The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 67 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 1 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Mignot: Mega VC funds benefit managers financially but not entrepreneurs
“I think this push towards larger asset gathering is very good for VCs who do it. You know, it can make a lot of sense financially. It can make a lot of sense for them. I'm not sure it makes so much sense for the entrepreneurs themselves.”
Mignot: Social media algorithms must be public and auditable
“I think it should be loud, but there should be a bigger conversation about social networks and about the openness of algorithms, which don't only apply to TikTok, but, you know, applies to X, applies to Facebook. I think those algorithms should be should be pu…”
Mignot: Building venture-backed hyper-growth startups requires seven-day workweeks
“If you look at the most incredible companies in the past, you know, you look at Revolut, you look at Deliveroo, all of these companies, the amount of work that these founders and these early teams put in was tremendous. I mean, it was seven days a week, you kn…”
Mignot: Index Ventures never passes on early-stage deals over price
“We never lose a deal or pass on a deal because of price in the early stage.”
Mignot: Mega funds distract VCs and hinder early-stage investing
“On the early stage you know, either seed or early venture or early growth, I don't think you need, you know, those mega assets, and I think they distract you, and they tend to pull you towards the later stage, and, you know, if you have so much capital to depl…”
Mignot: Midas List presence is the top predictor of VC returns
“I was chatting with you know, with Iliad, Quantumlight, and he, about it the other day, and they said the number one factor that they noticed was a good predictor of future returns was whether a partner was on the Midas list, a partner, an early stage investor…”
Mignot: LLM investments will yield lower venture multiples but huge absolute returns
“The pure venture multiple will likely be lower than some of the other categories in the past. I think that is clear. The difference is that the size of the outcome and the speed of Very importantly, the speed at which the size is gonna get reached means that y…”
Mignot: European LLM market will definitely be smaller than OpenAI
“I think there is a market. You know, is it gonna be smaller than OpenAI? Yes. For sure.”
Mignot: Systematic post-IPO selling beats market timing across VC portfolios
“If we looked at, if we had taken different schedules, we would have been worse off, and so we felt that overall, if you look across a basket, a portfolio, and again, it's a portfolio approach, so you may be wrong on one or two, but if you take a portfolio appr…”
Mignot: Revolut is better than any US neobank
“They're, you know, they can be as big, if not bigger than anyone in the world, and I think Revolut is probably, you know, one of, if not the best neobank in, in the market in, in many ways. It's, I think, better than anything, you know, in the U.S., for exampl…”
Mignot: Auto-investing in every pitch would have yielded better returns
“We ran the same analysis, where if you had said yes to every single company that had come to present at the partnership, we'd have done a lot better than we have. Simply because it goes back to the power law.”
Mignot: Early-stage VCs should never pass on startups due to high valuation
“We've seen millions of times, every time we've tried, we've walked out of something saying, oh, it's too expensive. It's great, but it's too expensive. I think you should never say that if you do early stage investing, because that, that's where, when you make…”
Mignot: Early-stage investors should ignore poor gross margins
“Beware of gross margin in the early days. That's a mistake we made a couple of times. You know, you have a lot of businesses that in the early days have really bad gross margin. All the LLM providers were very clear examples of that. I think if that's the only…”
Mignot: Index Ventures returned $30B and holds $20B+ across 30 years
“So we've been around for 30 years. We invested 11 and a half billion dollars. We've returned close to 30, and we still have 20 plus in holdings. Most of that is concentrated in eight, nine companies. We invested in probably 300, close to 400 companies over the…”
Mignot rejects narrative that VC is splitting only into mega-funds and boutiques
“I know there is a meme which is the industry is gonna, is diverging into two camps. You either have the mega funds, the asset gatherers, or you have the tiny boutique shops. And I don't truly believe in that. I think there is a third way”
Mignot: Forbes Midas list measures performance from 10 years ago
“My view on the Midas list is, it's a really good list for who was a great investor 10 years ago, and so that, that's kind of how I would describe it, because if you look at a lot of these companies, there were deals that were made, you know, 10 years ago and s…”
Martin Mignot: Top founders leverage VCs for targeted help, not one-stop support
“The best founders I've seen are very good at reaching out to investors and people around them on very specific topics when these people, it's leveraging the right people at the right time, being very specific about that versus going to, you know, I think that'…”
Mignot: Revolut's core insight was offering costless high-volume FX for free
“FX, For a large corridor where you have a lot of volume of transfer costs nothing. So it should be given, you know, given for free, you know, to the market. And then once you have that, that's a really good hook, and then you can build something else.”
Mignot: Lime and Dott will ultimately succeed in micromobility
“I still think that some companies will do well, actually, in that space. I think Lime is, is doing well. I think Dot is doing pretty well. I think they will be okay at the end, but it's clearly, you know, it's been a really, really difficult space.”
