Back in 2005, when Mamoon Hamid joined USVP as a fresh-faced engineer turned investor, the tech world was still figuring out what came after the dot com crash.

When he first met Aaron Levie in 2006, Box was a simple file sharing service competing in a crowded market. But Mamoon saw beyond the product to the underlying shift.

Files trapped on individual computers were moving to the cloud. Collaboration was becoming the killer feature. The browser wasn’t just an access point, it was enabling an entirely new way of working.

A pattern was emerging. Move the system of record to the cloud, expose it through the browser, and collaboration comes almost for free.

This simple framing helped Mamoon ride the entire Web 2.0 wave, leading him to back Box, Yammer, Slack, and Figma long before they were household names.

He believed a browser-delivered, cloud-hosted experience would beat desktop software and on-premise servers for most business workflows.

He was right. It wasn’t just about a better interface, it was a fundamental change in how software could be delivered and consumed. No more installation CDs. No more version conflicts. You just opened a browser and started working.

[To hear him discuss this in more detail, listen to his podcast episode with Jack Altman.]

Mamoon’s framework to spot fundamental platform shifts:

  1. New interface paradigm - The browser democratized access to software.
  2. Shift in data location - From local to cloud, from siloed to shared.
  3. Change in user behavior - From individual productivity to collaborative workflows.

Just as the browser replaced desktop applications, natural language slowly is replacing graphical interfaces. Why navigate through fifteen menus when you can just ask for what you want? Why navigate fifteen dropdown menus when you can type “show me deals closing this quarter that need attention”?

In the cloud era, data was passive. It sat there waiting for you to query it. In the AI age it’s active. Your CRM shouldn’t wait for you to check on leads. It should identify opportunities, draft outreach emails, and schedule follow-ups before you even ask.

We’re shifting from reactive to proactive tools.

The browser era was about a centralised system of record accessed through a point and click GUI. The AI era is about an autonomous system of action, driven by natural language and intent.

The insight this time is that the marginal cost of cognition is collapsing. Storing data is table stakes, turning it into action is where value accrues.

The browser thesis wasn’t just about data accessibility from any devide, it was about collaboration becoming the atomic unit of work. The killer insight was that when data moved online, work itself transformed from individual tasks to shared workflows.

The AI era question isn’t just about cheap intelligence. It is also about how work fundamentally reorganizes when intelligence is embedded everywhere.

“What happens when the atomic unit of software shifts from features to entire workflows that complete themselves without user input?”

“What new value emerges when software can both decide and act in real time, across every context at near zero marginal cost?”

What Mamoon understood about Web 2.0 and what applies even more strongly to AI is that platform shifts compound: Box moved file storage to the cloud, paving the way for Figma to let designers collaborate online and for Slack to bring team conversations into the same space.

With AI, this compounding is happening even faster. Every workflow automated creates demand for adjacent automations. Every successful AI product educates users and reduces resistance to the next one.

With their framework for identifying platform shifts, Mamoon and Kleiner are perfectly positioned for the AI wave.

Kleiner’s investments in Glean (enterprise search powered by AI), Harvey (AI for legal work), and Ambience Healthcare (AI medical scribe) all follow the same pattern: they’re not merely adding AI features to existing interfaces, they are rebuilding entire categories with AI at the core.

[Edited using Claude. Any errors in interpretation are my own.]