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Mike Silagadze

Founder & CEO, ether.fi · 1 appearance on the record.

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

founderexecutiveinvestor@MikeSilagadze ↗LinkedIn ↗ether.fi ↗

Mike Silagadze co-founded Top Hat, an edtech engagement platform he led as CEO for over a decade. He later transitioned into decentralized finance, running Gadze Finance and founding ether.fi, a liquid staking protocol.

19statements → 6claims → 2claims resolved → 3.79/5average certainty → 2.95/5average debate potential → 4.5/5argument clarity · the sources → 2said about them ↓

0 supported 2 partly supported 0 contradicted 4 not checkable as stated how the 6 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 5 assertions · 3 opinions · 8 insights · 1 disclosure · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 6 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 4 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 Mike argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
50% certainty 3
50% certainty 4
none yet 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? →

4.5 / 5 directness 4.8 · coherence 4.9 · precision 4.3 · compression 4

answered every one of 24 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? →

252 words/min while actually speaking · 19.2 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,228 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 ▾ 4/10
pushed back at the host 3/10
setup questions received 75%

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

Opinion
Silagadze: Teaching quality is a very low priority for universities
“Teaching, as surprising as it may be, is really very low on the total pool of priorities in higher education. In fact, that's just, it's not how universities get funded. You know, universities are not known generally because of the quality of their teaching. I…”
Mike Silagadze Mar 16, 2018 ▶ 7:48 20VC: Why Virtually All Companies Hire The Wrong Way, Why EdTech Is The Most Brutal Market & How To Scale Your Sales Team for Engineering Founders with Mike Sliagadze, Founder & CEO @ Top Hat
Assertion Partly supported
Silagadze: Companies should measure IQ because it strongly correlates with performance
“Most companies don't measure IQ at all, and that's wrong. I mean, there's a zero-point-six correlation between IQ and job performance, and that is, in fact, if you could base your hiring decision on one factor, you could only base it on one factor. IQ is actua…”
Mike Silagadze Mar 16, 2018 ▶ 13:13 20VC: Why Virtually All Companies Hire The Wrong Way, Why EdTech Is The Most Brutal Market & How To Scale Your Sales Team for Engineering Founders with Mike Sliagadze, Founder & CEO @ Top Hat
Opinion
Silagadze: Higher education is a luxury good, not a productivity investment
“I think many people believe that education is an investment that makes you more productive. In a sense. And I think beyond some of the very basic stuff that you learn in primary school, I don't actually think that's the case. I actually view education as a con…”
Mike Silagadze Mar 16, 2018 ▶ 20:44 20VC: Why Virtually All Companies Hire The Wrong Way, Why EdTech Is The Most Brutal Market & How To Scale Your Sales Team for Engineering Founders with Mike Sliagadze, Founder & CEO @ Top Hat
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Silagadze in 2018: Crypto bubble could dislocate the global economy
“You know, it seems like certainly the crypto mania is concerning. I worry that it's going to get large enough to where I'll actually dislocate the global economy just like the real estate bubble did not too long ago.”
Mike Silagadze Mar 16, 2018 ▶ 21:44 20VC: Why Virtually All Companies Hire The Wrong Way, Why EdTech Is The Most Brutal Market & How To Scale Your Sales Team for Engineering Founders with Mike Sliagadze, Founder & CEO @ Top Hat
Assertion Partly supported
Silagadze: Only 10 to 15 EdTech startups have reached $10M+ revenue
“Out of the, you know, thousands and thousands of companies that have been funded over the last decade or so, only a handful, I would say probably 10 or 15, have really broken out past the, let's say, tens of millions in revenue milestone and, you know, are on …”
