LA Venture Podcast: Omar Hamoui on Raising Early Capital Outside the Bay Area

Minnie Ingersoll
Minnie Ingersoll is a partner at TenOneTen and host of the LA Venture podcast. Prior to TenOneTen, Minnie was the COO and co-founder of $100M+ Shift.com, an online marketplace for used cars. Minnie started her career as an early product manager at Google. Minnie studied Computer Science at Stanford and has an MBA from HBS. She recently moved back to L.A. after 20+ years in the Bay Area and is excited to be a part of the growing tech ecosystem of Southern California. In her space time, Minnie surfs baby waves and raises baby people.
LA Venture Podcast: Omar Hamoui on Raising Early Capital Outside the Bay Area

On this week's episode of the L.A. Venture podcast, meet Omar Hamoui, a partner at Mucker Capital. Hamoui is the founder of AdMob, a cornerstone of modern mobile advertising. He discusses being one of the first apps in the app store, and early negotiations with Steve Jobs. Hamoui also talks about how entering the venture world was difficult both then and now, despite his early success selling AdMob to Google for $750 million.


After his time with Google, Hamoui became a partner at Sequoia Capital, the venture firm that funded giants like YouTube, Zoom, Instacart and Zappos. He left in 2019 to join Santa Monica's Mucker Capital — a pre-seed and seed stage venture firm that helps early companies scale their brand. In this episode he also discusses why he thinks it's difficult to raise a Series A round outside of the Bay Area.

Hear Hamoui give first-hand accounts on how he learned to create startups, negotiate, when to sell and how to find the right team.

"Sometimes people build businesses that aren't working at their scale. They have to raise money to keep going, but they're really just covering the problem with more money. It's actually not a functional business in the first place." — Omar Hamoui

Omar Hamoui is a partner at Mucker Capital. He currently resides in Santa Monica.

dot.LA Engagement Intern Colleen Tufts contributed to this post.

Want to hear more of L.A. Venture? Listen on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

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