The Art of Enduring: How Greylock Partners Has Stayed Relevant for 60 Years in Venture Capital
In 2005, in a nondescript office in San Mateo, California, two companies were quietly taking shape under the same roof. One would become Palo Alto Networks, now valued at roughly $140 billion. The other would become Workday, worth somewhere between $50 and $100 billion. Both were incubated — or as the firm prefers to say, initiated — at Greylock Partners, one of the oldest venture capital firms in America.
That both companies emerged from the same office in the same year is remarkable enough. But what's truly extraordinary is that the firm that nurtured them had already been investing for four decades by that point, and would continue reinventing itself for two more. In a recent conversation on the Uncapped podcast, Greylock partner Saam Motamedi sat down with host Jack Altman to discuss the firm's unusual longevity, its approach to talent and company building, and why he believes the venture industry's current trajectory is failing founders.
From Classified Ads to AI: Six Decades of Reinvention
Greylock turned 60 years old in 2025. Founded in 1965, it holds the distinction of being the oldest venture firm in the U.S. to have started with multiple limited partners, effectively pioneering the GP/LP relationship that underpins the modern venture industry.
But what did venture capital even look like in 1965? There was no internet, no personal computers, no Silicon Valley as we know it. Motamedi, who has spoken with some of the firm's original partners — now in their 90s — paints a vivid picture:
"They would buy newspapers of different cities, look in the classified sections for job postings, because that was an indication that a company was emerging and hiring, and then they'd fly to the city, show up at the office, and meet the entrepreneur."
Decision-making was glacial by today's standards — six months to contemplate a $200,000 investment. The firm's early wins included Continental Cablevision, which eventually became part of AT&T and Comcast, and even Neutrogena, the skincare brand. Later came healthcare investments in companies like Vertex, Stryker, and Millennium — all now publicly traded giants.
The firm then navigated into open source software with Red Hat, the social networking era with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram, marketplaces with Airbnb, and now enterprise software and AI. Each transition required a fundamental rethinking of strategy, team composition, and market focus.
The Thread That Persists
So what has held Greylock together through all of this change? Motamedi points to a letter written by one of the original partners that he discovered a few years ago:
"The ambition of every Greylock partner should be to win the Oscar for the best supporting actor to the entrepreneur. And in that is the ethos of the firm, which is, 'We're a service-oriented firm. We're a people-oriented firm. We don't, we are not the stars of the show.'"
This service mindset, Motamedi argues, is the single most durable element of the franchise. Everything else — the sectors they invest in, the geography, the speed of decision-making, even the composition of the partnership — has evolved. But the fundamental orientation toward being in the founder's corner has not.
The Apprenticeship Model and the Problem of Turnover
Motamedi joined Greylock at 23 years old. He was immediately embedded in board meetings, executive interviews, and follow-up conversations with CEOs — sitting alongside senior partners and absorbing their pattern recognition through osmosis.
"I was in every conversation with them, right? Ranging from the board meetings itself, the follow-up conversations with the CEOs, when they were interviewing executives, I was sitting next to the partner doing the interview. And then after the interview, there would be a discussion of what that person detected."
This apprenticeship model is central to Greylock's identity and stands in contrast to how many firms operate. At Greylock, the language around investment attribution is deliberately different: rather than asking who sourced an opportunity, they ask who was "causally impactful" to a successful investment. This reframes the incentives entirely. A senior partner's first reflex when encountering a great opportunity is to think about which younger partner should take the lead.
The broader industry, Motamedi observes, has a serious turnover problem — one that's particularly damaging to founders. As partnerships have grown larger, the principal-agent problem has intensified. Junior partners optimize for putting "shots on goal" rather than deeply supporting existing companies, knowing they can parlay one win into a more senior position at another firm.
"I'm consistently disappointed by what I see from venture investors at firms we would consider top-tier firms... It's an incentive problem. The model is at fault."
The root cause, he argues, is the shift from carry-based economics to fee-based economics. When firms become scaled asset managers running enormous portfolios, the incentive to deeply serve any individual company erodes. A partner with 25 company relationships might rationally choose to focus on deploying the next $20 million rather than spending hours on a Zoom helping company number seven navigate a difficult financing.
The Flywheel: Why Depth Compounds
One of the most compelling illustrations of Greylock's approach is a story Motamedi tells about a chain of relationships spanning nearly two decades.
It begins in 2007 with a failed recruiting attempt. Greylock tried to hire Josh McFarland, a star product manager at Google, onto their investment team. He declined — but came to Greylock as an entrepreneur-in-residence instead, founding an ad tech company called TellApart. That company hired a young Google engineer named Sanjay and later acqui-hired a small startup whose co-founders included Evan Reiser. TellApart was eventually acquired by Twitter for roughly $500 million.
After the acquisition, the company's head of engineering became an EIR at Greylock, who then connected the firm with Sanjay and Evan as they left Twitter. Working together nights and weekends, they conceived Abnormal AI — now the second-fastest growing security company of all time. And from within Abnormal's early team, two more founders emerged who are now building new Greylock-backed companies.
"We're now 18 years later, right? And by the way, these two new companies are just beginning to flourish. Tomorrow, I'm going to an all-hands at Cogent, and I guarantee you there are engineers in that audience that three to four years from now are gonna be back in our office starting the next company."
This kind of compounding network effect, Motamedi argues, simply cannot exist without deep, intimate relationships with portfolio companies — the kind that come from being on the board, recruiting early engineers, and sourcing initial customers.
See, Decide, Win, Build: An Inputs-Based Approach to Performance
Performance management in venture is notoriously difficult. Returns take years to materialize, luck plays an enormous role, and the sample sizes are tiny. Greylock's answer is an inputs-based framework developed during a two-day partnership offsite in Napa in 2021.
