YouSaid · the spoken record

Mike Volpi

lines on the record: 81
first: 2019-08-19
most recent: 2019-08-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“We haven't really spent that much time in Latin America yet, but clearly, I mean, the market is becoming more and more vibrant. And it's interesting that you say that because we've been looking Of recent over the last six months had many more opportunities that are coming out of Latin America.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so a lot of the original open source companies come from there, Elastic, which was one of ours, was founded in Amsterdam. So you do find a lot more of that movement. The Apache Foundation, I think, if I'm not mistaken, was based in Europe. So you see a lot of that. Now there's a ton of it in the US as well, but it's definitely something that found its roots in Europe and continues to be fairly vibrant.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the granddaddies of open source are Linux and MySQL, both European movements to start with. I think that the notion of a community-driven creation of software feels very European in Scandinavian at some level.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then financial services a lot of the geographies in Europe, the UK being a great example, have offered a much more welcoming regulatory environment to kick off these approaches. And as a result of that, we've seen a huge number of really innovative companies all the way from insurance to payments to lending to new bank accounts, cross-money lending. It's been really in the financial”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In terms of sectors. Well, I mean, I would definitely say that there are areas that Europe has continually done well on, like open source, which Mike can talk about. It's a socialist movement. It had to come out of Europe. Another one has been around e-commerce and specifically fashion. That's been a massive area, probably a lot to do with the fact that the big houses are in France and Italy. So that's been a big part of it.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where But the numbers don't really show that. I think someone was pointing out to me that 70% goes to three cities and most of it goes to Silicon Valley. It's New York, Austin, and Silicon Valley, essentially. It still has that. So how when you're trying to sell that?”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's become, you know, people came here because they wanted to be entrepreneurs. Now people can stay in Paris and be entrepreneurs, which wasn't the case a decade ago, right? Or they can be in Nashville and be entrepreneurs. And in those places, entrepreneurship was not A, not particularly socially accepted. And certainly capital was hard to come by. Whereas now, because capital is going all over the place, you can be an entrepreneur in Nashville or in Austin or in New York or in Seattle or in Paris or in Prague and find the capital that you need.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. I want to talk about that in a minute. Yeah, and frankly, I think that if I were to bet the market share chart 10 years from now, it'll still have silicone belly available. 70%. I don't know what the percentage is. It's something like something. And it might not be 70, it might be 60, or it might be 50, but it'll still be a great. But just because Silicon Valley exists doesn't mean opportunities elsewhere aren't rising. And on a percentage basis, like if you start from a low number, you're seeing geographies like Europe. You've seen China. You're seeing India. You're seeing Latin America. You're seeing cities outside of Silicon Valley that are doing better and better. And that's great. Fundamentally, I think the big shift is that entrepreneurship is continuing to mainstream more, not at the expense of Silicon Valley, but in addition to Silicon Valley.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's funny because you hear that retort in all sorts of places like from New York or from LA or from Europe or from China. And the truth of the matter is it's an and not an or. Like people make this like Silicon Valley is over and it's happening over there. Actually, it's happening everywhere. So Silicon Valley, I think, is still an unbelievable place, a magnet of talent. You still think absolutely. You still think that...”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, that's still the case in a lot of them. That's still the case. We have a completely orthogonal view of that where we actually think that the best companies have to think outside of their domain from the get-go, from their geographic domain. And we have a lot of expertise on not only helping them.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think it's a question of, I mean, it's a two way street and that fundamentally, a lot of it is going to be based on the chemistry and being able to show what we've done in the past by being involved. So that if money is the differentiator in this valley and certainly it's becoming increasingly true in Europe, we're never going to win. It's going to be absolutely based on what we can do to help the entrepreneur. So one of them is, as I said, this notion of having a global perspective is actually a big difference. I mean, you recall the days when VCs around here refused to invest in any company without the right zip code.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are far less valuation sensitive. They're far less discerning. And so you find them, particularly if you're in the growth fund business, you're finding that valuations are going up and that it's super competitive and so on and so forth, which is sort of a reality. So I think we collectively think of it as double-edged sword. On the one hand, it's good because we can go after new market segments that we couldn't do before. On the other hand, it's super competitive and tough out there”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But now that those pools of capitals are available, the good news is you can go after businesses that traditionally you thought, yeah, there's no way this is VC-backed. All of a sudden now it feels like, oh, yeah, we could do this. We can do Instacart. We could do Lyft. We could do Uber. We could do all these things that traditionally weren't in our domain because that capital is available. So there's usefulness to it. The tricky part to it is, of course, is that those large pools of capital.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Businesses that need lots of people or they need to have a hardware firm. Yeah, or just even imagine Uber launching all these cities around the world where they need people on the ground doing things, right? Or very capital intensive businesses like self-driving cars, right? Those, as a venture capitalist, you would look at and go like, hmm, outside of our league can't do it”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, two parts of it care. Having more capital isn't entirely useless in the sense that historically in venture capital, we had a tougher time thinking about investing in operationally intensive businesses.