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Martin Mignot

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2025-08-11
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2025-08-11
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  1. “I do believe that having government entities or quasi-government entities support local innovation is important. I think the way to do it is not necessarily to, I think they should be customers. I think they should buy those products and they should help them as customer rather than as investor necessarily.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah. Well, the notion of sovereignty and tax sovereignty is a real notion. I think it's important. You have to recognize that there's a big part of the economy that has to think that way, where you have geopolitical realities that matter. And so if you're a government entity, if you are a quasi-government company, you may want or even have to use local providers eventually at some point. So I do think there is a large part of the market that needs and want local providers, especially assuming that they are close to the frontier or at the frontier. And so I think there is a real market case for that. There's also a lot of, I think, localization, customization that can need to happen. And so I think there's going to be a great enterprise market for those providers. So yeah, I think there is a market. Is it going to be smaller than OpenAI? Yes, for sure.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “See at the end of the journey. I think it's the pure venture multiple will likely be lower than some of the other categories in the past. I think that is clear. The difference is that the size of the outcome and the speed, very importantly, the speed at which the size is going to get reached means that you can have, especially if you can deploy a lot of capital, you will still be able to generate a lot of absolute returns. So in terms of performance, we'll still be very high, in terms of pure multiple and early state investments, maybe slightly lower because of dilution.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “In the earlier stage, for sure. I mean, I think for us, especially at seed stage, our approach to seed is much more collaborative. The idea is we don't want to compete with people like you and other seed funds and angels. We want to bring them along. We want to work together. It's conviction investing, and we're going to pull our weight and be super involved. But this is not the stage where we want to maximize ownership. So we're not going to have sharp elbows at that stage. Later on, especially at Ciriz and B's, that's where we really want to, because of the time we're going to spend helping these companies and spend time on the board and be hopefully the reference investor. That's where we need a minimum ownership.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “I mean, the time has changed for sure. I studied 15 years ago and we were all aiming for 20% was kind of the minimum bar. We still have some 20% ownership, but it's obviously getting a lot harder. For us, the goal is to get double digit ownership at exit. That is typically where if we look at the performance of the fund, most of our returns have been generated by companies where we own close to or more than double digit ownership at exit. And so that's what we're trying to aim for.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “We've done it in some occasions. Again, when we found extraordinary founder with revenue traction or open source traction, we've done that in a couple of open source companies, then it can totally make sense and you can really get amazing rewards for that”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Definitely. And so there is a too high price. Yeah, there is a price, there is the amount raised, and there is the maturity of the business. What we've all seen these companies that raise tons of capital at a very high price before they had proper product market fit. They thought they had it, but a lot of it was subsidized by investment. And then when they stopped investing because they realized, well, you know, it's not customers were acquiring or not profitable. So we need to stop it. It doesn't really make sense. Then they realized having all this money and all this team, they had to spend, especially in Europe where it takes a long time, they had to spend a year or two reducing the size of the team, going back to the basics. And so trying to find product market fit after you've grown so much and had so much capital and had such a high valuation makes it really, really tricky. So that is dangerous.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Becomes narrower and the likelihood of, you know, so you have a better understanding of where the company will, you know, the closer you get to IPO, the closer you should have a sense for what is the valuation. And so you have a better sense for that risk reward profile that you're mentioning. In the early stage, this is so far out. You don't really know. So I think, again, if you go back to the first principle of if you have this extraordinary funder and there is real traction, then don't overthink it.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “That's not really how we think, to be honest. This kind of risk reward profile, you don't know, right? Because you don't really have a good sense for the size of the reward. And I think in general, by and large, we've been, you know, the industry has even kind of underestimated the size of the outcome. I mean, you mentioned the scale of the revenue growth, the scale of the market caps of these businesses. didn't think that that would be the case even 10 years ago. So at the early stage, if you had known at the time that the outcomes could be so large, well, then maybe it was a very fair reward for the risk you were taking. So I think in the early stage, I think it's absolutely right. The only question is how far does it extend in valuation when you're, you mentioned Penet, it's 100 billion, is there 1 trillion still a mental trap? I don't know. So there must be some moment where you get into a slightly different realm and where the distribution of outcome”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yes, I think the answer is yes, by and large. So if there's one team that is aware of those differences, I would say it's index. We are very well aware of it and we take it into account when we vote on deals. And that's also why we leave a lot of latitude, especially in the when you have data, it's different because obviously data can speak for itself. But I think when at the earlier stage, to your point, the presentation matters a lot more. And that's where leaving more latitude to the partner or the investor who is closer to the funder and spend more time with them is super important because, yeah, I mean, we've had that in the past for sure.