And one of the things we've referenced in this conversation is at Greylock, we're very, very long term investors and we're not thinking about the next few quarters, even necessarily the next few years. We're taking 10 year plus points of views on companies. But we also acknowledge the extreme uncertainty around what the next few quarters and next few years hold for us. And so when we do a new financing, we are capitalizing a company to get to a particular set of milestones so that if needed, they can go back and raise more capital from the capital markets. And I'd say right now, if you want to be prudent, you'd say, hey, milestones you thought you'd get done in four or six quarters could take eight to 12 or perhaps even longer, depending on how the world plays out. And so because of that, we're thinking a lot more about, hey, can we actually capitalize these companies for even longer? And traditionally when we do a financing, we may have thought of it as 18 to 24 months of Runway. Now in many cases we're thinking of it as 36 months plus. So that if for any reason a company has a short term hiccup, it doesn't hurt the long term operational prospects.

And some well captured kind of some of the baseline stuff which is while the overall transformations are call it 80, 90% the same with an acceleration, it does change the way you operate, change the way you recruit, changes the way that the team pulls together. Also, you know, the volatility of the market changes capital plans and you want to have more range of insurance for plans not executing the way you want for changes in the later financing market. So you can be able to choose when you're financing and those. That's part of the reason why some did that. I'd only add significantly kind of one thing which is I think third after the two that Sam has mentioned, which is part of the value for entrepreneurs working with, you know, kind of experienced investors who've worked with a number of companies or company builders. Is that part of the thing we started telling our portfolio in March, right. Was that look, the general way that the market and everyone's talking about this is going to be like X months of pandemic and then it's going to be back to stability. And we actually think that it's going to be months of volatility. We think it'll be like that. There's a likelihood it's a second wave given how badly the US federal government's mishandling the pandemic. People say hey, the whole capital market's going to be totally stable in September. And we're like, could be in September by accident, but it also could be could be unstable in October. So you need to actually plan on volatility. And here's some ways you think about it because planning on voluntarily is not saying plan that the world's over, that you won't be able to get sales, you won't be able to get any revenue and so forth. Because by the way, world's over, go home, right? It just doesn't work. But it's plan on volatility like it's a solvable problem, but you're going to have to be much more nimble. What does that mean? How do you monitor things? How do you have a strategy that presumes volatility? Because the usual kind of thing is like, oh, prove out certain hypotheses in your business, prove out certain product market fit. Once you do there, start moving to scale. And when you say volatility you say, well a proof, you know, now in July may not be the Exact same thing of what's going on in September. So in doing that, here is kind of the ways that you manage it. Here's the ways you operate your team, as Sam was talking about. Here's why you want more capital shield, as someone was talking about. And then here's how you think about strategy and the coherence of the team as you're executing forward.

Yeah. And part of it, to Reid's point, around volatility, is if you're a CEO or a founder of a new company, a core part of your job is risk management and also just survival of the company. And so part of the exercise is, okay, there's more volatility in the world. I want to mitigate risk that comes from that increased volatility. What are the tactics? And Reed just reinforced some of them, including, okay, I might raise more capital at this stage than I would have in the past. There's different pieces to it, but we're trying to work very closely with, with the CEOs we partner with on increased risk management, just given the volatility.

Now, in thinking about the activity of a venture capitalist, I've always heard it described as, oftentimes somebody joins a venture capital firm, they gain the venture capital 15 because they suddenly discover they're supposed to have a breakfast meeting, two lunch meetings, a dinner meeting, go to an event afterwards, and do all these different things. And that's because the industry runs on so many of these informal, serendipitous connections now. It's a little hard to do those in this pandemic. So what are the ways that you're capturing some of that serendipity, making those connections as different than before the pandemic?

Well, SAHM may be able to comment better on the serendipity, because one of the challenges my schedule is it's insanely scheduled. And serendipity is a little bit more challenging. I mean, I guess there is less of the events through this year than I used to go to. So going to The Allen & Co. And other kinds of events, basically all virtual or canceled for that year, and going to virtual events doesn't have the same networking benefit. So you have to be much more proactive, which, you know, one of the things both some and I will cover, for me, that's a combination of two things. One is being more proactive in my network, you know, talking to people, calling them, saying, hey, who do you know? Or, you know, kind of great new entrepreneurs or entrepreneurial projects. Or maybe they call me and using that and then Being willing to schedule some time to just chat with them in order to see what's going on, make those connections. And then because of the earlier diversity point, make sure you're doing that also with people of color. Make sure you're doing that also with women. Because it's too easy when you're only network based to be the, you know, like, oh, well, I'm just gonna, like, for example, all three of us are Stanford grads. I'm just gonna meet with Stanford people and it's like, no, no, no, that's bad on a number of different levels. So make sure you're being proactive in all of those areas. But unfortunately my serendipity answer is not as good as I, I hope Sam's going to be.