The system has 18 inputs across five categories: See, Decide, Win, Build, and Internal Partnership. For "See," partners are measured on whether they saw at least 75% of the seed and Series A opportunities done by competitors in their sector. For responsiveness, they collect feedback from CEOs and score each other on a 1-to-5 scale.
Perhaps most interesting is the domain leadership input. Two to four times a year, partners present sector reviews to the full partnership — their predictions for what will happen in their domain over the next 12 months. Then they check back.
"Did you actually understand what was happening in your domain? Oh, it turns out all of CRM was reinvented and you were asleep. That's not good."
And in a potentially controversial twist, Motamedi notes that good outputs without good inputs is also a red flag:
"If someone has good outputs but no inputs, that's also not a fit for our system. Because we can't be convicted that they're gonna reproduce the outputs."
The Art of Company Initiation
Greylock's track record in helping start companies is exceptional — Palo Alto Networks, Workday, Abnormal AI, Sumo Logic — but Motamedi is careful to distinguish their approach from typical incubation programs. The firm deliberately avoids the word "incubate" because it implies the VC is the center of the company rather than the founder.
The key framework is simple but powerful: eliminate market risk, embrace execution risk.
"What we wanna do is pick opportunities where there's zero market risk and actually a lot of execution risk. Because in the execution risk, you build your moat."
When Abnormal AI was founded, there was already $2 billion in email security TAM and two public incumbents. The question wasn't whether a market existed — it was whether the team could build an AI system capable of detecting advanced social engineering attacks. That pattern — obvious market, uncertain execution — runs through nearly all of Greylock's most successful initiations.
Most other firms that attempt this, Motamedi says, make two fatal mistakes: they take too much ownership (destroying founder quality through negative selection) and they pick areas where market risk remains high.
The Barbell and the Capital River
When asked where alpha exists in venture today, Motamedi describes a barbell. On one end: being the first money in, taking raw ingredients and turning them into something that looks like a company. On the other end: being the last money in, writing billion-dollar checks at late stages where only a handful of firms can compete.
"Where are the real market makers in the current era of venture? One is the people who are investing at the start... The other place is the last money in, these really late-stage private rounds where, to price a round, you have to write a billion dollar check."
The middle ground — the indexing model where firms make 80 to 100 investments hoping to catch seven or eight winners — may generate adequate returns but is fundamentally worse for founders and unlikely to produce spectacular funds.
Motamedi also introduces the concept of the "capital river" — a flywheel where a select few companies in each category achieve escape velocity. Once in the river, everything compounds: capital comes easier, talent is attracted, customers take a chance, and the next round arrives at three times the prior price. Getting companies into this river, he argues, is one of the highest-leverage things an early-stage investor can do — through talent placement, customer introductions, and careful company design in the first year.
The Horizontal Opportunity
Perhaps Motamedi's most contrarian view concerns the current enthusiasm for vertical AI companies. While acknowledging their impressive revenue ramps, he urges caution:
"Why are these businesses growing so fast? One view would be like, if I'm a law firm, the managing partner has probably come and said, 'We have to buy an AI solution this year.' And everybody's buying... But now the question is, are they gonna go from 300 to three billion in revenue? Or is it that all the demand got pulled forward?"
He draws a parallel to 2021, when companies riding the digitization wave showed incredible growth rates that proved to be a pull-forward of demand rather than sustainable trajectories. The same dynamic could apply to vertical AI.
The bigger opportunity, Motamedi believes, lies in horizontal enterprise software — just as it always has. He points to three converging forces that make this the best moment since 2005 to build disruptive horizontal companies: new pricing models (outcome-based rather than per-seat), a new atomic unit of value (end-to-end task completion rather than workflow support), and a fundamentally different data model where structured schemas may no longer be necessary.
"I think we're gonna see really, really large horizontal companies that we'll look back in a decade that were founded in 2025, 2026, that went after these large markets, sold to everyone in the world, and that's how you build 10, 20, 30 billion dollar revenue businesses."
Staying Sharp: Paranoia, Patience, and Play
Throughout the conversation, a tension emerges between the patience required to build deep relationships and the paranoia needed to avoid complacency. Motamedi describes keeping one full day per week unscheduled and protecting his mornings until 11 AM — time for long-term thinking rather than reactive work.
He also speaks movingly about the role of friendship in sustaining a career in venture. His close friend group — which includes Altman and several other investors — provides something rare: people with high context on your work who genuinely want to see you succeed.
"It's really rare in life to have people who have high context on your work, but truly want to see you win... I think what's so special about our crew is we all know each other super well. We make fun of each other continually. And we push each other to be the best version of ourselves."
The Long Game
Sixty years is an eternity in venture capital. Most firms don't survive a single generational transition, let alone multiple ones across entirely different technology eras. Greylock's longevity is not an accident — it's the product of a deliberate philosophy that balances enduring values with relentless reinvention.
The firm's service ethos, its apprenticeship model, its willingness to invest deeply in a small number of relationships, and its paranoid insistence on seeing the full market — these are not just strategies but cultural commitments that compound over decades. The flywheel that began with a failed recruiting pitch in 2007 is still spinning 18 years later, generating new companies and new founders.
But perhaps the most important lesson from Motamedi's conversation is about the nature of patience itself. In a world where AI companies rocket from zero to $100 million in revenue and venture decisions happen in hours, the temptation to chase every bright object is overwhelming. The firms and individuals who resist that temptation — who maintain conviction in their frameworks, who invest in relationships that won't pay off for years, who keep their mornings free to think — are the ones most likely to still be standing in another 60 years.
As Charlie Munger might say: the big money is not in the buying and selling, but in the waiting. In venture capital, it turns out, it's also in the building.