Every argument clarity score on this site is built from rows on this page. Each
question and answer was assessed with names hidden, the host's own answers included, on
four things from 1 to 5:
directness (does it answer the question asked), coherence (do the ideas follow),
precision (concrete details and clear references), compression (says a lot per word). The weighted
mix (30/30/25/15) is the exchange score. A person's published score averages their exchange
scores on raw tape only, at least 8 of them, shrunk toward the cohort mean.
Full method →
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q Now, I'd love to start off by hearing a bit about you, and how you came to be a partner at INDEX, and your story. What's your origin story?
A It's a pretty long story. So, uh, a very long time ago, I was an academic. I, uh, 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. I wound up 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. A company wound up being acquired, and I wound up getting to venture for the first time at a place called Coastal Ventures. And so there were a few things I learned when I was at Coastal. 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 at around 50 people, uh, and was there, uh, for about four years when we grew through to almost 1500. I wanted 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, uh, I'd hit kind of a level of maturity, uh, in, in what I was doing, and I wanted to find a new thing, uh, 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, uh, over again, uh, at a ro…
AI assessment note: “I was an academic. I, uh, did a PhD in physics. I worked on building quantum computers.”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q Now, I'd love to start off by hearing a bit about you, and how you came to be a partner at INDEX, and your story. What's your origin story?
A It's a pretty long story. So, uh, a very long time ago, I was an academic. I, uh, 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. I wound up 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. A company wound up being acquired, and I wound up getting to venture for the first time at a place called Coastal Ventures. And so there were a few things I learned when I was at Coastal. 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 at around 50 people, uh, and was there, uh, for about four years when we grew through to almost 1500. I wanted 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, uh, I'd hit kind of a level of maturity, uh, in, in what I was doing, and I wanted to find a new thing, uh, 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, uh, over again, uh, at a ro…
AI assessment note: “I was an academic. I, uh, did a PhD in physics.”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q Yeah, absolutely. Question from Jason Lemkin. What makes a great board member?
A I think it's somebody who can be your partner, but also be your critical partner. Uh, 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 Uh, 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 Houston or a Stuart Butterfield or, you know, 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, uh, so the hope is that for some amount of time until these guys don't grow you, uh, you can do that as a board member.
AI assessment note: “somebody who can be your partner, but also be your critical partner.”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.85
Q Now, I can't leave out Lars in this discussion, so we've got to mention our friend Lars at Balderson. So he has a question for you, and it's how has the experience been for you with regards to fighting for the competitive deals, and does the immense operational background help with this? From Lars.
A Uh, that's a great question from Lars. You know, I think that, uh, for me, it's, uh, it's really, it's 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 Index will be unhappy if I say this to me, is in some ways secondary to that. I think an example of this is, um, I wound up investing in Intercom, and, you know, from the moment of Meeting Owen, I knew that this is, uh, the founder I want to work with, right? And, uh, we saw eye to eye. I had experience with a problem that they were going after, uh, from the Dropbox days because we had this challenge of communicating effectively with our customers who were spread across, um, different communication methods, protocols between Zendesk and Salesforce and Marketo, and we, we had no way of tying those data sources together effectively, and having a consistent way to talk to our customers would have been immensely helpful. But, To me, the fact that Owen is a product-centric founder, and he and I have a great working relationship, was the thing that ultimately, I think, made me excited about the deal, and ultimately, I think, uh, led to me winning the deal.
AI assessment note: “I had experience with a problem that they were going after, uh, from the Dropbox days”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q I'm sure you can imagine. Uh, and, and some of them with the amazing operation experience that you have. Say there is sometimes troubles in terms of transferring their operational knowledge onto a different company, a portfolio company, when it might be different times, macroeconomic, different products, different customer base. Is that ever a problem, and how do you ensure that it doesn't become, oh, we did this at Dropbox?
A A company like Dropbox. There are going to be companies that are similar to Dropbox, and they have similar, um, whether it's existential issues or go-to-market strategies or, you know, 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, um, the folks who I've seen in venture who are 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, right? Those are common themes when you look at a company and it's about to double head count and go from, you know, 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.
AI assessment note: “It's really, this is the framework that we used to think about it”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q said about scaling that Dropbox while in hyper growth and all the different lessons that you learned. I recently had Jeff Buskang from Flybridge on the show, and he said that to scale successfully, you need to reinvent yourself every six months. How do you kind of respond to that? Is that something you agree with? And how, what were your lessons from scaling Dropbox whilst maintaining that startup culture?
A Yeah, I mean, I think, um, as you scale, you go through these pivotal moments. Uh, if you think about the beginnings of a company, you, um, have people, uh, in one room who, uh, can typically just shout across the room or, and, uh, maybe they don't even have to shout because they're just, uh, so aligned in their thinking that they can just look at each other and know what, you know, the other person's thinking, what they should be doing, what the right answer is. That's, you know, 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. Uh, the first thing that goes are conference rooms, and the second thing that goes are bathrooms, so you get to expand. But, um, what, what you wind up finding is that, um, 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, uh, in some kind of processes for everybody else. Because, um, Uh, new folks who come in, uh, don't have the same context as you did. And those are probably the biggest challenges and, uh, they're challenges associated with not just understanding, but also execution…
AI assessment note: “I think every six months we did a pretty significant reorg.”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.60
Q I'm sure you can imagine. Uh, and, and some of them with the amazing operation experience that you have. Say there is sometimes troubles in terms of transferring their operational knowledge onto a different company, a portfolio company, when it might be different times, macroeconomic, different products, different customer base. Is that ever a problem, and how do you ensure that it doesn't become, oh, we did this at Dropbox?
A A company like Dropbox. There are going to be companies that are similar to Dropbox, and they have similar, um, whether it's existential issues or go-to-market strategies or, you know, 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, um, the folks who I've seen in venture who are 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, right? Those are common themes when you look at a company and it's about to double head count and go from, you know, 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.
AI assessment note: “isn't we did a specific thing. It's really, this is the framework”
Answered raw tape
D 4 · C 5 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.30
Q said about scaling that Dropbox while in hyper growth and all the different lessons that you learned. I recently had Jeff Buskang from Flybridge on the show, and he said that to scale successfully, you need to reinvent yourself every six months. How do you kind of respond to that? Is that something you agree with? And how, what were your lessons from scaling Dropbox whilst maintaining that startup culture?
A Yeah, I mean, I think, um, as you scale, you go through these pivotal moments. Uh, if you think about the beginnings of a company, you, um, have people, uh, in one room who, uh, can typically just shout across the room or, and, uh, maybe they don't even have to shout because they're just, uh, so aligned in their thinking that they can just look at each other and know what, you know, the other person's thinking, what they should be doing, what the right answer is. That's, you know, 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. Uh, the first thing that goes are conference rooms, and the second thing that goes are bathrooms, so you get to expand. But, um, what, what you wind up finding is that, um, 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, uh, in some kind of processes for everybody else. Because, um, Uh, new folks who come in, uh, don't have the same context as you did. And those are probably the biggest challenges and, uh, they're challenges associated with not just understanding, but also execution…
AI assessment note: “And so, yeah, I think every six months we did a pretty significant reorg.”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.30
Q Is that bad when you're an investor? I find I kind of don't know about earthquakes or volcano eruptions, but I know about Slack's latest round.
A I think if you, if you, Are hyper-focused on, uh, your domain, you lose sight of what really drives people, right? And ultimately, all of us are investing in businesses that build products for people. These macro trends are quite important, you know, obviously for VCs, also the macro trends and markets are really important. So I read the BBC a lot. Uh, but in terms of, uh, tech, uh, look, I love, uh, tech meme. It's got a great syndication for all the, all the news I care about. Uh, hacker news. I, I scan through every once in a while and, uh, When I'm, ah, when I'm really digging out, I'll go through the archive and read the quantum physics papers.
AI assessment note: “if you are hyper-focused on your domain, you lose sight of what really drives people”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.30
Q Absolutely. I, I'm intrigued then. How did you deal with the, when you have such rapid hiring, how do you deal with the establishing kind of onboarding for new hires and ingratiating them into the team well?
A So we, uh, we wound up being lucky because we had, uh, an incredible, uh, recruiting team early on. Kudos to, uh, Drew and Arash, uh, for really focusing on company culture, uh, as one of the top priorities. And I think that's one of the things that, uh, really, uh, differentiated, uh, Dropbox, um, We had an incredible pool of talent, incredibly talented people who were incredibly focused and, uh, bought into the company culture. And so we made, uh, onboarding a top priority. Parts of the executive and leadership team, uh, do an onboarding talk for, uh, first individuals and then classes of people coming in. Uh, we had a whole process for onboarding people for a few weeks. One, I'm building a real team around, uh, new employee onboarding. The other thing that we did really solidified the culture was Infuse an element of delight into everything that we did.
AI assessment note: “we had a whole process for onboarding people for a few weeks”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.30
Q Absolutely. I, I'm intrigued then. How did you deal with the, when you have such rapid hiring, how do you deal with the establishing kind of onboarding for new hires and ingratiating them into the team well?
A So we, uh, we wound up being lucky because we had, uh, an incredible, uh, recruiting team early on. Kudos to, uh, Drew and Arash, uh, for really focusing on company culture, uh, as one of the top priorities. And I think that's one of the things that, uh, really, uh, differentiated, uh, Dropbox, um, We had an incredible pool of talent, incredibly talented people who were incredibly focused and, uh, bought into the company culture. And so we made, uh, onboarding a top priority. Parts of the executive and leadership team, uh, do an onboarding talk for, uh, first individuals and then classes of people coming in. Uh, we had a whole process for onboarding people for a few weeks. One, I'm building a real team around, uh, new employee onboarding. The other thing that we did really solidified the culture was Infuse an element of delight into everything that we did.
AI assessment note: “we had a whole process for onboarding people for a few weeks”
Answered raw tape
D 4 · C 4 · P 5 · Cm 4 4.25
Q Now, I can't leave out Lars in this discussion, so we've got to mention our friend Lars at Balderson. So he has a question for you, and it's how has the experience been for you with regards to fighting for the competitive deals, and does the immense operational background help with this? From Lars.
A Uh, that's a great question from Lars. You know, I think that, uh, for me, it's, uh, it's really, it's 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 Index will be unhappy if I say this to me, is in some ways secondary to that. I think an example of this is, um, I wound up investing in Intercom, and, you know, from the moment of Meeting Owen, I knew that this is, uh, the founder I want to work with, right? And, uh, we saw eye to eye. I had experience with a problem that they were going after, uh, from the Dropbox days because we had this challenge of communicating effectively with our customers who were spread across, um, different communication methods, protocols between Zendesk and Salesforce and Marketo, and we, we had no way of tying those data sources together effectively, and having a consistent way to talk to our customers would have been immensely helpful. But, To me, the fact that Owen is a product-centric founder, and he and I have a great working relationship, was the thing that ultimately, I think, made me excited about the deal, and ultimately, I think, uh, led to me winning the deal.
AI assessment note: “led to me winning the deal”
Answered raw tape
D 4 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 4 4.00
Q And then another one from Oz. Do you think the VC environment is too heated in the valley, therefore driving valuations up?