Mike Silagadze Mar 16, 2018 ▶ 4:34 20VC: Why Virtually All Companies Hire The Wrong Way, Why EdTech Is The Most Brutal Market & How To Scale Your Sales Team for Engineering Founders with Mike Sliagadze, Founder & CEO @ Top Hat
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Silagadze: Most venture capital investors in EdTech have lost money
“Most people that have invested in EdTech have lost money in EdTech, and so, yeah, there's good reason to be skeptical.”
Mike Silagadze Mar 16, 2018 ▶ 5:04 20VC: Why Virtually All Companies Hire The Wrong Way, Why EdTech Is The Most Brutal Market & How To Scale Your Sales Team for Engineering Founders with Mike Sliagadze, Founder & CEO @ Top Hat
Insight
Silagadze: EdTech products fail because buyers and end users are mismatched
“Products in education technology are generally terrible because The decision makers aren't the users.”
Mike Silagadze Mar 16, 2018 ▶ 6:09 20VC: Why Virtually All Companies Hire The Wrong Way, Why EdTech Is The Most Brutal Market & How To Scale Your Sales Team for Engineering Founders with Mike Sliagadze, Founder & CEO @ Top Hat
Insight
Silagadze: Technical founders' early sales leadership hires fail almost 100% of the time
“There's one mistake that almost every young founder makes, engineering founders in particular, honestly, almost a hundred percent of the time is at some point they decide, you know what, we need to start figuring out sales. And then they correctly assess, well…”
Mike Silagadze Mar 16, 2018 ▶ 17:06 20VC: Why Virtually All Companies Hire The Wrong Way, Why EdTech Is The Most Brutal Market & How To Scale Your Sales Team for Engineering Founders with Mike Sliagadze, Founder & CEO @ Top Hat
Opinion
Silagadze: Traditional Chalkboard and Paper Lectures Fail to Effectively Teach Skills
“Chalkboards and paper books and all this stuff that hadn't changed for hundreds of years. And not only that it hadn't changed, but this is, it doesn't work. It's a really terrible way to teach people skills, actually.”
Mike Silagadze Mar 16, 2018 ▶ 3:07 20VC: Why Virtually All Companies Hire The Wrong Way, Why EdTech Is The Most Brutal Market & How To Scale Your Sales Team for Engineering Founders with Mike Sliagadze, Founder & CEO @ Top Hat
What-if
Silagadze: I wouldn't have invested in early-stage Top Hat today
“If I was evaluating Top Hat in the early days, I don't know if I would have invested knowing everything that I know now, just knowing how difficult the market is.”
Mike Silagadze Mar 16, 2018 ▶ 5:10 20VC: Why Virtually All Companies Hire The Wrong Way, Why EdTech Is The Most Brutal Market & How To Scale Your Sales Team for Engineering Founders with Mike Sliagadze, Founder & CEO @ Top Hat
Insight
Silagadze: Standard corporate hiring processes systematically favor charismatic extroverts
“Virtually all companies out there completely ignore this research and instead implement the same kind of hiring processes that have been shown repeatedly not to work, that have been shown to have tons of bias and be in favor of hiring basically extroverts that…”
Mike Silagadze Mar 16, 2018 ▶ 10:21 20VC: Why Virtually All Companies Hire The Wrong Way, Why EdTech Is The Most Brutal Market & How To Scale Your Sales Team for Engineering Founders with Mike Sliagadze, Founder & CEO @ Top Hat
Insight
Silagadze: Top experienced talent is harder to find because high performers are locked in
“And so as a result, people who are experienced paradoxically are, as far as the distribution, it's more challenging to find top performers because they said that the good ones are already locked in somewhere.”
Mike Silagadze Mar 16, 2018 ▶ 14:27 20VC: Why Virtually All Companies Hire The Wrong Way, Why EdTech Is The Most Brutal Market & How To Scale Your Sales Team for Engineering Founders with Mike Sliagadze, Founder & CEO @ Top Hat
Insight
Silagadze: Top sales individual contributors usually make poor managers
“When you've got somebody who's a top rep and, you know, is clamoring for a promotion to management, more often than not, that's a bad idea. You need to figure out how to level them up and give them the opportunity for growth within the, you know, as an individ…”
