Mike Volpi

General Partner, Hanabi Capital · 1 appearance on the record.

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investorexecutiveoperator@mavolpi ↗LinkedIn ↗hanabi.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

After serving as Chief Strategy Officer at Cisco Systems, Volpi established Index Ventures' San Francisco presence in 2009. He is a venture investor whose investments and board directorships include Scale AI, Confluent, Cockroach Labs, ClickHouse, and Sonos.

14statements → 5claims → 1claims resolved → 3.86/5average certainty → 2.64/5average debate potential → 4.4/5argument clarity · the sources → 60said about them ↓

0 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 4 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

4 predictions · 1 assertion · 3 opinions · 5 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertion are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is 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.

Their most notable contradicted claim

Prediction Didn’t hold up

Volpi: The era of large closed-source enterprise software platforms is over

“I generally think that we've seen the last of enterprise software companies, large enterprise software companies that are platforms that are closed source.”

Mike Volpi Sep 18, 2017 ▶ 21:31 20VC: Index's Mike Volpi on Making The Move From Player To Coach, What It Takes To Build Generation Defining Brands & How Europe Really Stacks Up To The US Venture Market

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

4.4 / 5 directness 4.6 · coherence 5 · precision 4 · compression 3.9

answered every one of 22 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? →

226 words/min while actually speaking · 8.4 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,658 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 ▾ 1/10

pushed back at the host ▾ 2/10

setup questions received 65%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 15:44“Do you agree that the future of VC is aligned with the Andreessen style operational value add? Or do you think we'll see different innovations on our service providing role?” ▶ 17:22“And I had Rob Siegel at XE Capital on the show before, and he said that the enterprise space is less interesting. Now we're entering a period of consolidation, so I'm really intrig…” ▶ 9:26“So how was that experience for you, carving out a segment in the already very crowded West Coast market?”

when Mike pushed back ▶ 2:37“I'm so delighted that you're stalking all of us at Index Ventures, and, uh, I'll do my best to be a little different than my partners.” ▶ 17:44“In this particular circumstance, I pose a slightly different thesis to what Rob was saying, in that”

What they said14 What others said60 Episodes1

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

Prediction Didn’t hold up

Volpi: The era of large closed-source enterprise software platforms is over

“I generally think that we've seen the last of enterprise software companies, large enterprise software companies that are platforms that are closed source.”

Opinion

Volpi: Europe Has Far Fewer Skilled Investors Than the US

“There are far fewer skilled investors in the European market than there are here in the U S”

Mike Volpi Sep 18, 2017 ▶ 12:47 20VC: Index's Mike Volpi on Making The Move From Player To Coach, What It Takes To Build Generation Defining Brands & How Europe Really Stacks Up To The US Venture Market

Insight

Volpi: High-Volume Corporate M&A Is Right Strategy Despite High Failure Rate

“Track record of M and A having done a little bit of it at Cisco in my era is broadly speaking, not super successful. You know, you have to do a lot of them and many of them fail, which is the right methodology.”

Mike Volpi Sep 18, 2017 ▶ 18:27 20VC: Index's Mike Volpi on Making The Move From Player To Coach, What It Takes To Build Generation Defining Brands & How Europe Really Stacks Up To The US Venture Market

Insight

Volpi: Great entrepreneurs rarely listen to advice from many people

“A great entrepreneur very rarely listens to advice from lots of people.”

Mike Volpi Sep 18, 2017 ▶ 6:56 20VC: Index's Mike Volpi on Making The Move From Player To Coach, What It Takes To Build Generation Defining Brands & How Europe Really Stacks Up To The US Venture Market

Insight

Volpi: Early-stage entrepreneurship is about understanding human incentives, not analytics

“Entrepreneurship, especially at the early age, is less about, you know, analytics and numerics, and it's really about understanding human beings, their incentives, their motivations, and what makes them great.”

Mike Volpi Sep 18, 2017 ▶ 7:43 20VC: Index's Mike Volpi on Making The Move From Player To Coach, What It Takes To Build Generation Defining Brands & How Europe Really Stacks Up To The US Venture Market

Opinion

Volpi: World-Class Venture Capital Firms Require a Silicon Valley Presence

“If we wanted to build a world-class firm, we had to have a presence in Silicon Valley. We were not going to do that remotely.”

