The Ledger
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Mignot: Index Ventures avoids maximizing ownership during seed stage investing
“Especially at seed stage, you know, our approach to seed is, is much more collaborative. You know, the idea is we don't want to compete with people like you and, you know, and other, other seed funds and angels, you know, we want to bring them along, we want t…”
Martin Mignot: Index Ventures splits investments evenly between Europe and US
“We consistently invest about half in Europe and half in the US”
Index Ventures Has the Most Performance-Driven Culture Seen by CMU
“And they don't, they are the most performant driven culture that we see.”
Goldberg: Great companies expand TAM by increasing product surface area
“I mean, if you look at, you know, I was very fortunate to see some amazing companies from index from the early days, whether it was a Figma, whether it was a whiz, whether it was a data dog companies that, you know, have been able to build TAM by just increasi…”
Shah: Index offers to underwrite seed rounds while splitting allocation
“Generally when I meet a founder at a seed stage, I'll tell him or her, I'll underwrite the entire round. So there's no financing risk, but We should split it into three sleeves. One sleeve is for index, one sleeve is for a seed fund, and the third sleeve is fo…”
Shah: VCs should buy and hold power law winners
“The goal is to buy and hold and let other people help inform like when to sell. So, and that's true for kind of the winners that make up the power law contributors, which is the business that we're in to find fund returners for like.”
Shah: Index Ventures requires two partners for every founder meeting
“Every meeting ideally would have two people in it. So that's a super high bar for taking Any meeting, like I'm asking to prioritize someone else's time in addition to mine, which means the threshold for a meeting is super high.”
Shah: Index Growth Fund returns followed power law over mid-tier multiples
“When we started our first growth fund our hypothesis was probably three to five X over three to five years, right? I'd just come out of a private equity firm as had some of my colleagues. And so we had like a, we had that mentality. And when we looked at the p…”
Shah: Index Ventures makes Series B investments only by exception
“If we're making a series B investment, it's by exception, like elastic. Series B investment. Terrific return. Confluent. Series B investment. Terrific return.”
Index Ventures acquired significant secondary Facebook stock from Owen Van Natta
“He ended up selling us some pretty significant secondary of, and so it turned out to be a great investment for index.”
Danny Rimer: European founders routinely underestimate their own extraordinary strengths
“In Europe, of course, it's the antithesis of that, right? Like, they're not even aware at How good they are in particular areas, let alone the fact that they're much better than they think they are in other areas.”
Index capped social platform valuations at $1B after Instagram sale
“At the time, we thought the peak amount that a social platform would be worth Was a billion dollars because Instagram sold to Facebook for a billion dollars.”
Danny Rimer: VCs flawlessly price deals on current comps instead of growth
“So that's the other one, which is we always evaluate the multiple that we're paying based on the current snapshot of comps, rather than thinking out what is it going to be worth if every company continues to grow, and if this specific sector grows, what are th…”
Index Ventures avoided expanding to China and India to maintain focus
“I think that reflecting back, not going to, not jumping on the bandwagon and going to China or India was actually a really important lesson for us in maintaining maintaining our focus.”
Index Ventures offered Facebook $50M at a $5B valuation
“We offered them what we thought was an incredible term sheet, which was to put in fifty million at five billion.”
Index Ventures uses a 1–4 and 7–10 voting scale
“Every investor has a vote, and we have a voting system that goes from one to four, and from seven to 10, so you can't do a five or six, and you need a certain threshold of positive votes north of six, so it's more like 6.5, to get an investment, ah, passed thr…”
Danny Rimer: Exiting investments is Index Ventures' greatest strength
“I think probably one of the things that Index is best at is the exiting part.”
Sequoia and Accel are Index's primary consumer Series A competitors
“Clearly, clearly the folks at Sequoia are a big fierce competitor, and the folks at Acceler are fierce and, you know, I would say there are a number of different players, but those come to mind for consumer stuff. Certainly Sequoia comes to mind a lot. Benchma…”
Danny Rimer: Great founders need a clear spike rather than well-rounded skills
“So I think it's more about having a really clear spike in a particular part of your personality or vision rather than the full product.”
Danny Rimer: Avoid investing in second-derivative market creation plays
“Probably more patient on the technology and the amount of time that it takes to come to fruition rather than a question of whether the market is going to be Excited, you know, that I have to, I would call that a second derivative play. Not only does the produc…”
Index Ventures' mistakes stemmed from betting against Europe
“Every time we've messed up is when we over rotate a bet against Europe.”