Mike Silagadze Mar 16, 2018 ▶ 19:09 20VC: Why Virtually All Companies Hire The Wrong Way, Why EdTech Is The Most Brutal Market & How To Scale Your Sales Team for Engineering Founders with Mike Sliagadze, Founder & CEO @ Top Hat
Insight
Silagadze: Measuring engineering velocity with metrics is nearly impossible
“Whereas in engineering, that's difficult, if not impossible. I mean, you basically, you almost don't have any metrics when it comes to measuring engineering velocity.”
Mike Silagadze Mar 16, 2018 ▶ 19:32 20VC: Why Virtually All Companies Hire The Wrong Way, Why EdTech Is The Most Brutal Market & How To Scale Your Sales Team for Engineering Founders with Mike Sliagadze, Founder & CEO @ Top Hat
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Silagadze: Canada Lacks Executives Who Have Scaled Companies Beyond $100M
“And biggest challenge I would say is lack of executive talent. There are very, very few people in Canada that have scaled businesses past a hundred million dollars. And as a result of that, it's challenging to build a business that scales to that degree becaus…”
Mike Silagadze Mar 16, 2018 ▶ 22:46 20VC: Why Virtually All Companies Hire The Wrong Way, Why EdTech Is The Most Brutal Market & How To Scale Your Sales Team for Engineering Founders with Mike Sliagadze, Founder & CEO @ Top Hat
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Silagadze: Higher education sales cycles can take three years for small deals
“If you want to sell something in higher education, generally speaking, you know, you have to go through a committee process that can take years, sometimes three years for relatively small transaction sizes.”
Mike Silagadze Mar 16, 2018 ▶ 5:47 20VC: Why Virtually All Companies Hire The Wrong Way, Why EdTech Is The Most Brutal Market & How To Scale Your Sales Team for Engineering Founders with Mike Sliagadze, Founder & CEO @ Top Hat
Disclosure
Silagadze: Top Hat abandoned top-down university enterprise sales as a dead end
“So that's what we started, actually. I mean, we started trying to do enterprise sales in universities, and very quickly, within a matter of months, realized that it was a dead end. I mean, the business just could not exist.”
Mike Silagadze Mar 16, 2018 ▶ 8:05 20VC: Why Virtually All Companies Hire The Wrong Way, Why EdTech Is The Most Brutal Market & How To Scale Your Sales Team for Engineering Founders with Mike Sliagadze, Founder & CEO @ Top Hat
Insight
Silagadze: Work sample tests are highly predictive of employee performance
“One of those things is a work sample. I mean, that's one of the most predictive things. So you actually have people do a sample of the work that they are going to do, whether it's programming, if it's developer or doing a presentation of their sales rep, that'…”
Mike Silagadze Mar 16, 2018 ▶ 10:42 20VC: Why Virtually All Companies Hire The Wrong Way, Why EdTech Is The Most Brutal Market & How To Scale Your Sales Team for Engineering Founders with Mike Sliagadze, Founder & CEO @ Top Hat
Insight
Silagadze: Premature promotions usually lead to departures since demotions are impossible
“We've certainly made The mistake of promoting people too early, and unfortunately, that usually doesn't end well, because what tends to happen is you can't demote them, because that's, you know, politically or whatever, from an optics perspective, you can't re…”
Mike Silagadze Mar 16, 2018 ▶ 15:14 20VC: Why Virtually All Companies Hire The Wrong Way, Why EdTech Is The Most Brutal Market & How To Scale Your Sales Team for Engineering Founders with Mike Sliagadze, Founder & CEO @ Top Hat

The other half of the tape: Mike Silagadze's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 2 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 2

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
00111120182019episodesmentions
01120182019episodes it came up in
000.50.51120182019episodesmentions per episode
2019 1 mention in 1 episode
2018 1 mention in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20VC: Why Virtually All Companies Hire The Wrong Way, Why EdTech Is The Most Brutal Market Mar 16, 2018 18m
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