Saeed Amidi: From a Hobby to 40 Unicorns

Introduction

Richard C. Wilson: We are all here thanks to Saeed, because we are inside of his venue, which is well known by many people in Silicon Valley and the Bay Area. He started this business in 2006, although the history goes back further, I was reading in the book you gave me upstairs.

So in 2006 he got started, and today Plug and Play has more than 60 global offices, 25 different verticals, and partnerships with over 100 universities, including Stanford, which we've done a lot of investments through. If I have my notes right, I think they made three to five investments just today.

They have a portfolio of more than 2,500 startups that have raised over $50 billion between them, more than 40 of which became unicorns. And over 550 corporate partnerships with companies like 3M and General Electric, names everybody in this room would recognize.

So Google rented space in his building when they had fewer than ten employees. PayPal was there in their early days. And Logitech opened its first US office in that same building back in 1982.

That's just a little background on Plug and Play, which is essentially his family office and incubator platform, and which he has scaled up enormously.

So let's welcome Saeed to the stage.

Saeed Amidi: Thank you, Richard. It's great to be here.

I was going to welcome you to Plug and Play, but you got more than you asked for, so you're going to get some more history too.

We still have that little building on University Avenue in Palo Alto, where Google grew to 50 people, PayPal grew to 50 people, and Logitech.

So I brought some of that luck from that Palo Alto building to here about twenty years ago. This was the headquarters for Philips Semiconductor. Where the shopping center is, it used to be a fab, and as people say, now hopefully manufacturing will come back.

But it seems like it's going to Arizona more than California. Florida, Texas and Arizona.

It's lovely to be here and to be part of the program.

The businesses behind the venture firm

Richard C. Wilson: What did I miss from your bio that you wish I'd added, so people understand you better?

Saeed Amidi: The family office is involved in real estate. I also have a bottled water business and a large packaging business, together about a billion dollars in revenue and 4,000 people. Those are the businesses I built starting in 1979.

And because I was in Palo Alto on University Avenue, next to Stanford, we occasionally met startups and we invested in them as angels. That really was my hobby.

Initially we did four or five investments a year. But when I invested $100,000 in Dropbox and got $36 million back, I said, maybe my hobby is better than my real business.

“When I invested $100,000 in Dropbox and got $36 million back, I said, maybe my hobby is better than my real business.”

So slowly my hobby now takes 90% of my time, and like the people on the panel, I try to learn every day, try to make the best decision possible, and stay curious.

I went on a walk before coming here with my daughter, who has joined me. I said, I enjoy every minute of the day. Frankly, 90% of it.

But nobody, I think, has a job better than my hobby.

What he looks for, and the plan B question

Richard C. Wilson: What's the secret to your success? What's at the core of it?

Saeed Amidi: I heard from earlier panels that you look at the person and try to judge their talent, their passion.

But for me, the biggest element of success is hard work. I think hard work trumps everything else.

My father used to tell me, if you become cash flow positive, you have time to make mistakes and fix things.

“If you become cash flow positive, you have time to make mistakes and fix things.”

Saeed's father

So I believe in cash flow, hard work, and of course I really like smart people from Stanford, Berkeley, MIT. I have a lot of respect for higher education. Next time I come to the world, I will study. I promise.

Richard C. Wilson: Our team has a weekly Zoom call, and for those of you on the team, you'll remember I held up the T-shirt, which I have three versions of, that says “Hard work pays off.” That's a Mat Fraser line. He won the CrossFit Games five years in a row and beat everybody by roughly 30%.

I believe in that fully. I tell my team, look, this is important. You can be smart, but if you don't work hard, none of that matters.

What else do you identify quickly when you're across the table from a founder?

Saeed Amidi: We did an investment today. It's called Multiverse, in Spain. I think it's the best AI unicorn in Spain.

They compress AI by 90%, and the quality is good enough for Samsung phones and HP laptops.

When I talked to Roman, you feel the knowledge he has.

I'm not an engineer, so now I have very good colleagues and partners who are PhDs from Stanford and from Illinois. I leave the technical due diligence to them.

As someone else on the panel said, I think I'm a pretty good judge of character. Somebody asked, what questions do you ask?

I always ask the entrepreneur, if this doesn't work, what are you going to do? What is your plan B?

And quite frankly, if they have a plan B, I don't invest, because it is hard.

“I always ask the entrepreneur, if this doesn't work, what is your plan B? And quite frankly, if they have a plan B, I don't invest.”

Plug and Play is my 18th company, and if you don't work hard, if you don't believe in what you're doing more than 100%, it's hard to succeed.

And then I also say you have to get lucky. Timing, and the people you surround yourself with, are incredibly important.

Richard C. Wilson: An earlier speaker this morning asked, what do I even teach my kids? What's university going to be like?

My answer is, we study a physics textbook at breakfast, and I have them study summaries of two books. One is Be Useful by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and one of the top ideas in it is burn your plan B. Don't have a plan B. Go deep on plan A and work it.

