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Ilya Fushman

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28
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2016-09-19
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2016-09-19
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1
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  1. “Well, the most recent one is the latest financing round for Slack, saying yes was pretty simple. Slack is one of the fastest growing companies. I think that's been around and it's poised to transform how people”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “I think if you are hyper focused on your domain, you lose sight of what really drives people. And ultimately, all of us are investing in businesses that build products for people. These macro trends are quite important, obviously for VCs, also the macro trends and markets are really important. So I read the BBC a lot. But in terms of tech, look, I love tech meme. It's got a great syndication for all the news I care about. Hacker News, I scan through every once in a while. And when I'm really digging, I'll go through the archive and read quantum physics papers.”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I love I actually just love reading news. I love reading the BBC. I think that a lot of times you miss the macro when you're hyper focused on the specifics.”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “I think it's somebody who can be your partner, but also be our critical partner. And what I mean by that is I think you have to be supportive. You have to understand the business, but you also have to be critical and push at the right times because ultimately that's the value of bringing in a board member is that it's somebody who's going to give you the raw feedback, but it's going to be fair and understood raw feedback. That's the most important. From my experience, if you're lucky enough to be a Drew Hausen or a Stuart Butterfield or a Mark Zuckerberg or any one of these iconic founders, there are very few people in the world who can give you candid, unsolicited, valuable advice. And so the hope is that for some amount of time until these guys grow you, you can do that as board member.”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I don't think I've ever had an idea. I think a lot of what's guided me throughout life, I've been able and I've been lucky to have opportunity and take advantage of it. But what I'd love to be at is build Index into a great global VC and have us be the marquee investors in the next generation of decacorns.”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Master and Margarita by Michael Golgakov. It's a Russian classic. It's a surrealist novel, but it's really about love and human emotion, and it's just a beautifully written piece of work.”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “And my experience at Dropbox with that before we really did anything, Dropbox had 70% of its users outside of North America, and biggest chunk of those were in Europe. And ultimately, we collected a lot of revenue in Europe, and a lot of our business was in Europe. And in fact, if you look at most SaaS companies and really, I think most companies that generate revenue, 30 to 40 percent of their revenue will come from Europe. And so having operations in Europe and having support in Europe is critical and being able to establish a presence in Europe and having a partner who helps you with that is also critical. So I think that's the role that index can play. The idea for us is that we're going to build a great team in the US where individual partners will be able to help foster growth in companies. And on top of that, we'll be able to provide a bridge, a seamless bridge to Europe.”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Yeah, I mean, that's why I joined. That's the challenge. So indexSF opened up in 2011. So it's relatively young. General thesis, by the way, for us to open the U.S. office was that we'd seen a few trends. One was that the initial thesis of index was like they're great companies that are going to be built in Europe. But we also saw was that those great companies, once they become big enough, want to branch out to the US. And they need a partner who can support them across the Atlantic. And so that was one driver. The second driver was that we realized that there are great companies built in the US that ultimately want to get to Europe and have to get to Europe, right? Because that's the next GDP per capita part of the world.”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Or North America to Europe, or really anywhere to Europe, or helping with expansion from Europe to North America, or they want to work with a particular partner, whether it's somebody who has product background or somebody who's been an enterprise for a long time or somebody who really gets social. So I think there is sort of a lot of noise, but if you look deep down, the companies that are really good are also a lot more thoughtful about the partners that they bring on. And I think that's ultimately what winds up being the thing that you need to focus on, which is your differentiation.”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “The VC environment has been heated in the valley for a really long time. In fact, probably for decades, if you ask most folks in Venture. The reality today is there is a lot of capital flowing into firms, right? Because if you think about it, at the macro level, there aren't that many places to deploy large sums of money with high returns. And so I think there is going to be a continuous supply of capital. That's not going to stop. I do think that because of that, there is a lot of money and there are many companies. But what you see is that I think the companies that are really good can create a concentration of capital and they become very competitive. But I think those companies are also becoming a lot more discerning about what they want in terms of an investor partner. Really, it's not just about the capital. They do want to know that somebody's bringing in a great network or they're helping an arc in the case of index, helping with expansion from the state.”