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to comment for this article, would have over
all of Kleiner. Around the same time, Kleiner
was fighting a bruising court battle, a gen-
der discrimination suit filed by Ellen Pao, a
Doerr protégé. Kleiner emerged victorious
but bloodied from the litigation, and Doerr
continued his hunt for new talent. He and
Schlein, who helped manage the firm, found
it at the same place Doerr tried before, Social
Capital, by recruiting another cofounder,
Mamoon Hamid, to head up early-stage
investing. Hamid, who had led Social Capital’s
investment in Slack, joined Kleiner in 2017, a
year after Doerr became chairman, a role that
connotes something like emeritus status at a
venture firm. Doerr presented Hamid as the
new leader of Kleiner—a move that would put
the newcomer in conflict with Meeker, who
already was providing plenty of leadership of
her own.NOT LONG AFTER HAMID, who is 41, joined
Kleiner, he circulated a poll to the firm’s staff
with questions about the free food provided in
the office. “We’d like to have a high-quality se-
lection of snacks that makes everyone happy,”
he wrote in an email. The focus on noshing
was culturally if not financially significant.
He’d been brought in to shake things up, after
all. A few months later, when Kleiner moved
its annual holiday party from the fusty Menlo
Circus Club in the suburbs to a hipster venue
in San Francisco’s gritty Tenderloin neighbor-
hood, Hamid insisted on skipping the uncool
practice of providing name tags.
Cue the grumbling. Hamid’s assertion
of authority extended beyond generational
etiquette and a long overdue redesign of the
firm’s website. He also turned his attention
to the operations of the entire firm, includ-
ing the growth fund. Hamid began attend-
ing growth team meetings, for example, and
giving input on investment ideas, offering
to help source deals. He wanted to blur
the lines of what types of investments were
appropriate for which funds, meaning he
envisioned the early-stage fund taking big-
ger stakes, the province of the growth fund.
Hamid, say Kleiner insiders, saw himself as
helping; Meeker’s team viewed Hamid’s of-
fers as meddling.
The relationship between the two fundsto have Meeker run the new fund afforded
her the opportunity to repot herself. “I always
wanted to invest,” she told Wired in 2012.
“The Kleiner team had been talking to me for
a decade about joining, and I thought that if I
didn’t do it now, I never would.”
Her deep network and ability to spot tech
trends paid off almost immediately. Kleiner’s
new growth fund invested in the likes of Face-
book, LendingClub, DocuSign, Snapchat, and
Slack—all companies seeded by other venture
capitalists that nevertheless had plenty of
upside left when Meeker invested. The returns
were stellar for its category. Kleiner’s growth
fund grew investments by 2.4 times as of late
last year, according to data the firm supplied
to its investors. That performance bested a
Kleiner venture fund raised at a similar time,
even though later-stage investments are de-
signed to be considerably less risky.
And as Meeker was racking up victories,
Kleiner’s early-stage practice continued to
stumble—especially compared with the com-
petition and its own illustrious past. There
were successes. Longtime partner Ted Schlein,
for example, invested in a series of security-
software companies that were purchased for
healthy gains. Randy Komisar and Trae Vas-
sallo invested early in Nest, acquired in 2014
by Google for $3.2 billion. But the wins weren’t
enough, and Kleiner continued to miss big-
ger opportunities. The fund it raised in 2010
doubled its money. But that paled in compari-
son to a Benchmark fund of a similar vintage
that multiplied investors’ capital by 25 times,
thanks to investments in Uber and Snapchat.
It didn’t help that Kleiner faced a myriad
of distractions. Even as its alternative-energy
investments were blowing up or otherwise
foundering, Doerr set out in 2014 to solve the
early-stage leadership problem by trying to
buy another firm. He approached Chamath
Palihapitiya, an outspoken former Facebook
executive who was the driving force behind
Social Capital, which at the time was planning
to raise its third fund. Doerr had personally
invested in Social Capital, a not-uncommon
practice for the bigwigs of Sand Hill Road,
and he thought Palihapitiya’s brashness and
connections could be the answer to Kleiner’s
problems.
Talks eventually broke down, however, over
how much control Palihapitiya, who declined
“[Hamid]
comes
in and
thinks he’s
the new
sheriff in
a place
where
Mary
thinks
s h e ’s
the sher-
iff. Why
wouldn’t
she leave?”