Yeah, it's a great question. I'd say it comes back, Chris, you're asking about silver linings. Like, I'll give you two silver linings that lead to serendipity in different ways during this time. One is we're not sitting in cars, going to different office company offices or breakfast meetings or dinner meetings. So candidly, there's a lot more time and in some ways calendars are more open than they, than they were before the pandemic. I think the second part is, and this is part of why we love the new innovations we're seeing from entrepreneurs. Like with things like Zoom and newer, like video communication tools, it's actually super easy and effective to get on a 10 minute, 20 minute, 30 minute interaction. And now like a set of interactions gets unlocked that before, like you weren't going to drive 30 minutes, you know, to our office, or I wasn't going to drive 30 minutes to yours for a 20 minute meeting. And so what I found is we actually get to meet more people every week. We get to meet those people in new creative ways. And, and I think to Reid's point, now in some ways, like the network is less insular because you're spending less time at the same events or at the same in person meetings that are constrained to this geography and more time being responsive to people who email us cold or proactively looking for different, you know, diverse segments and setting up meetings with entrepreneurs across them. So I think you've lost the serendipity of going to an event and meeting, you know, someone interesting at the event. You've gained the serendipity of, hey, my calendar's much more open. I can just take meetings that are coming into me or I can go out and look in new places and meet people that way.

And that actually is a positive because it helps address some of those diversity concerns that have come up a couple of times. Because after all, who is it that has the time and the money to go to these different events that applies a set of filters both geographically and demographically? And now as a result, entrepreneurs can reach out and create these relationships in a way they couldn't before. So let's talk a little bit about the way Greylock invests, because you mentioned it a little bit. But in addition to traditional venture capital investing, one of the things Greylock has become known for is incubating investments, bringing in entrepreneurs used to be into a physical space and working with them from the idea phase. Now how has this changed because of the pandemic? That's something where obviously you can't sit in the same room with them anymore. So how is that now different?

It's a great question, Chris. Working with companies at the earliest stages is a lot of what we do and really what we love doing. Whether in the past, you know, companies like Workday or Palo Alto, and more recently, you know, companies like Abnormal Security that were started at Greylock's offices, it has become a large part of the way we work and the way we invest. You're right that it's much more challenging now because, you know, what used to be long, unstructured late night conversations in conference rooms over takeout now needs to all happen virtually. But again, in the theme of silver linings, I'll mention a few. So one is, as Reid said, the asteroid that hit us. It's a very focusing event. And I think it's focusing both in terms of where are the different pain points in the markets that entrepreneurs want to build, because those pain points get escalated and aggravated. And it's also focusing for individuals. Like if you're an engineer, product person, salesperson, sitting at a large company, you've been thinking about starting something new. You know, the pandemic hits, it can be really focusing around, hey, like, I actually want to go get this thing done and I'm now going to go focus on it. And so in an interesting way, we've seen a lot of people who are working on really interesting technical areas at the large tech companies, you know, come out of month three or month four of this pandemic thinking, hey, that project I've been working on internally that I think could be useful for the rest of the world, or that pain point that I've always wanted to start a company around, now's the time to go do it. And part of it is again like, because people aren't spending all this time commuting, there's actually just more time in the day and more time for people offline to start brainstorming with their friends and ideating. And so we've been really focused on like going outbound to these people and saying, hey, we can't offer our conference room, but we can offer our virtual conference room and we'd love to do that ideation with you. And so over the last few months, I think all of us at Greylock have spent time meeting individuals who haven't started companies yet, but are now, you know, a hundred percent focused on wanting to start a company and have identified the general zone and pain they want to go focus on. And then we focused on supporting that. And the way we're doing that is, you know, for example, like we're investors in a company called Figma. Actually Figma makes it somewhat easy to do great whiteboarding and brainstorming virtually. So we've done that with a number of entrepreneurs. And I think the other piece is particularly on the software side, a lot of the early stage company building game is about working closely with customers. And you sort of want to have a very, very tight feedback loop where you're building with high customer centricity so that when you ship product, you've shipped something that really solves the customer's pain point. And you know, I think the negative view would be hey, like, are customers buying as much software as they were before the pandemic? And I think in some areas actually they are and, and more so because of out of necessity and others less. But if you're starting a new company today, you're not really selling today, you're not selling really the next 12 months you're in build mode. What's happened on the customer side is their calendars too have freed up. And so for these forward leaning IT or technology executives sitting at large, Fortune 500s for someone like that to jump on an hour, zoom call, give you early product feedback, that's just completely invaluable, that's much easier now. And so we found that it's actually been really effective to take these people who are now beginning to think about, okay, what does my company look like, what do I want to go build and pair them with customers who are eager to give feedback. And hopefully we get to a point four, six quarters from now where if you're starting today, you've got generally available product ready, you're ready to start selling and at that point there's more clarity in the overall macro and buying begins to re accelerate. So we think it's a really good time to be starting from scratch and we're doing everything we can to find people who are just getting ready to start and figuring out how to help them.