Kurgan: Early-Stage Venture Investments Require Marriage-Like Founder Transparency
“When you invest in a company, it's a marriage, you know, it's gonna last, if it's early stage, it's gonna last for a very long time, And you need some level of transparency. If that transparency isn't there, you know, we're not going to be effective, and we we…”
Danny Rimer: VC Partners Must Act as Temporary Stewards for Future Generations
“The mindset is that you're not here for the rest of time, but you're here for a short period of time, and you have to make it matter as much as possible. Make sure that you're not letting down your partners, and make sure that the next generation see you as an…”
Danny Rimer: Founders Passionate About General Business Rather Than Specifics Fail
“I probably would say that with me, everything starts with a passion that folks around here joke, because if someone comes to me for wanting to work at index or starting a business and they're passionate about business, they're not going to go very far. You kno…”
Index Ventures Approaches Fintech via Broad Portfolio Bets Over Single Picks
“Jan and Neil and Mark and our team have been very proactive in investing in fintech. And so we decided we're not going to call the company that's going to be successful, but we're going to invest across a whole roster of companies because we think that financi…”
Danny Rimer: Diverse Teams Protect Scaling Startups From Groupthink
“And what I mean by diverse team is backgrounds, ages, obviously genders, experience, culture, so that you're sheltering yourself from the groupthink that sets in when you hire people from the same university or the same generation with very similar experiences…”
Danny Rimer: Consumer Startups Must Measure Organic Marketing Channels Early
“In the areas that companies take for granted, because usually they found product market fit, and so there's going to be a number of elements on the marketing side that just happen, but the earlier you start measuring them and predicting them, the more successf…”
Danny Rimer: Index Ventures Lacks Top-of-Mind West Coast Entrepreneur Mindshare
“So the big challenges then are still challenges that we have today, which is we have not the type of mindshare with entrepreneurs that we'd like to have on the West Coast, that we're not the first necessarily the first name or venture firm that you think of wh…”
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…”
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”
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.”
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…”
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…”
11 of 13 Pear Launchpad Companies Raised Top 2016 Seed Rounds
“So, you know, last year we had about 13 companies 11 of them ended up raising a seed round from great people. Accel, first round, Index, just really, really top name people. And the other two went back to school.”
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.”
Mignot: Structural risk asymmetry justifies high valuations for potential rocketships
“It's like your downside is always limited to the amount you're investing while your upside is unlimited by definition. So, so in all of these cases if you think, you know, you're truly in face of a rocket ship and something that can be worth multiple billions,…”
Mignot: Index passed on BlaBlaCar's early round before investing at growth stage
“Blah, blah, car was exactly that approach where we had passed on the previous round, but we had stayed very close to the team. And, you know, and kept an ongoing dialogue in between the two rounds. So when they felt ready to raise a growth round, then we you k…”
Kanji: Accel and Index are the best venture firms in Europe
“Axel's a great firm. I mean, it's probably one of the best in Europe, if not the best, alongside of Index.”
Ehrenberg: IA Ventures Held 2.2% Stake in Datadog at IPO
“Datadog's a great example of one that ended up being A fund returner, but we had 2.2% at IPO because we were in there at pre-seed and then RTP led the seed and then index led the A.”
Mignot: Index Ventures passed on Zendesk early rounds before growth investment
“That was just before I started, but we did that with Zendesk, for example, where, you know, we passed on, on, on the seed and on DA especially You know, if you look at the memo and the valuation at the time, it's quite funny in retrospect, I don't remember exa…”
Mignot: Index Ventures invested in every funding round of Figma
“We invested in, you know, every round.”
Hebbia raised pre-seed from Peter Thiel and Floodgate before Index seed
“We raised a pre-seed from Peter Thiel, and Floodgate, and then our seed from Mike Volpe at Index”
Hebbia hit $1M revenue before raising a $30M Series A from Index
“We ended up going from zero to a million dollars of revenue sometime in 2021 or 2022, and raise our series A also from Index, from Micon Index, which is thirty million bucks.”
Shah: Index distributed stock position one week after $1B acquisition
“We're a large investor in a company. We invested early stage company got acquired for about a billion dollars by a public company. And within a week of receiving our proceeds I asked our team to distribute the whole position.”
Index Ventures co-invested $5M in King after Apax preempted round
“So we were going to lead with fifteen million, which at the time was a huge Series A, and they came in with twenty-five million, and we had an opportunity To put in an incremental five million at their valuation, and we decided to hold our breath and do it.”
Index Ventures offered Discord a term sheet after a two-slide presentation
“Based on the retention of Discord at the time, we followed up the next day and offered them a term sheet.”
Brian Chesky calls Index the best partner that never invested in Airbnb
“Brian, Brian Chesky from Airbnb repeatedly loves to say, you know, Index is, is the team that they wish they, they're, it, Sorry. He says Index is the best partner that never invested in the company.”
Stephane Kurgan: Venture capital operates on an eight-to-ten-year feedback loop
“When you're an executive, especially in the digital business, you have a daily clock, right? The feedback loop is, is extremely fast. So, you know, every morning I would get a thousand data points, you know, with all the reporting, and then suddenly you go to …”