Markus Villig
24 statements across 2 episodes · 3 bullish · 9 bearish · 2 people on the record · first statement Nov 13, 2024 by Markus Villig · said 12 times in 4 episodes since 2024 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Markus Villig's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Harry Stebbings (5), Larry Aschebrook (4), Taavet Hinrikus (2)
tap a year for its mentions
2025 11 mentions in 3 episodes 4 per episode
- Wayne Ting, CEO @Lime: From Losing $3 on Every $1 to $90M in EBITDA | E1252 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Larry Aschebrook, Founder & MP @GSquared: How We Lost Money on Uber and Made Millions on Lyft · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Plural Partner, Taavet Hinrikus: Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2025, scene by scene →
Everything said about Markus Villig, oldest first
Nov 13, 2024
Nov 13, 2024 negative
Villig: US ride-hailing rivals became bloated due to excess VC capital
“Specifically you look at some of our US competitors who raised thirty billion dollars. I mean, these companies obviously started off with having so much excess cash that they got very bloated. It was never a problem for them that they had to optimize for costs…”
Nov 13, 2024 positive
Markus Villig would have pitched New York growth funds earlier with Bolt
“I've would have likely gone to these New York funds much earlier. I think that actually I at first just didn't even think that they would be willing to invest in private companies such as ours, but actually the moment we got to first meetings with them and the…”
Nov 13, 2024
Nov 13, 2024
Villig: Future mobility disruption will come from new innovations, not incumbents
“Either it's going to be something new like electric scooters, or it's going to be self-driving cars, but I think it's going to be a completely different thing that's going to shake up the market, not the existing company.”
Nov 13, 2024 negative
Villig: Listening to external advice in 2019 slowed Bolt's global expansion
“Probably we should have been even more aggressive in our expansion. So if I look back at this period that we had from 2015 to 19, where we launched all of these markets remotely, it was a fantastic time. I think what we did back in 2019 was that we started rai…”
Nov 13, 2024
Nov 13, 2024 negative
Nov 13, 2024 positive
Nov 13, 2024 positive
Villig: Bolt's lead engineer produced work equivalent to ten engineers
“We have a couple of these extremely, extremely intelligent people at Bolt who really defined the company. I'd say Oliver, our lead software engineer has been like that like he was able to do alone, but It took probably 10 average engineers to do the same work,…”
Nov 13, 2024
Markus Villig rejected a €100 million acquisition offer from Daimler
“So they approached us and they tried to buy the business back then for maybe a hundred million euros, which obviously as a young kid would have been a fantastic outcome. So we discussed it with the founders, but my view was immediate. We don't want to sell the…”
Nov 13, 2024
Nov 13, 2024
Villig: Bolt could have grown faster by raising angel funding earlier
“I think I should have been more aggressive with initial fundraising. I think we could have sped ourselves up a couple of months if I had gotten out and raised a small angel check before I did, because we bootstrapped the company completely for about the first …”
Nov 13, 2024
Markus Villig: Early expansion mistakes delayed Bolt's evolution by years
“I think we could have actually been more deliberate about which markets we choose to expand into. So I think that as I mentioned, we had this first wave where we just expanded with the wrong model and looking back, if we hadn't done that and we would have done…”
Nov 13, 2024 negative
Villig: Finding European tech leaders who scaled thousand-person companies is hard
“If so, I'd say that it's very hard to find strong people leaders in Europe who actually understand tech companies and who have actually built organizations of thousands of people that I agree with. There's just almost no tech companies of that size in Europe.”
Nov 13, 2024
Nov 13, 2024 negative
Markus Villig: People have largely forgotten about the war in Ukraine
“I think that there's a lot of things going on well in the world of technology, but I think it's absolutely insane that we have war going on in Europe. Russia attacking Ukraine, killing people, and everybody's just basically forgotten about it.”
Nov 13, 2024
Markus Villig launched Bolt using $5,000 saved for his university fund
“My parents and I was like, hey, we really need some budget to get this thing off the ground. And we came from a very modest means in Estonia, especially back then, wasn't a rich country. So they said, yeah, we'll put aside 5000 bucks for your university fund. …”
Nov 13, 2024 negative
Nov 13, 2024
Nov 13, 2024
Villig: Intelligence matters more than long hours when making decisions
“I'm still in the camp of intelligence, so I would rather get somebody who's very smart. It's fine if they work a bit less hours, but they make the right decisions. At least for our business you cannot compensate with hard work if you don't make the right decis…”
Nov 13, 2024 bearish
Nov 13, 2024 negative
Nov 20, 2024 negative
Sertoglu: Passing on Bolt's seed round was Bek Ventures' biggest loss
“I mean, one example that's probably our biggest loss is we met Bolt, the car ailing company, and they were called Taxify at the time, a small Baltics ride-hailing company, and even though, you know, Marcus, the founder, was extraordinary, we really couldn't se…”