Uncapped #37 | Saam Motamedi from Greylock Partners

December 16, 2025

AI Summary

5 min read

🎙️ The Voices & The Context

The Format: This casual interview between close friends blends personal banter with deep dives into venture capital, revealing Greylock Partners' 60-year evolution through candid storytelling and insider insights. Reflective and collaborative.
The Format: Casual interview with heavy banter.
The Key Players:
- Sam (Guest): Greylock Partners partner since age 23, key figure in modern investments like Abnormal Security; fascinating for his role in a firm backing unicorns from Palo Alto Networks to Workday.
- Jack (Host): Tech founder and podcaster, shares tight friendship with Sam, driving chemistry through mutual roasting, product plugs, and overlapping VC networks.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **🎙️ Introduction: Sam (Greylock Partner)**
2 (01:30) **Greylock's Historic Successes**
3 (02:00) **Greylock Origins in 1965**
4 (02:30) **Early VC Practices (1960s-70s)**
5 (03:15) **Evolution Across Sectors**
6 (04:20) **What Persists in Enduring VC Firms**
7 (06:00) **Low-Profile Ethos vs. Loud Competitors**

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

Saam Motamedi is a General Partner at Greylock Partners working with enterprise software entrepreneurs at the seed and early stages who are focused on new opportunities in intelligent applications, cybersecurity, AI, and data infrastructure. In 2019 at just 26 years old, Saam became the Greylock’s youngest General Partner in its 54-year history – a remarkable achievement at an institution that had backed Airbnb, AppDynamics, Coinbase, Discord, Figma, Instagram, LinkedIn, among others.

Saam’s portfolio spans 14+ companies with collective valuations exceeding $10 billion. Abnormal Security, which Greylock incubated in its offices in 2018 with Saam as founding investor, grew into a multi-billion-dollar email security powerhouse. Cresta, where he led the Series A in 2019, became the leading generative AI platform for contact centers. Snorkel AI, Braintrust, Orb, and a portfolio of other infrastructure companies position Saam at the center of AI's business model transformation.

We covered:

Durable components to great firms
Inside look at how Greylock operates
Cracking the code on incubations
Alpha in today’s venture strategies

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Timestamps:

(0:00) Intro

(1:32) Greylock turning 60 this year

(4:11) What’s persisted since 1965

(8:59) Apprenticeship

(11:34) What's durable in venture

(16:29) Greylock’s ethos

(19:33) Incentive misalignments

(24:44) Breadth vs depth in venture

(29:28) Managing the team on inputs

(34:00) Why incubations are so hard

(43:22) Finding alpha

(52:38) Greylock’s approach to portfolio services

(59:18) Assessing wild revenue ramps

(1:08:10) Horizontal vs vertical SaaS

(1:11:34) Friendships and work

(1:16:26) Saam's biological age

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