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “It's May, it's not really what we see. We consistently invest about half in Europe and half in the US, and we have a global one global bar. And I think that's the way we see the world. We're not fighting for local maximum. We're fighting for a global maximum. We want to be in the very best businesses globally and be the reference investors in those.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “So, if you judge your judgment based on gross margin at that time on the price of token at the time, you would have missed on great companies and great investments.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Was an example. All the LLM providers were very clear examples of that. A lot of the AI apps have similar characteristics. I think if that's the only thing that's holding you up, in most cases, I would totally ignore it because the reality is, you know, when you're getting started, optimizing for high gross margin is the last thing you should be doing. You're entirely focused on growth and building the product. But in most cases, especially in pure software businesses, you will find ways to optimize your gross margins and the cost, whether it's the underlying cost of the technology you're using is going down. I mean, the AI apps is a good example of that, where the cost of the price per token keeps on going down. Or you can just optimize your infrastructure a lot better when you have a lot more volume. And that's what happened with Revolution.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Well, it means that you have a lot of businesses that in the early days have really bad growth margins, very low gross margins. So Revolut is an example. Snowflake was an example.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “So it wasn't an obvious one. And I think I thought you're Nick at the time wasn't a natural kind of storyteller and fundraiser. So I think for all those reasons, he wasn't an obvious deal, which, by the way, I think that's one of the learnings is beware of gross margin in the early days. And I think that's a mistake we've made a couple of times. And I think Snowflake was a similar story.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “It's a revolution was pretty controversial, actually, of all the deals. Yeah, it's funny. It sounds in retrospect, it sounds bizarre, but it may end up being one of the most successful or maybe the most successful, but it was definitely one of the most controversial. The reason for that was that it was quite a few folds. The first one is it was a very European product, you know, and I think the product made a lot of sense for the European audience. Didn't make as much sense in the US context, where FX, frankly, is not a big topic. So I think that was one element where US-based folks were less familiar with the product and didn't resonate as well. The other issue we had is it was, especially in the early stages, it was a kind of negative gross margin business. I mean, they were basically giving away effects that weren't charging for anything else. So you had a little bit of interchange, but not that much. And so you had very low gross margin business. And obviously that was attractive. And the more they scale, and they scale very fast, all organic and word of mouth, the more they were burning capital.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “We have a different size of quorum depending on the size of the checks of who needs to be there. There are always folks from each office. It's very important because we work as one team across offices. And then we vote. We vote one to ten. You can't vote five and six. So you have to be four against. And then it's kind of a, so it's a qualified majority, essentially. So if the average is above six, the deal is approved. And so that mechanism is the same. And then there's also some latitude if you have very high conviction on the early stage. I think we have a bias for two action. And again, going back to having a beginner's mindset, the person who spends a lot more time with a certain team is obviously a better place to make a judgment call on that team. And so there is kind of a collective trust into the partner's judgment.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I don't think it means less. Finding product market fit is the hardest thing in any business and tons of funders walk around in the desert for years without ever finding it. So I think we shouldn't minimize or trivialize finding real traction and having real revenue traction. I think this is remarkable and it should be celebrated. Obviously, if you're talking about AI, auditing the quality of that revenue is critical. That's what we spend a lot of our time doing. Is that revenue long lasting? Is it sticky? The more cohorts you have, the more you can see the numbers. If you don't have that, then it's going to be talking to customers and also really trying to understand their use case. If it's something that's more like project-based and they want to use it once and then they will switch to something else potentially, or is something that, especially if it's inserted inside their workflow, you know, cursor is a good example. We've made a bunch of those type of investments. Then, you know, even if the number doesn't show it yet, you know.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “Yeah, exactly Five years in where you're like, oh, I'm small And you're like just team again. Yeah, I remember Matt talked about that meme at some point. And I'm getting there too. I'm back on the other side of the curve.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, exactly. I love Danny and I love Daniel Every freaking round. But, you know, so I think the learning here is when you have, again, it goes back to the founder, when you have, and we knew because, you know, Daniel was working at one of our companies. So we knew the guy was incredible. And so when you have such a unique founder that, again, does have a unique insight about their industry and has the ability to execute on it. And also in this case, you see real signs of execution, don't overthinking. I think that's a problem that we have. And chat with a lot of VC who say it's kind of pretty widespread in the industry. You think you want to be very smart. You want to be very diligent. And so there is a tendency to overthink. And when something has a fantastic funder and has real movement, then sometimes you just need, even if it's an industry like, oh my God, I've been burnt in the past. Don't overthink it.