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “That's a great question from Lars. You know, I think that for me it's really getting to that product market fit, right? Which is what I said before. I think it's finding a resonance between me and the founder where we both agree that, hey, there's value to be had in the relationship. The deal, and maybe my partners at the next will be on that.”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Yeah, I think that's probably a good way of putting it. It's really pattern recognition. I think over time, what I've seen great folks who I've worked with on the venture side develop is this kind of gut instinct and a pattern recognition for things that have happened and sounding the alarm bell.”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “A company and it's about to double headcount and go from 300 to 600 people. You can say here are the things that broke and here is maybe something you should be paying attention to. It's dangerous to be prescriptive.”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Yeah, I think it's a fallacy to say we did it this way at a company and therefore you should do it that way. I think that's the wrong approach, actually. And I never say we did it in Dropbox this way and therefore you should do it. And frankly, because there's not going to be another company like Dropbox. There are going to be companies that are similar to the Dropbox and they have similar, whether it's existential issues or go-to-market strategies or product challenges. And I think the thing that I can bring from the experience isn't we did a specific thing. It's really, this is the framework that we used to think about it. And I think it's that framework of how you think about it that's really valuable. And I think that's what the folks who I've seen in Venture who were operators and who I think are great investors bring with them. It's not a specific decision point or a specific thing that they did. It's really more passing on the knowledge for how founders and executives should be making decisions, how they can be thinking about things more effectively, you know, seeing around corners, those are common themes when you look”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “And I think certainly those are the kinds of companies that I resonate with a lot in product-centric founders who want to do a brainstorming session or who want to do a strategy meeting or who want to have me meet with their team and help out. That's the kind of stuff that I really love doing.”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “There's a spectrum of folks in venture. I certainly am on boards with folks who are great from a just kind of invest fair financial perspective and I think there are also folks who are great operators in the former CEOs and founders. So I think you have a spectrum. It's really about, I think, picking what makes you happy. And what makes me happy is scratching that building-ish, right? Because otherwise it would be really lonely. I get a lot of value out of it and I think that the companies I work with get a lot of value out of it. And I think that's really where product market fit for me as a venture.”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “It's in many ways. Venture is similar, right? I think the firms are in some ways similar and in many ways different. But at the end of the day, what I think has been the biggest learning for me is that the time you spend with a company is not just about spending time with the executive team. And it's something that I think we really kind of embody at index overall. I try to spend a lot of my time with the folks who are building things, not just the founders and CEOs, but also their team and their team's team to really help build the company, shape it and guide it. And that's been incredibly rewarding to me. And that's been the way for me to scratch the itch of building things because the feedback cycles in venture are incredibly different from the feedback cycles of building and shipping products. And that's probably the biggest gap.”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “It's been incredibly fun and incredibly rewarding. I mean, I think the thing for me is that I did a brief stint adventure before Dropbox, so I spent about a year and a half at Kosla. So I kind of had a sense of what I was getting into.”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “I was like, wowcase. But it was literally the drawing of a cupcake to make sure that this kind of element of humanity was top level present at the company.”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “We knew that delight not just at the product level, but at the culture level, company level had to be a thing. And so John was really the guy who crafted a lot of the content and built a team around himself to really kind of be a culture team that infused the light and fun into everything that we did. We had things like interesting fun motivational posters where maybe some folks were photoshopped into movie scenes. We never forgot that we're building products for people. And in fact, in one way in which we solidified it at a later point in time was we added a company value, which was cupcake. And it was literally a cupcake. Drawing of a cupcake”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “How do you infuse that into people, especially the So, one way we did it was we had company all hands, which most companies do, but we never took ourselves too seriously in these company all hands. And we always made sure that we infuse some element of making fun of ourselves. We had an incredible designer, John Ying, who is responsible for the stick figures, you know, the shark with the Velociraptor and the AK-47 and the panda, who really focused on bringing kind of the notion of delight into everything that we did. Take a step back, you know, we were building a file sync and share product, so our competition were network-storage drives and USB sticks, which are definitely not delightful.”