This week @mamoonha and @ilyaf of @kleinerperkins joined @eriktorenberg on Turpentine VC to make the case for the craftsman approach to venture capital, and it's a must-listen. Our top takeaways: 1. KP holds firm in their belief in the craft approach to VC, which isn’t too dissimilar from the approach 30 - 40 years ago. Of course they employ new tools and software that allows them to be better stewards of the capital they manage, but the craft of investing is still at the center of everything they do. Kleiner may never have more than 7 partners: less is more, and one team, one dream. And it all comes from the question of: “how do we make really good decisions?” That means all being based in the Bay Area, having in-person team meetings every Monday, and having those discussions as a team sitting around a table. 2. The team at Kleiner uses “majors and minors” to cover new waves or emerging domains with a small team. Because of their team size, it’s difficult for KP to spin up specialization. So they fall back on having partners with great fundamentals (majors), with the ability to shirt into emergent domains (minors). The minors allow partners to shift into the new trends bubbling up, like crypto, AI, and more. Mamoon and Ilya view their job as making sure they know what the new thing is, and being intentional and deliberate with their decisions to either lean deeper into it, because they believe that’s where real history-making companies will get built, or pass, because they think it’s a fad. 3. The process KP uses to determine how well they’re doing compared to other competing firms. Every Monday, they look at the prior week of Seed, Series A’s, and Series B’s that got done by their peer set. And they ask the following question for each company: “Did we see this one? Or did we not see it?” Then over the course of a quarter, they aggregate that to assess what’s happening on the ground and whether or not they’re seeing what they think are interesting companies in every company they look at. It’s a way of assessing whether or not Kleiner is truly the first, second or third call, or how relevant the firm is to the top companies that are getting funded today. While the ultimate truth to them is the eventual outcomes and win rate, this is a great top-of-funnel leading indicator. Links to the full podcast are in thread. Thank you to @cartainc, @synaptic_data, and @PestoTech for supporting the show!