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Javier Soltero

Corporate Vice President of Outlook, Microsoft · 1 appearance on the record.

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

founderexecutiveoperatorinvestor@jsoltero ↗LinkedIn ↗Wikipedia ↗

Soltero co-founded Hyperic and email startup Acompli, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2014 and became Outlook Mobile. He later held senior executive roles at Microsoft and served as Vice President and General Manager of Google Workspace.

15statements → 6claims → 2claims resolved → 4.13/5average certainty → 2.07/5average debate potential → 4.3/5argument clarity · the sources → 2said about them ↓

0 supported 1 partly supported 1 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 3 not checkable as stated how the 6 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

2 predictions · 4 assertions · 3 opinions · 4 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 6 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 3 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 Javier argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted
Soltero: Sequoia wrongly called Hyperic a product in search of a market
“Maybe that comment from Sequoia had really left a mark, this idea that, that they thought that Hyperic was a product in search for a market, which of course hundreds of millions of dollars of years later, or hundreds of millions of dollars later, I'm happy to …”
Javier Soltero Sep 6, 2015 ▶ 15:17 FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
50% certainty 4
0% 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 4.7 · coherence 4.3 · precision 4.2 · compression 3.4

answered every one of 12 assessed questions directly

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? →

227 words/min while actually speaking · 63.7 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,488 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 ▾ 0/10
pushed back at the host ▾ 2/10
setup questions received 45%

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

Opinion
Soltero: Venture capital is an incestuous market where players collude on deals
“Venture capital is not a true market in the sense that it's a very limited number of players often colluding with and really incestuously sort of managing deal flow back and forth, and it works.”
Javier Soltero Sep 6, 2015 ▶ 21:14 FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft
Assertion Contradicted
Soltero: Sequoia wrongly called Hyperic a product in search of a market
“Maybe that comment from Sequoia had really left a mark, this idea that, that they thought that Hyperic was a product in search for a market, which of course hundreds of millions of dollars of years later, or hundreds of millions of dollars later, I'm happy to …”
Javier Soltero Sep 6, 2015 ▶ 15:17 FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft
Insight
Soltero: Open-source software cannot be sold via traditional top-down enterprise models
“They were doing a sort of typical top-down sales approach and the type of go to market dynamics usually reserved for the Siebels and you know, oracles of the world, and you couldn't do that then, you can't do it now.”
Javier Soltero Sep 6, 2015 ▶ 5:01 FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Soltero: Most current founders would fail in a sudden macro crash
“I'm certain that most people you know, that are building companies nowadays would have a very hard time in such a sudden and drastic adjustment to the way people look at cash and capital and barn rates and whatnot.”
Javier Soltero Sep 6, 2015 ▶ 11:56 FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft
Insight
Soltero: Painkiller products carry hidden churn risk when customer pain subsides
“Painkiller products fall under a class of product that is the name implies they take away pain. And the challenge with those products is yes, they're attractive and everybody needs them. However, you're always subject to the let's say the person metaphorically…”
Javier Soltero Sep 6, 2015 ▶ 16:01 FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft
Insight
Soltero: Ability to raise capital is a shallow founder metric
“That seems to be a really sort of shallow skill to cite. It's important, but it's not what makes a great entrepreneur, frankly.”
Javier Soltero Sep 6, 2015 ▶ 20:20 FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft
Assertion Partly supported
Soltero: Hyperic bootstrapped two years before Accel/Benchmark funding and $420M exit
“We ended up bootstrapping Hyperic actually for two years before we raised money ultimately from Excel and Benchmark who were great investors. And helped us take this thing to you know, ultimately a four hundred and twenty million dollar acquisition by VMware, …”
Javier Soltero Sep 6, 2015 ▶ 5:33 FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft
Opinion
Soltero: Founders in 2015 haven't internalized lessons from 2008 crisis
“I, we thrived through the 2008 financial crisis. That was a really challenging time for me, and something that I think has sadly not been internalized enough, frankly, by most entrepreneurs today.”
Javier Soltero Sep 6, 2015 ▶ 7:51 FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft
Disclosure
Soltero acquired software costing $15 million to build for just $1
“All we had was this product that had cost about fifteen million dollars to build, and we had been lucky enough to buy it for a dollar”
Javier Soltero Sep 6, 2015 ▶ 8:32 FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft
Insight
Soltero: 'Viagra products' enable users to do what seemed impossible
“Viagra products are the simplest products. They help you do things you previously thought were not possible.”
Javier Soltero Sep 6, 2015 ▶ 16:31 FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Soltero: Microsoft will modernize email into a beloved medium within five years
“Over the next five years, we're here to make email awesome, and really take this incredibly powerful and pervasive medium that, that we often sort of complain about and hate and really turn it into something that people genuinely love and feel like it has adap…”
Javier Soltero Sep 6, 2015 ▶ 28:59 FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Hyperic reached nearly $10 million in revenue before 2009 exit
“We were at the time when we sold it in 2009, close to ten million in revenue thousands of customers, deeply, deeply adopted open source product and a pioneer in some new business model elements”
Javier Soltero Sep 6, 2015 ▶ 3:33 FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Soltero: Hyperic bootstrapped to over $1.5M in bookings before VC funding
“When we first started working with venture investors we had already bootstrapped the company for two years. We had taken it from a zero dollars to north of like 1.5 million in bookings strategic OEM relationships, all the, you know, two dozen customers, all of…”
Javier Soltero Sep 6, 2015 ▶ 6:14 FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft
Opinion
Soltero: Hyperic was infinitely harder to build than Accompli
“I don't mean to suggest that, that one was actually, if anything, Hyperic was infinitely harder for many, many reasons.”
Javier Soltero Sep 6, 2015 ▶ 19:21 FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft
Disclosure
Accompli had millions in enterprise pipeline before Microsoft acquisition
“At the time, We were very, very, very fortunate to already have, like, multiple millions of dollars of sales pipeline, and customers actually two in Europe, one in the UK, and two in the US, who were working with us very closely to really sign up and craft wha…”
Javier Soltero Sep 6, 2015 ▶ 22:39 FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft

The other half of the tape: Javier Soltero's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode on 20VC. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 1

Statements about Javier Soltero, by other people (1)

Assertion Supported
Microsoft Acquired Accompli for $200 Million in 2014
“Prior to Microsoft, Javier co-founded Accompli, the mobile personal information manager acquired by Microsoft for two hundred million dollars in 2014.”
Harry Stebbings Sep 6, 2015 ▶ 0:13 FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
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0112015episodes it came up in
000.50.5112015episodesmentions per episode
2015 1 mention in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
FF 012: Acquired by Microsoft for $200m with Javier Soltero @ Microsoft Sep 6, 2015 24m
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