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Yeah, I mean, that's our, you know, that's absolutely our position. There are still some really good companies that we could have invested in. I would say, so going back to your original question, this idea of keeping a beginner's mindset is absolutely essential for any investor. And it's really hard to do. The example we always use at index is Spotify. And to your point, it wasn't because of a bad investment. It was because of a mediocre investment, which is different. We had just invested in last FM, a totally reasonable outcome, we saw how the society gets made in that industry and the power of the labels and we're like, gosh, this is impossible to make money. And we really love Daniel. And we saw that the product was phenomenal and there were some early traction. But we had this bias of the music industry is so hard. It's never going to happen. And that's why we passed multiple times. And when we wanted to come back, it was too late. And so I think my going there.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “We could have invested in any lot of other neobanks. Contour would be a really good example of that. A lot of remittance and certain corridors. So there's a lot of”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Yeah, that's probably the hardest one. And actually, you know, it's funny, it doesn't only, it's not only the bad investments or the mediocre kind of any investment gives you some form of bias. You know, if it's a great investment, then everything else may look not so great in comparison. And, you know, I've suffered certainly from that, you know, on the fintech side, for example, where I was lucky enough to be early in Revolut and then I looked at a lot of other fintech investments. I was like, well, Revlut can do this, so Rebut does it better. So I think it goes both ways.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “If you are selling the hardware, it's mostly a hardware product and hardware is really hard. If you don't sell software on top, you rely on a very complex supply chain which has suffered a lot over the past years, obviously. It's a volume game. You need to have distribution, you need to have relationships. So you need to raise a lot of money to build all of those assets. And the return on that capital is not as good as on pure software businesses. If you're selling a service, so Lime and Bird and those, I think you can have large scale, but it is so operationally complex. And you're also competing with a lot of subsidized transportation. So you're charging full price for a service that is offered at a discount by a lot of municipal services. And you're fighting against a lot of regulation, a lot of challenges. I still think that some companies will do well, actually, in that space. I think Lime is doing well.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Five or six years ago. So I think look, market timing is a real thing. You can be right, but it can be that, again, if you look at food delivery, it's interesting. People try to do delivery five or six. There was a French company, I forgot the name. It was doing delivery. But what they didn't have was they didn't have smartphone penetration. So they had to call drivers to tell them where to go and where to deliver. And obviously that didn't scale. And there was no efficiency and they would take 50 minutes. It would be very expensive. And so you needed to have not only the invention of the smartphone, but you need to have everyone, including drivers, having smartphones for something like Delivery to exist. So clearly here it's true. The concept was there, but the technology just didn't follow. I think in the case of cowboy and micro mobility in general, I think the timing was absolutely correct. The challenge here in this industry is that”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I think it goes down without great execution that comes with it. I think that on its own is not enough. I still think it gives you an advantage, but then I agree. I think it's all about execution.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “Link to that first principle thinking. So he thought about FX, for example. FX for a large corridor where you have a lot of volume of transfer costs nothing. So it should be given for free to the market. And then once you have that, that's a really good hook. And then you can build something else. And if you think about most of the great companies, they have one simple insight, but that is very deeply original. That's the core of what I look for in founders is I want to sit there and then they will teach me something that they have come up with, either thanks to the experience, but more usually.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “I don't prefer any of those types. The way I think about it is slightly different. What I love in founders is unique insights and that unique insight can come. So the unique insight can come from two places. It's one experience and knowledge of an industry. The other one is just sheer intelligence and ability to break down complex problem into very simple ones. And if you think about all the best founders I've worked with and you have worked with, I think that they tend to have this one similarity, which is they can come up with a very simple insight, something that sounds very simple, but it actually incredibly deep and profound and defensible. And they typically come at it from first principle thinking. I mean, I think first principle thinking gets thrown out a lot, but the very best funders, they have that. And so if you take, you know, Nika Trevut as an example of that, a lot of his decisions and a lot of his coincides were just”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “They don't necessarily need your help. The best founders I've seen are very good at reaching out to investors and people around them on very specific topics. When these people, it's leveraging the right people at the right time, being very specific about that versus going to, I think that's a little bit a lot of the approach that we see in the market. It's like, it's a one-stop shop for everything. I don't think the best founders use their investor or their supporters that way.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  30. “Two things. One is I didn't investigate as much as you did, but my view on the miners list is it's a really good list for who was a great investor 10 years ago. That's kind of how I would describe it because if you look at a lot of these companies, they were deals that were made 10 years ago. And so I think it's really accurate to show you who made great investment 10 years ago. Is it very accurate to see who is a great investor today or in the future? I think there is some persistence of returns and there's a lot of studies that have shown that, but it's not definitely there are a lot of great investors today who are not yet on the list, but will be in the future that should be on it.