A few things to add in. You know, Sama's covered it well as usual. One is people who may or may not know. Greylock's been one of the really strong forums historically which has kind of helped pull these teams together and get projects launched in the past as like Palo Alto Networks, you know, workday data domain. Now current stuff that's going is like gladly Awake Security, Sumo Logic. There are all of these areas where Greylock has helped actually, you know, bring the founder in, incubated the office, helped assemble the founding team, helped assemble the earliest customers and by the way, that work continues, that's actually one of the kind of deep competence areas, especially within the enterprise side for doing that. Now the work is okay, well now you can't come into the office and do it, but a lot of the work can still be done, which is how do we ideate and Whiteboard possibly using Figma as another portfolio company, as Sam was referring to as a way. And how do you bring other people into it? How do you have them talk to customers who as again saw mentioned, have more time so you can be kind of ideating a little bit or availability, so you can ideating availability. And then, you know, how do you get that team to assemble? And this is part of where, you know, we have a bunch of recruiting resources that are targeted at assembling the first hires into a company and the team. So how do you pull that together? And the recruiting team has been working on how do you operate in the time of the pandemic in order to make that work and then just randomly much more farther afield. One of the other Greylock investments is a thing called Entrepreneur first, which has been how do founders come into a kind of a virtual camp and find each other? Because one of the things that obviously the pandemic changes is it also makes it more work for the founding team to come together. And it's one of the things that we know that we have to work harder at and do more of in the line of stuff we've already been doing here at Greylock.

Wonderful. Now one final question that I'll ask. Because this is where the rubber meets the road for those entrepreneurs, the question is if this is a great time to reach out to investors, if this is A great time to, to finally work on that problem that's been bothering you and build a company around it. What do they need to do to get in touch with Greylock? Obviously they can listen to this podcast, but then what do they do next?

Thank you for everyone listening to the podcast. Part of the delight of the business is connecting with amazing entrepreneurs and that's part of why we're all here, Saab and myself included. Look, the classic advice is still there, which is you were well served by getting a knowledgeable introduction to us because, because obviously a huge amount comes in through the transoms. It's hard even on a well crafted email pitch to discern which is a good fit, which is the right quality. It's pretty easy to see some things that are pretty crazy, which I in some and everyone else sees occasionally. But like the, huh, is this really interesting or not? It's hard to actually get a sense of and take the time. And so that reference is very helpful. As Tom and I have mentioned a little bit, we're trying to make sure that our networks are sufficiently broad to include people of color and gender and so forth and make sure that's working and we're working on that. But that's a classic. Now, that being said, you know, obviously part of the challenge maybe is it may take a little bit more work and a little bit more challenging to do that. So then if you are emailing, that gets useful to email saying, hey, we know so and so in common or so and so knows me or that kind of thing. Because one of the ways that, you know, we operate as kind of network, intelligent ways to go, oh, like sometimes even before I respond to someone, I'll go ask, hey, do you know this person? Is this a good person to engage with in order to facilitate a good use of my time, a good use of their time, you know, a productive conversation. Those are kind of the basics and I, maybe Sam will cover some of the new ground.

I think that's really well captured. You know, I'd say one of the positives for entrepreneurs is we here at Greylock, we think it's a great time to start companies. We're really optimistic around a number of long term trends and actually how software and technology can help us get through this pandemic and improve quality of life across segments. And so we are very much looking to meet new entrepreneurs. I think one of the positives is we have more time on our calendars. We're very responsive to people coming from out of network and from different segments. You know, pulled into us and we're looking to take those meetings. You know, I think two things I'd add Reid mentioned, like, hey, like, if you're going to send us an email, just being as clear around what you're doing, what the value proposition is, why you think there's strong alignment with, with us at Greylock, that's really important. But the other piece is, you know, it used to be like, hey, a first conversation might be in person or over a coffee or over a whiteboard. Now, because we can't do that, I think there's an elevated importance on do you have a send ahead deck and what do you put in that deck and what's the quality of that deck? And the specificity to just help us understand the opportunity as quickly as we can. That's one part. And then the second part, which is just broader around companies, is like, look, I think a lot of trends are getting accelerated or continue to be true and perhaps are just going to play out over longer time horizons. But the other thing that I think we're really looking for is what are the companies and ideas that are actually going to thrive during the pandemic? And so on the software side, it's like we're seeing new companies that make it easier to run virtual events or run virtual offices. And those are things that I think are going to do really, really well over the coming quarters. And so one way to certainly stand out is to think about for your company and for what you're building, not just why is it robust during the pandemic, but why does it actually get better and why is the pain point even more acute and your value proposition even stronger? And the companies that do that, I think are going to stand out, not just to us as investors, but overall to the market.

Well, on a day full of silver linings, I think that's a great silver lining to end on. And thank you for listening.