Saeed Amidi: I have to read the book.

How he actually uses AI

Richard C. Wilson: You talk to so many AI startups, many doing things nobody in this room is aware of yet, because you're on the bleeding edge of it. What does a company like yours do with AI day to day, in a way that might surprise people?

Saeed Amidi: On the way here this morning I went to BlackRock to meet David, their head of AI investment.

I believe in keeping the human in the loop for the relationship and the final decision. But quite frankly, research and knowledge are free right now.

When I wanted to start a bottled water business, I joined the Bottled Water Association. I went to Black Mountain in San Carlos and I delivered water for two days, just to learn what it was like.

And now, with Alberto Gutierrez, I was able to build the largest and most profitable water company in Spain.

So my thought is, you have to use AI, as some other panelists said, to do ten times the productivity with the same people. But you have to have domain knowledge, focus and execution. AI just helps you scale.

I think it's bigger than the Industrial Revolution. I think it's bigger than the mobile revolution, and we will all benefit from it enormously. I'm optimistic by nature, and I think we will make a better world.

Somebody else said, I have not listened to the news for two and a half years. I used to listen to NPR because it was okay on my way to work and back, but even that bothers me now.

So I said, I'm going to forget about the news until the news gets better.

They say the pessimists are sometimes right, but the optimists make all the money.

“They say the pessimists are sometimes right, but the optimists make all the money.”

Inside 550 corporate partnerships

Richard C. Wilson: Let's talk about corporate venture capital. You have partnerships with over 550 corporations. Some would define it as corporate venture capital, some just want IP and acquisitions in the space, or to be on the bleeding edge like you.

How do you work with them? What do they want? A lot of people in this room have something and have no idea how to approach a company like that.

Saeed Amidi: When I opened Plug and Play in 2006, Citibank and Volkswagen came here almost by accident and said, Saeed, can you run a selection day?

Citibank was implementing mobile banking. They gave us and twenty startups a sandbox to build mobile apps and features, and out of the twenty they incorporated four.

One of my favorite corporate partners is Mercedes, in Stuttgart. Again, by accident. Their board of directors, Ola Kallenius, Dieter Zetsche and the executive board, were on a tour of Silicon Valley. They had a joint venture with Jensen Huang at Nvidia to make an autonomous car.

They visited me for four hours. We created an event like this one and showed them four startups, even though their own team had 400 people at the Mercedes lab in Sunnyvale.

Before they left, they invested in all four startups, and they said, Saeed, you have to come and do this in Stuttgart.

Fast forward to today, I have an office at the University of Stuttgart, and I do fifty solutions a year with Mercedes, Bosch, ZF, Porsche and Volkswagen.

With Mercedes alone I have done 154 pilots. Forty-four of them are in the car.

And again, if you can text Ola, the CEO of Mercedes, and he texts you back the same day, you must have made an impact.

Generally, with all 550 corporate partners, mostly we navigate the solution for them to solve a problem.

My second favorite partner is Walmart. They spend $54 billion on supply chain, logistics and warehouse automation.

We've had an office at Walmart for seven years, and we do ten projects a year with them.

Before AI was hot, I took a company called Platform Science to Walmart, and they installed it in 13,000 trucks. It's route optimization at the edge. Walmart's head of supply chain told me, Saeed, that saved us $200 million a year.

And then the Walton family asked me, Saeed, why don't you open a supply chain fund?

I didn't want to invest other people's money. It's hard to answer to one set of people. I call them pillars, which is entrepreneurs. I didn't want to answer to LPs either. But apparently that boat has sailed, so now I actually manage nine specific funds.

Either they're AI for financial services, backed by some of the largest insurance carriers in the country, or they're industry focused, like supply chain and logistics.

And since I now have 165 investment professionals and 12 partners, if I didn't raise a fund I would lose my best people.

So again, I gave up. I'm usually stubborn, but now I have funds.

How to reach someone like Saeed

Richard C. Wilson: Someone who can text the founder, CEO or chairman of some of the largest corporations in the world is a very busy person, and I'm sure you have a lot coming at you, and people helping shield and filter.

What actually pierces all of that and gets your attention?

Saeed Amidi: I love meeting people and I love having a personal relationship with them, but you cannot have a personal relationship with all 2,600 active portfolio companies.

So I choose the top fifty people I enjoy and who I think are going to change the world, and I do better on text.

My daughter Sanam, who is in charge of marketing, technology and AI implementation, took my cell phone number off my card. She said, Saeed, you cannot have your cell phone on there.

But I printed some without her, so now I have cards with my cell number that she didn't approve. She's in charge of security too.

So if it's somebody I'd like to keep in touch with, I say, please let's do it by text. And then we follow up with an email or a pitch deck.

I like funny stories, so I'll tell you one. I went to Abu Dhabi and Dubai last week. I left Monday, I came back Friday.