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  31. “I was chatting with Iliad Quantum Light about it the other day, and they said the number one factor that they noticed was a good predictor of future returns was whether a partner was on the MIDAS list, an early stage investor in the company was on the MIDAS list, which kind of tend to show that there is a persistence of returns in terms of proven investors.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  32. “And if you look at the principal rank, we have a lot of people who've been around for a long time. If you look at the strategist rank, we have a lot of people been here for a long time. So there has been turnover in the industry at large.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  33. “A much larger company where people move around a lot more. A lot of our people have been around for 10 years plus, even in our strategies team. And that creates a level of trust and competency that it's really hard to replicate in much larger organizations.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  34. “What I've changed my mind on is if you start from the funder and if you really think through how can you best help them in what is the most helpful way that you can interact with them at the early stage especially, how does that help them that you have 10 different products that you do LBO, you do credit, how is that helpful to an early stage funder? It's not. And so if you really think from that first principle of, okay, what are the resources you need to be really helpful in those early stages? And again, in the service for us of building both the biggest ownership and the best reference from those founders, it's not this super large scale multi-product. It's, you know, you need enough, again, to support them, but you also need to be small enough to kind of keep that interpersonal relationship and that close support where they know they can call 10 people at index, get help on anything that may happen to them. You don't necessarily have that in such a personal and trusted way.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  35. “This is not how we see seed at all. Every check is high conviction. We don't make as many as a result, but we have high conviction checks and we work closely with responders, even at the seed stage. It's the same as if you were a series there. Our goal is very simple. We want to be as early as possible, become the largest shareholder, and become the most valued and most referenced investors in those companies.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  36. “Not sure you're going to have venture like returns at 300 billion. I think you can have amazing returns. Can you have 70x? You could five accounts. You can have a check. Yeah, no, absolutely. The math makes sense. Do you need dedicated funds to do that or can you do it in a more ad hoc way? I think that's a question. That is under a later stage set of things, obviously. We on the early stage, either seed or early venture or early growth, I don't think you need those mega assets. And I think they distract you and they tend to pull you towards the later stage. And if you have so much capital to deploy, obviously, you will tend to focus more on the later stage, on the very big checks. And I think if you want to help and support at the earlier stage, it can be an impediment.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  37. “Puff. I wouldn't say that's the minimum. We see it as the right size to both support entrepreneurs with the right amount of capital and then have enough to pay for the infrastructure that we have.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  38. “Not entirely. No. I know there is a meme which is the industry is diverging into two camps. You either have the mega funds, the asset gatherers, or you have the tiny boutique shops. And I don't truly believe in that. I think there is a third work. And index is in that third work where you need enough scale to help support the founders. And we think always from the founder's point of view, how can we best serve them? And you need a minimum size to really help them to kind of invest across stages, support them from inception to IPO. You need a minimum size. But I also don't think you need a GGA size to really support them. I think this push towards larger asset gathering is very good for VCs who do it. It can make a lot of sense financially. It can make a lot of sense for them. I'm not sure it makes so much sense for the entrepreneurs themselves. So I do believe there is a third way.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  39. “I don't know if I would say tourist BC, but I would say the asset class has institutionalized. Funds have become larger. There's more people in general by and large. And so you bring people who may sometimes want to have a career, choose it as a career more than as a calling. Me personally, I think us at Index, see this job as a calling.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  40. “The way I put it for this particular statement was very much playing the long game, the fact that if you are to get into this industry and this job, you've got to commit for 10, 15 years at least, and focus on not only outside reward and not on the external, progressing as a career, but very much more on the internal and doing it for the right reasons, which is investing in great companies, supporting great funders. That was what I really meant by that.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  41. “Beware of gross margin in the early days. And I think that's a mistake we've made a couple of times. You have a lot of businesses that in the early days have really bad growth margin. All the LLM providers were very clear examples of that. I think if that's the only thing that's holding you up, in most cases, I would totally ignore it. We never pass and we never lose a deal or pass on the deal because of price in the early stage. So we've been around for 30 years. We've invested, I think, 11.5 billion dollars. We've returned, I think about close to 30, and we still have 20 plus in holdings. Most of that is concentrated in eight, nine companies. And we've invested in close to 400 companies over the years.”

    2025-08-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index's Decacorn Factory | Decision-Making, Investment Process, Biggest Lessons, Biggest Misses | Why Gross Margin is a Fallacy at Seed | Never Turn Down a Deal on Price with Martin Mignot, Partner @ Index Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source