Mike Volpi Sep 18, 2017 ▶ 9:58 20VC: Index's Mike Volpi on Making The Move From Player To Coach, What It Takes To Build Generation Defining Brands & How Europe Really Stacks Up To The US Venture Market

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Volpi: Slack's enterprise viral growth velocity is unprecedented

“Slack, which is spreading virally at a, you know, velocity that's, I don't think I've seen before in the enterprise environment.”

Mike Volpi Sep 18, 2017 ▶ 14:23 20VC: Index's Mike Volpi on Making The Move From Player To Coach, What It Takes To Build Generation Defining Brands & How Europe Really Stacks Up To The US Venture Market

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Volpi: Enterprise Consolidation Will Drive Startup Opportunities Over 3-4 Years

“I actually would argue that that either today or in the next three to four years is Opens opportunities for repeat entrepreneurs and opens opportunities for a new companies that will fill the gaps of those that have been acquired.”

Mike Volpi Sep 18, 2017 ▶ 19:08 20VC: Index's Mike Volpi on Making The Move From Player To Coach, What It Takes To Build Generation Defining Brands & How Europe Really Stacks Up To The US Venture Market

Insight

Volpi: Transitioning to VC requires stepping back from being front-and-center

“Super important to understand that the people that are actually making the decisions that own the success or failure of a company are the ones that are on stage. And I think being able to make that transition and not feeling like you're the one that is front a…”

Mike Volpi Sep 18, 2017 ▶ 3:48 20VC: Index's Mike Volpi on Making The Move From Player To Coach, What It Takes To Build Generation Defining Brands & How Europe Really Stacks Up To The US Venture Market

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Volpi: Establishing a Top Venture Firm in San Francisco Takes Ten Years

“We did not think that index ventures in San Francisco, Would become, you know, a trailblazing firm in a year. This was a ten-year effort for us, and even now, five years into it, almost six years into it, we're sort of midstream on that”

Mike Volpi Sep 18, 2017 ▶ 10:43 20VC: Index's Mike Volpi on Making The Move From Player To Coach, What It Takes To Build Generation Defining Brands & How Europe Really Stacks Up To The US Venture Market

Insight

Volpi: Great brands stem from exceptional customer experience, not marketing tactics

“Universally, the one common concept with anybody that's able to build a great brand is it starts with a fantastic experience for the customer. That's how the brand builds. It's not billboards and blogging and nice logos and all that stuff. It really is about d…”

Mike Volpi Sep 18, 2017 ▶ 13:50 20VC: Index's Mike Volpi on Making The Move From Player To Coach, What It Takes To Build Generation Defining Brands & How Europe Really Stacks Up To The US Venture Market

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Volpi: Index Ventures will build its brand through founder service, not blogging

“To index itself, our firm, what we're trying to do is to delight our customers in some sense. And, you know, our, a lot of our portfolio companies are the customers that we serve and by delighting them over time, we're going to build a brand. And it's less abo…”

Mike Volpi Sep 18, 2017 ▶ 15:06 20VC: Index's Mike Volpi on Making The Move From Player To Coach, What It Takes To Build Generation Defining Brands & How Europe Really Stacks Up To The US Venture Market

Opinion

Volpi: Benchmark proves VC success doesn't require heavy firm services

“I do think that firms like Andreessen and Kleiner and Greylock have done a phenomenal job building services organizations. And there is no question that there is value in doing that. And then there are other firms like say benchmark who have done a terrific jo…”

Mike Volpi Sep 18, 2017 ▶ 16:26 20VC: Index's Mike Volpi on Making The Move From Player To Coach, What It Takes To Build Generation Defining Brands & How Europe Really Stacks Up To The US Venture Market

Disclosure

Index Ventures prefers applied AI over core machine learning algorithms

“I would generally say that we're probably more excited about the application of machine learning rather than the algorithms and the processes of doing machine learning itself.”

Mike Volpi Sep 18, 2017 ▶ 21:14 20VC: Index's Mike Volpi on Making The Move From Player To Coach, What It Takes To Build Generation Defining Brands & How Europe Really Stacks Up To The US Venture Market

The other half of the tape: Mike Volpi's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 60 times in 17 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 11 George Sivulka 11 David Cahn 6 Reid Hoffman 5 Danny Rimer 4 Anjney Midha 4 Scott Dietzen 3 Mark Goldberg 3