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “So we wound up being lucky because we had an incredible recruiting team early on kudos to Drew and Rash for really focusing on company culture as one of the top priorities. And I think that's one of the things that really differentiated Dropbox. We had an incredible pool of incredibly talented people who were incredibly focused and bought into the company culture. And so we made onboarding a top priority parts of the executive and leadership team do an onboarding talk for first individuals and then classes of people coming in. We had a whole process for onboarding people for a few weeks. One of them building a real team around new employee onboarding. The other thing that we did really solidified the culture was infuse an element of delight into everything that we did. So if you recall some of the”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “So, all of that winds up being something that you need to rework probably every six months. And then there are these kind of macro points where one of them is the 150 person kind of dumb bar limit, right, which is the point at which you don't know everyone's name. And that's a pretty critical one because you really don't know everyone's name. In a world where you don't know everyone's name and you're not in the same room, how do you make sure”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “New folks who come in don't have the same context as you did. And those are probably the biggest challenges, and their challenges associated with not just understanding, but also execution, because as you become bigger, you start having teams that are pretty big monoliths and you need to start splitting them up. And so, yeah, I think every six months we did a pretty significant reorg. And we also would start building new processes, whether it was things like defining set of company values or a set of processes for how we build products or a set of processes for how we did interviews or expanding our candidate pool from everybody being all around athletes who were full stack engineers to bring in specialization. You go through these kind of pivotal transition moments or starting to bring in folks who are not just on the product side, but on the sales of go-to-market side and integrating them and defining processes for how the product side of the company works with the sales side of the company.”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Yeah, I mean, I think as you scale, you go through these pivotal moments. If you think about the beginnings of a company, you have people in one room who can typically just shout across the room, and maybe they don't even have to shout because they're just so aligned in their thinking that they can just look at each other and know what the other person is thinking, what they should be doing, what the right answer is. That works pretty well until you're about 15 to 20 people, and then it doesn't work anymore because you have folks who've just come on board, they're new, you need to kind of get them up to speed. But you can still do it because everybody is in the same room. At about 50 people, you start getting to the room limit. The first thing that goes are conference rooms, and the second thing that goes are bathrooms. So you get to expand. But what you wind up finding is that as you scale, you need to start investing a lot more in communication and transferring the knowledge that's in your heads and verbalizing it and putting it in some kind of processes for everybody else.”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “Set of knowledge in building Dropbox that was really impactful to other people and could be really transferred across a variety of sectors because it wasn't just about building a cloud file sign and share service. It was really about how do you build a company? How do you go through scaling from 50 to 100 to 150 to 300, 500 and 500 plus people? How do you kind of restructure and realign yourself? How do you make sure that people really know what they're doing? the ship towards a common set of goals and so being able to take that knowledge transfer it to entrepreneurs do it across a variety of different sectors and ideas was incredibly compelling to me and taking index and building it as well alongside of that felt like a dream job.”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “And what I was doing, and I wanted to find a new thing. And I wanted a bit of a soul surge to figure out what is it that I really wanted to do. I went from, hey, doing the same thing over again at a rocket ship company to, hey, I'd really like to start my own company to realizing I don't have ideas that I really would go all in on for the next 10 years. And in that process, spending a lot of time with the folks at Index who led the series B in Dropbox, which is how I knew them in the first place. And they were immensely helpful. And they sort of said, look, we know that you have an entrepreneurial ambition. You don't have any great ideas yet. But we're building index. So how about you come over and you help us build index, help build index on the West Coast in the States? It felt like an incredible opportunity to me. And I found through personal investing and through just working with entrepreneurs outside of my day job that I had accumulated a”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “It's a pretty long story. So, a very long time ago, I was an academic. I did a PhD in physics. I worked on building quantum computers, did semi-successfully. I then realized I don't want to be in academia when I'm doing a startup with a bunch of my grad school friends. We built the world's most efficient solar cell. It was also the world's most expensive solar cell. So that didn't quite work out. The company wanted being acquired, and I wound up getting to venture for the first time at a place called Kosla Ventures. And so there were a few things I learned when I was at Koslova. One was that I loved Venture. And two was that I wanted to be a venture capitalist who's been an operator, who's seen things before, who's done it, and who can actually provide real value. And so my journey then took me to Dropbox, which was amazing because I joined it around 50 people and was there for about four years when we grew through to almost 1,500. One of being able to do a lot of interesting things on that ride, building launching Dropbox for business, and ultimately running product. And then I realized that I'd hit kind of a level of maturity.”

    2016-09-19 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source