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And, you know, I think that one of the interesting aspects of our business is that while there are many cycles and there are many new entrants that come in with different approaches, fundamentally the actual business is very similar. It's two folks in a garage coming up with an idea, starting small and trying to build something that's going to be meaningful on a global basis. And that, you know, a lot of money is not is certainly not necessarily going to make the difference. And in fact, you could argue that your success is going to be inversely proportional to the amount of money that you raise. There's no direct correlation with the amount that you raise and the success of the company. So at the end of the day, when you start, it's going to be much more of an artisanal approach.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you're playing the financial model, then capital matters. And our philosophy has been that we want to hang out with entrepreneurs and people that are doing interesting things and try to lend our know-how around it. And we're not clear that necessarily having more money.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I think if you look at the venture business today, I'd say broadly there's maybe a couple of schools of thought, right? One school of thought is to look at this as a financial instrument. You know, you're sort of providing capital, you do it to a large number of companies, and you rely on statistics and market analyses and so forth to produce a reasonable portfolio outcome. And I think the other school of thought is to sort of say you really are sort of An advisor and a shoulder to cry on for the entrepreneur, and you go sort of entrepreneur first up in the former category, I don't think that capital is a material competitive advantage. Your competitive advantage is who you are, your capabilities as a person, your competence, your ability to actually help the entrepreneur.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, it's really not changed that much. Right. In the grand scheme of things, the growth fund was about the same size. It was 750 million instead of a billion. And the venture fund was 550 million instead of 650 million.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so there were a few firms. It hadn't quite worked And we looked at each other and said, well, if we have aspirations to make index a truly global leadership firm, we can't just do that in Europe. And the obvious place to do it from is San Francisco. So we decided that we would try that, even though it had never done before, never been done before. And Danny and I moved over here in a renta office, sort of a pre-we work we work, and launched the whole index activity and the rest is history.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, you know, I think, look, Danny and the team, before I ever got to index, had done a fantastic job in Europe. Index was a very small, tiny firm when they got started and it become one of the leaders, if not the leader, in Europe.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I think the point of view from the get-go is that. And we have to surround them with great talent and teams and really support them. So originally a lot of the investments that we made like Skype and MySQL and Netaporte were European investments because very few folks were applying the Silicon Valley style of investing to Europe. And then I think we realized that actually this notion of a global perspective of truly thinking about what businesses can do and what their impact can be on a global basis led us to realize, well, maybe we shouldn't be just investing in Europe. We should be investing in the US as well. And that was actually part of the reason that we convinced Mike to join us was that our thinking was we've done this in Europe. We continue to do it in line. That's right. Right. Yeah.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be made So he invited me to join Index and allowed me to redeem myself. So I promised him that whatever money he lost in juice, I would make him back. And I think I've tried my hardest to do that. It's that guilt. I did a video.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was sort of a good idea. Danny was on my board. I didn't do particularly well for them. And then in 2009, Danny basically said, you know, you really sucked as a CEO, but you might be an OKBC. So why don't you try joining us?”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I was lucky enough to be part of the buying team. I did a fair bit of that. Then the world came to an end in 2000 with the dot-com bubble crashing. And John Chamber has basically said, you know what, we're not going to buy anything anymore. So you should get an honest job and go run some product stuff. So I did that for... Six years, different product lines and so forth.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I wasn't as tall as Mark Hendrieson. That was probably one of the issues. Anyway, I decided that I needed to find a job on the internet. And at the time, there were no internet companies. There was no Yahoo, no eBay. Those were all 95 vintage companies. And so I did a little research and I figured out that there's this thing called a router that the internet runs on. And I figured, well, if the internet's going to be popular, the railroad tracks must be worth something. So I joined this little company called Cisco back in 94 And I thought I'd be there for two years and then go to a startup, and then one thing led to another, and Cisco went from about 1,500 people roughly when I joined to 55,000 people seven years later.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, my story is I was born in Italy from Italian parents. I was destined to be an ordinary Italian child eating pizza and mozzarella. That sort of came to a screeching halt. My dad moved to Japan. And so we lived there for 12 years and I went to college here. My story with the internet actually has a little something to do with Netscape, which is that I graduated from business school in 1994. And in 94, the browser was kind of commercialized, the mosaic communications at that time. I really wanted a job there. I couldn't get one.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“CEO of Netscape of Netscape, Peter, who was an incredible CFO, and Quincy, who was running around doing corporate development deals and trying to make sure that everyone understood that Netscape was going to be so important. So we did that Barksdale Group and quickly realized there that they were great friends, but none of them, because they were such great operators, really liked investing in companies.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“After writing a book about it, I was Thank you. The premise was that I just needed strong buys on pretty much everything because the world was going to take care of the rest. The internet was such an important wave that fundamentally I had to just get investors to ride it.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the idea was that the internet was happening and that people should buy the stocks because if they didn't buy the stocks, the companies wouldn't actually have a great career. So I was pedaling these early selling. Early stocks and just convincing folks at the internet was going to be something very important.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, with pleasure. Okay. Give me your. How much time do you have? Yes, so basically I came out here in the mid 90s to try and marry my two passions, which were art and the internet. And I quickly realized that I loved working with internet entrepreneurs, but I didn't want to work in the art world. And so that led me to work for Boutique Investment Bank, hammering a quiz.”
2019-08-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Index Ventures' Mike Volpi and Danny Rimer · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT