Ilya Fushman

Partner, Kleiner Perkins · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

investorexecutivescientist@ilyaf ↗LinkedIn ↗kleinerperkins.com ↗

Ilya Fushman is a tech investor focused on early- and growth-stage investments in enterprise software, AI, and fintech, with investments including Rippling and Slack. Before joining Kleiner Perkins in 2018, he was a General Partner at Index Ventures and served as Head of Product at Dropbox.

9statements → 5claims → 3claims resolved → 67%fully supported → 3.89/5average certainty → 1.56/5average debate potential → 4.3/5argument clarity · the sources → 36said about them ↓

2 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 4 assertions · 4 insights · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Ilya argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported

Fushman: 70% of Dropbox users were located outside North America

“Dropbox had 70% of its users outside of North America, and the biggest chunk of those were in Europe”

Ilya Fushman Sep 19, 2016 ▶ 18:54 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

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1

none yet certainty 2

50% certainty 3

100% certainty 4

100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.3 / 5 directness 4.5 · coherence 4.5 · precision 4.1 · compression 3.8

redirected or did not address 1 of 17 assessed questions (6%). Watch them ▸

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

239 words/min while actually speaking · 51.3 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,974 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 2/10

pushed back at the host ▾ 1/10

setup questions received 65%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 13:27“Is that ever a problem, and how do you ensure that it doesn't become, oh, we did this at Dropbox?” ▶ 12:09“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?” ▶ 16:18“Do you think the VC environment is too heated in the valley, therefore driving valuations up?”

when Ilya pushed back ▶ 10:47“It's been a year.”

What they said9 What others said36 Episodes1

Everything Ilya Fushman said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Fushman: Slack will become workplace productivity's primary operating system

“Slack is one of the fastest growing companies, I think, that's been around, and it's poised to transform how people work and communicate, and build a true operating system and platform for productivity going forward.”

Ilya Fushman Sep 19, 2016 ▶ 22:53 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

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Fushman: Dropbox conducted a major reorganization every six months while scaling

“And so, yeah, I think every six months we did a pretty significant reorg.”

Ilya Fushman Sep 19, 2016 ▶ 6:59 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

Insight

Fushman: VCs giving operational advice must avoid being prescriptive

“It's dangerous to be prescriptive.”

Ilya Fushman Sep 19, 2016 ▶ 14:36 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

Assertion Supported

Fushman: 70% of Dropbox users were located outside North America

“Dropbox had 70% of its users outside of North America, and the biggest chunk of those were in Europe”

Assertion Partly supported

Fushman: 30% to 40% of SaaS company revenue comes from Europe

“If you look at most SaaS companies, and really, I think, most companies that generate revenue, 30 to 40% of their revenue will come from Europe”

Insight

Fushman: Venture capital is like a swim team, not a soccer team

“But it's a sometimes lonely job. It's like being on a swim team and not a soccer team.”

Ilya Fushman Sep 19, 2016 ▶ 19:57 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

Insight

Fushman: Scaling requires turning implicit leader knowledge into documented processes

“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.”

Ilya Fushman Sep 19, 2016 ▶ 6:30 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

Insight

Fushman: Venture feedback cycles differ fundamentally from product development

“The feedback cycles in venture are incredibly different from the feedback cycles of building and shipping products, and that's probably the biggest gap.”

Ilya Fushman Sep 19, 2016 ▶ 11:52 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

Assertion Supported

Fushman's solar startup built the most efficient and expensive solar cell

“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.”

Ilya Fushman Sep 19, 2016 ▶ 3:10 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

The other half of the tape: Ilya Fushman's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 32 times in 13 episodes on 20VC. 4 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 12 Joe Thomas 7 Eoghan McCabe 5 Hubert Palan 3 Mark Goldberg 1 Mamoon Hamid 1

Statements about Ilya Fushman, by other people (4)

Insight

Goldberg: Investors should pay up for category winners over #2 or #3 players

“Yeah, so I think one of the lessons I learned from Index Ventures, and certainly two of my mentors, Mike Volpe, Ilya Fushman, was you want to be in the category winner, and when you need to pay up to be in a category winner, that's something that I think a lot…”

Mark Goldberg Oct 25, 2024 ▶ 16:58 Mark Goldberg: Why Politics is Rife & Decision-Making is Broken in Large VCs | E1219 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings

Disclosure

Loom raised Series A from Kleiner after Index rejected their seed

“Now, we ended up fundraising from Ilya, who had moved over to Kleiner at that point from Index, but we were worried, even though he individually had a ton of conviction about Loom, we weren't able to get the seed round done with Index, and so there was no guar…”

Joe Thomas Aug 7, 2020 ▶ 25:38 20VC: Loom Founder Joe Thomas on Whether To Take Multi-Stage Money at Seed, How Early Stage Founders Should Select Their VC, How Sequoia Won The Loom Deal & The 3 Rules To Operate Remote Teams Successfully

Opinion

McCabe: Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman is his favorite board member

“I loved working with Ilya Fushman. He's with Kleiner Perkins these days. Ilya was always just real. I'm a stickler for integrity and authenticity, and Ilya was what he was and is what he is, and There was no games. It wasn't hard to figure out, and I admired t…”

Eoghan McCabe Oct 22, 2020 ▶ 26:55 20VC: Intercom Founder, Eoghan McCabe on How To Deal with the Weight of Expectation, Having Your Identity Tied To Your Company, How To Be Your Authentic Self Even with Stakeholders & Why There Are No Rules

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Hubert Palan: Ilya Fushman conducted deep on-site diligence for Productboard's Series A

“But if I look at our, even the early round series A, like Ilya Fushman showed up at our office, you know, for people here at WeWork, but like he wanted to see the other people. He wanted to talk to people. So like, you know, he did a very good diligence and th…”

Hubert Palan Jan 29, 2021 ▶ 11:37 20VC: Why "Founder Insight" is Overrated, Why Big and Bold Product Visions Can Be Dangerous & Why Getting To Product Market Fit by Accident Can Lead to Danger with Hubert Palan, Founder & CEO @ ProductBoard