On the plane, I met two entrepreneurs and made an investment at the bar on Emirates.

Those two entrepreneurs had domain knowledge. They had each worked ten to fifteen years at PwC. They were solving a problem they'd been working on for ten years, with AI. They're cash flow positive and profitable with thirty people.

But what I really saw was the sparkle in their eyes, the joy they had. And apparently they had pitched someone at Plug and Play, not me, and my colleagues had passed.

I told them, let us take another look, because I really like them.

Frankly, I shook hands with them for $100,000, if my bosses allow me. Because even when I make the decision, every investment needs four of our venture people to unanimously approve it.

So I have to convince three of my colleagues before they can get the $100,000.

It's really hard. I have to answer to everybody.

The university machine

Richard C. Wilson: You have partnerships with more than a hundred universities. There must be amazing startups and technology coming out of them that need help commercializing.

Can you explain how that works, and what you've learned about working with universities?

Saeed Amidi: Every Wednesday we have a university pitch competition. If anybody here would like to come, we'll invite you.

We feature thirty startups to about 300 investors and 100 corporate partners. Then those investors and corporate partners vote on whether they want a follow-up meeting with the startup.

We take that, do deep due diligence on five of the thirty, and then we invest in one or two.

Last year we registered over a hundred startups straight out of universities, either professors or PhD students.

My best one is called Guardant Health. There were two PhD students. We gave them the first $250,000 check. Six years later they went public. They've since taken over the old HP headquarters in Stanford Research Park.

So I really enjoy it. It's an honor to be part of the journey of these entrepreneurs.

But I always tell them, you have to do 99% of the work. Plug and Play will do that 1%, either help you raise money or help you do a proof of concept with Mercedes or with Walmart.

And believe me, that 1% is important. But they still have to do 99% of the work.

“You have to do 99% of the work. Plug and Play will do that 1%. And believe me, that 1% is important.”

Read more about Plug and Play's university program.

Purpose

Richard C. Wilson: After all these years, what do you care about most? What keeps you excited?

Saeed Amidi: They say at my age, and I do have a little money these days, it's mostly purpose and impact.

I'm passionate about what I do, and my purpose in life is to make an impact in the life of the entrepreneur, and to solve some of the big problems in the world in healthcare, mobility and robotics.

Honestly, that is the joy I have.

Sometimes my family says, you shouldn't go to Dubai and Abu Dhabi and come back in two days. I have to slow down a little. But I love what I do, and I love it when I can introduce a startup to a customer or to one of my VC friends.

Doing business at the highest level

Richard C. Wilson: Some people in this room have done a lot of business with decamillionaires and founders, but are starting to approach centimillionaires, or people running publicly traded companies.

Because of your background, you get access to people that would be harder for others to reach. If you were mentoring someone who wants to do business at that level, and who doesn't have your background and reputation, what have you learned that would help them?

Saeed Amidi: Right now I'm opening one office a month. The one I opened recently is at Princeton, with Microsoft and CoreWeave.

I kept calling the Princeton president and he wouldn't see me.

Then I went to Princeton. Then-Governor Phil Murphy was hosting me at his residence for lunch, and the Princeton president showed up. He'd had a very full calendar and hadn't had time for me, but when the governor called, he came.

He arrived at 12:00 and left exactly at 1:00.

So if you can get somebody like a governor to call on your behalf, I think it works.

And just to summarize, with Governor Murphy we're opening three AI centers of excellence. One at Princeton, one at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, and one opening December 7th at Rowan University.

I promised him we will triple the number of funded and growth startups in New Jersey within three years.

He asked me, why don't I have Anthropic in New Jersey, or Google?

So we're going to change that, because they have the talent and they have the research. They just don't have as much connection to money and to Silicon Valley.

Advice to his younger self

Richard C. Wilson: If you could go back thirty years, what advice would you give yourself?

Saeed Amidi: I'm actually doing Plug and Play 3.0 right now. This is chapter three.

In 1982 I exported five Apple computers to Italy. We had to pack them ourselves. They gave me a keyboard, a box and a monitor. They were so out of touch with export licensing and everything back then.

If I could go back to '83 or '84, I would embrace technology more. Even though I've done well in the bottled water and packaging businesses, I think I would have loved to embrace technology sooner.

My wife is my tech support at home, so I'm really bad with technology. But at least now I invest in technology to make up for it.

Richard C. Wilson: Any last comments, anything you wanted to share that I didn't ask about?

Saeed Amidi: I really enjoyed sitting through some of the panels.

We work with corporations, and in our funds we have a lot of LPs that came through those corporate relationships. But we're diversifying our LP base toward family offices.

So if anybody is interested in learning more about Plug and Play, we'd love to show you what we're going to do over the next ten years. We call it chapter three, or Plug and Play 3.0.

Great to be part of the journey, especially today. Thank you, Richard.

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