A The VC environment has been heated in the valley for a really long time. Uh, uh, in fact, probably for, for, for decades, if you ask most folks in ventures. The reality today is, um, there are, there is a lot of capital flowing into firms, right? Because if you think about it, they're at the macro level, there aren't that many places to deploy large sums of money with, 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, 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 a investor partner. Really, it's not just about the capital. They do want to know that somebody's bringing in a great network, uh, or they're helping, you know, in our, in the case of index, helping with expansion from, uh, the States to, 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. Uh, or somebody who's been in enterprise for a long time, or somebody who really gets social. So I think there is sort of a lot of …
AI assessment note: “The VC environment has been heated in the valley for a really long time.”
Answered raw tape
D 5 · C 4 · P 3 · Cm 3 3.90
Q Does that differentiate you from other VCs? Is that a common theme of VC, to get really hands-on operationally with the builders themselves, or not? Does that
A I think there's a spectrum of folks in venture. Uh, I, I certainly am on boards with folks who are great, uh, from a just kind of investor financial perspective, and I think there are also folks who are great operators and former CEOs and founders, so I think you have a spectrum. It's really about, uh, I think picking what makes you happy, and what makes me happy is, is scratching that building itch, right, because otherwise it would be, it would be really lonely. I get a lot of value out of it, and I, I think that the companies I work with get a lot of values out of it, and I think, uh, that's really where Product market fit for, for me as a venture.
AI assessment note: “I think there's a spectrum of folks in venture.”
Partly raw tape
D 3 · C 4 · P 4 · Cm 4 3.70
Q uh, dominant BC environment in the Valley. You know, in Europe, it's already a dominant, dominant firm. In the Valley, it's not so much, you know, you've got your Kleiners, your Andreessen's, your, you know, all the big guys, you know, and Index is absolutely there, but it doesn't have the dominance it does in Europe. So how is that kind of establishing it as a premier fund in SF?
A Yeah, I mean, that's why I joined. That's the challenge. Uh, so Index SF opened up in 2011, so it's relatively young. General thesis, by the way, for, for us to open the US office was that, uh, we'd seen a few trends. One was that, you know, the initial thesis of Index was like, they're great companies, they're going to be built in Europe. What we also saw was that those great companies, once they become big enough, uh, want to branch out to the US, right? And they need a partner who can support them across the, uh, across the, uh, 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, uh, want to get to Europe and have to get to Europe, right? Because that's the next, uh, GDP per capita part of the world.
AI assessment note: “Yeah, I mean, that's why I joined. That's the challenge.”
Answered raw tape
D 4 · C 4 · P 3 · Cm 3 3.60
Q Does that differentiate you from other VCs? Is that a common theme of VC, to get really hands-on operationally with the builders themselves, or not? Does that
A I think there's a spectrum of folks in venture. Uh, I, I certainly am on boards with folks who are great, uh, from a just kind of investor financial perspective, and I think there are also folks who are great operators and former CEOs and founders, so I think you have a spectrum. It's really about, uh, I think picking what makes you happy, and what makes me happy is, is scratching that building itch, right, because otherwise it would be, it would be really lonely. I get a lot of value out of it, and I, I think that the companies I work with get a lot of values out of it, and I think, uh, that's really where Product market fit for, for me as a venture.
AI assessment note: “I think there's a spectrum of folks in venture.”
Redirected raw tape
D 3 · C 4 · P 3 · Cm 3 3.30
Q And then another one from Oz. Do you think the VC environment is too heated in the valley, therefore driving valuations up?
A The VC environment has been heated in the valley for a really long time. Uh, uh, in fact, probably for, for, for decades, if you ask most folks in ventures. The reality today is, um, there are, there is a lot of capital flowing into firms, right? Because if you think about it, they're at the macro level, there aren't that many places to deploy large sums of money with, 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, 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 a investor partner. Really, it's not just about the capital. They do want to know that somebody's bringing in a great network, uh, or they're helping, you know, in our, in the case of index, helping with expansion from, uh, the States to, 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. Uh, or somebody who's been in enterprise for a long time, or somebody who really gets social. So I think there is sort of a lot of …
AI assessment note: “The VC environment has been heated in the valley for a really long time.”
