Roxanne Varza

Director, STATION F · 1 appearance on the record.

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Roxanne Varza leads Station F, a Paris-based startup campus initiated by Xavier Niel. She previously ran Microsoft's startup activities in France, served as editor of TechCrunch France, and co-founded Tech.eu and StartHer.

11statements → 7claims → 2claims resolved → 3.82/5average certainty → 1.73/5average debate potential → 4.5/5argument clarity · the sources → 3said about them ↓

2 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not yet assessed 3 not checkable as stated how the 7 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 6 assertions · 1 opinion · 2 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 7 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, 2 are 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 Roxanne 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

Varza: Deezer, Sigfox, and BlaBlaCar raised $100M+ rounds in France

“We had several one hundred million dollar rounds that were done by French companies, that, that was Deezer, Sigfox, and BlaBlaCar, which, you know, those have all happened in the last two, three years.”

Roxanne Varza Aug 10, 2015 ▶ 5:46 20 VC 061: Roxanne Varza on Pitching A VC in 10 Minutes and Maximising Media Exposure For Your Startup

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

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

answered every one of 23 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? →

257 words/min while actually speaking · 23 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,871 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 70%

host pushback: the hardest questions Harry asked, tap to play ▶ 6:07“And do you think this massive, kind of, growth in funding does signify a bubble?” ▶ 5:04“Does France have SEIS and EIS alternatives?” ▶ 6:34“But for startup founders in locations that aren't, um, conducive to a startup environment, you'd definitely recommend them moving.”

when Roxanne pushed back ▶ 6:43“Um, actually, no.” ▶ 6:15“The talk about the bubble, I think it kind of cracks me up, because we're going to know we're out of the bubble when we're out of the bubble, so in the meantime, I feel like it's n…”

What they said11 What others said3 Episodes1

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

Opinion

Varza: French tech development has outperformed Silicon Valley since 2009

“The progress and the development that I have seen since arriving in France has really just outperformed Silicon Valley.”

Roxanne Varza Aug 10, 2015 ▶ 3:45 20 VC 061: Roxanne Varza on Pitching A VC in 10 Minutes and Maximising Media Exposure For Your Startup

Insight

Varza: Startup product launches are not newsworthy on their own

“A lot of entrepreneurs think that their product launch is news, and a lot of the time I have to sit down and tell them, that's not news. Companies are launching every day. There's no reason why yours is special.”

Roxanne Varza Aug 10, 2015 ▶ 15:57 20 VC 061: Roxanne Varza on Pitching A VC in 10 Minutes and Maximising Media Exposure For Your Startup

Insight

Varza: Relocating abroad provides unique career advantages over staying in Silicon Valley

“So I think it's been actually a huge asset living abroad. Sometimes I think, you know, had I stayed in the valley where everyone is just so remarkable, it's kind of like the top tier is really competing to stand out. I think when you change countries, by defau…”

Roxanne Varza Aug 10, 2015 ▶ 2:47 20 VC 061: Roxanne Varza on Pitching A VC in 10 Minutes and Maximising Media Exposure For Your Startup

Assertion Open · timeframe Aug 2015

Varza: Every top-tier US VC firm has invested in Europe

“I think if you look at every single American top tier fund, you will have at least one European investment today.”

Roxanne Varza Aug 10, 2015 ▶ 9:03 20 VC 061: Roxanne Varza on Pitching A VC in 10 Minutes and Maximising Media Exposure For Your Startup

Disclosure

Microsoft Ventures provides $500k in cloud credits per startup with zero equity

“No, actually the whole program is completely free so we don't take any equity, we're not charging them even for space it's, it actually comes down to a cloud offer that we're putting in front of them and we're not even, Really forcing them to use the cloud off…”

Roxanne Varza Aug 10, 2015 ▶ 13:08 20 VC 061: Roxanne Varza on Pitching A VC in 10 Minutes and Maximising Media Exposure For Your Startup

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Varza: Learning to code will become as essential as learning English

“But I think code is going to be tomorrow's English, so.”

Roxanne Varza Aug 10, 2015 ▶ 27:21 20 VC 061: Roxanne Varza on Pitching A VC in 10 Minutes and Maximising Media Exposure For Your Startup

Assertion Not checkable as stated

French startup tax benefits are weaker than UK's SEIS and EIS

“There was the ISF kind of tax benefit, which still is, is available, but they're nowhere near as advantageous as SEIS, NEIS in in the UK.”

Roxanne Varza Aug 10, 2015 ▶ 5:08 20 VC 061: Roxanne Varza on Pitching A VC in 10 Minutes and Maximising Media Exposure For Your Startup

Assertion Supported

Varza: Deezer, Sigfox, and BlaBlaCar raised $100M+ rounds in France

Roxanne Varza Aug 10, 2015 ▶ 5:46 20 VC 061: Roxanne Varza on Pitching A VC in 10 Minutes and Maximising Media Exposure For Your Startup

Assertion Supported

Microsoft Ventures Accelerator in France accepts 10 of 250 applicants

“And so that's a really intensive screening process, and we only picked 10 finalists, so that's 10 from 250 companies that make the cut.”

Roxanne Varza Aug 10, 2015 ▶ 12:08 20 VC 061: Roxanne Varza on Pitching A VC in 10 Minutes and Maximising Media Exposure For Your Startup

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Varza: TechCrunch France's top post was a guest essay on freemium

“I had one company that published a post on why they chose a freemium model for their business, and that post actually ended up being probably the top post of all time on TechCrunch France.”

Roxanne Varza Aug 10, 2015 ▶ 17:06 20 VC 061: Roxanne Varza on Pitching A VC in 10 Minutes and Maximising Media Exposure For Your Startup

Assertion Not publicly verifiable

Girls in Tech intro coding classes sold out in two hours

“So in the last few years, we've done free coding classes or intro to coding classes, which were wildly successful in France. And that, you know, we sold out within two hours.”

Roxanne Varza Aug 10, 2015 ▶ 21:10 20 VC 061: Roxanne Varza on Pitching A VC in 10 Minutes and Maximising Media Exposure For Your Startup

The other half of the tape: Roxanne Varza's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 2 episodes on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Jonathan Ross 2 Harry Stebbings 1