Saam Motamedi

Selecting the right preconditions

Starting a business is one of the most difficult things one can do. It’s imperative that the preconditions for your company are correct. Founders often underestimate the time they should dedicate to idea selection. Making the right foundational decisions, beginning with market identification and product definition, can have compounding effects. You’re going to be building for the next many years and, hopefully, decades — set the pre-existing conditions so that, when you win, you win big.

The intelligent future

We’re in the early chapter of the most significant computing shift in history — the AI-enabled transition to intelligent software. Technology landscapes will reorganize, and market leadership will be up for grabs. There’s immense opportunity to build new category leaders in existing markets and to define new markets as large swaths of spending shift from labor to software.

I’ve been working in AI for over a decade, dating back to my time at Stanford. It was always clear to me that AI has the potential to transform industries — it’s incredibly exciting to see that the underlying technology has now improved to the point where such transformation is possible. Before joining Greylock, I helped build RelateIQ, an intelligent CRM company that Salesforce eventually acquired, integrating it as the fabric of many of its AI capabilities. I’m particularly excited to partner with founders eager to build the next generation of AI-first companies.

Aspire to be the first call for founders

I’m available to support founders 24/7. Whether it’s a long whiteboard session to help define early product positioning, or a late-night dinner to help close a founding engineer, I am there to help. I approach my job with a customer-service-oriented mindset and take that service responsibility very seriously.

Our investment in Abnormal Security, a cloud email security platform, is a testament to this. Abnormal was initiated at Greylock’s offices in 2018. We were fortunate to work with Evan and Sanjay to launch the company and lead their initial financing, collaborating closely ever since.

Customer-obsessed and highly technical

I love backing founders who are highly technical and customer-obsessed. We welcome founders with limited experience — in fact, I find partnering with early career founders with unique market insight, relevant technical expertise, and who are deeply commercial especially exciting.

The founders of Snorkel, an AI infrastructure company, evolved the approach to data-centric AI they pioneered as Ph.D. students at Stanford into an enterprise platform that now powers AI at many of the world’s largest financial institutions. The founders of Cresta, a generative AI company for contact centers, immersed themselves in a contact center to understand firsthand how their users worked and lived — empathy that became crucial in building the most widely adopted co-pilot for contact center agents. Both teams are outstanding examples of being customer-obsessed as technologists.