Martin Mignot: Early Revolut success created bias against other fintech deals
“I was lucky enough to be early in Revolut, and, Then I looked at a lot of other fintech investments were like, well, Revolute can do this, so Revolute does it better”
Martin Mignot: Index Ventures missed out on Qonto due to Revolut bias
“We could have invested in any, you know, in a lot of other neobanks you know, you think, I mean, Qonto would be a really good example of that. A lot of, you know, remittance and certain corridors, and so there's a lot of players.”
Mignot: Index passed on Spotify multiple times due to music industry bias
“The example we always use at Index is, is Spotify. And to your point, it wasn't because of a bad investment, it was because of a mediocre investment, which is different. You know, we had just invested in Last.fm, which was a, you know, a totally reasonable out…”
Mignot: Index Ventures bans 5 and 6 votes in deal approvals
“We vote one to 10. You can't vote five and six, so you have to be, you know, four against, and then it's kind of a, so it's a qualified majority, essentially, so if the average is above six, you know, the deal is approved”
Mignot: Revolut operated as a negative gross margin business in early stages
“Especially in the early stages, it was kind of, You know, negative gross margin business. I mean, they were basically giving away effects that weren't charging for anything else. You had a little bit of interchange, but not that much.”
Mignot: Index has backed companies at excessive valuations that caused harm
“Oh yeah, for sure. Definitely.”
Mignot: Index requires double-digit exit ownership for fund-returning deals
“For us, the goal is to get double digit ownership at exit. That is the, you know, that is typically where we, if we look at the performance of the fund, most of our returns have been generated by companies where we own close to or more than double digit owners…”
Mignot: Governments should support local AI as customers, not investors
“I do believe that having, you know, government entities or quasi government entities support local innovation is in that critical field is, is important. I think the way to do it is not necessarily to I think they should be customers. I think they should buy t…”
Mignot: Index sold Robinhood shares lower but retains a large stake
“We were a very large investor in in Robinhood and we sold you know we sold quite a bit at a lower price than where it is today. You know, we still have a large stake”
Mignot: Index Ventures avoids detailed number crunching for scenario planning
“We don't waste cycles, go incredibly detailed into those. Yeah, we do, we, I think we focus more on, you know, sensitivity analysis, so we focus on what are the few levers that really matter for this business, and where do we think they're gonna go, but, you k…”
Mignot: Nik Storonsky targeted building a company larger than JPMorgan Chase
“Like, you know, eventually he thinks, he's convinced there is, there will be one global money app, and that he can be that one global money app that could be better, you know, bigger than, you know, when we first met, he wanted to be bigger than JP Morgan.”
Mignot: Jan Hammer is the strongest investment picker at Index Ventures
“I'd say Jan is probably the strongest. Yeah, I mean, if you look at his track record, you know, the consistency and some of the incredible winners that he has. I think he's a great picker.”
Mignot: Seven partners generated Index Ventures' top eight fund returns
“It's a very equal partnership, and, you know, even in terms of performance, so I mentioned there's like eight companies that represent the, you know, the largest share of return, They've been there has been involvement from seven partners for these eight compa…”
Mignot: Operational experience is not required to be a successful VC
“If you look at most of Most senior VCs today and the most successful one, a lot of them have, you know, never had any operational experience and started, you know, their career as a VC.”
Index Ventures maintains a 'life's too short' rule for unbearable entrepreneurs
“Some of us here have a rule of what we call the life's too short category, you know, so people who are, you know, entrepreneurs who are so unbearable that even if their business is fantastic, we just like, you know, life's too short to deal with it.”
Mignot: Co-founder departures are regular occurrences and not alarming
“At least some of the co-founders, you know, leave the company. That's something that, that we see happening very regularly. And I don't think that's a cause for alarm by any stretch.”
Mignot: FOMO is healthy and essential for venture capitalists
“I think in a way, you know, It's healthy, because that's because that's what VC is all about. That's what I think about, you know, that's what I dream about. And, you know, at night, it's like, you know, which, when I find a company that I really love, that's …”
Mignot: Venture capital has institutionalized into a career rather than a calling
“I don't know if I would say Tourist VC, but I would say it's, ah, the asset class has institutionalized. You know, it's become, ah, you know, funds have become larger, there's more people in, in, in general, by and large. And so you bring people who, ah, may s…”
Mignot reveals Index Ventures' latest fund sizes across stages
“We have a three hundred million dollar seed fund eight hundred million venture fund, and one and a half billion gross fund.”
Mignot: Deliveroo's core product is sub-20 minute delivery speed, not the app
“Look at, you know, Will at Deliveroo, for example, his insight was very much the product is the delivery, which sounds obvious, but it's not the digital experience. It's the speed and quality of the delivery, and it has to come below 20 minutes. That's the, if…”
Mignot: Workflow-integrated AI tools achieve significantly higher user retention
“Especially if it's inserted inside their workflow, you know, Cursor is a good example, you know, we've made a bunch of those type of investments, then in all likelihood, even if the numbers didn't show it yet, in all likelihood, the stickiness of that product …”
Martin Mignot: Index Ventures splits investments evenly between Europe and US
“We consistently invest about half in Europe and half in the US”
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…”
Mignot: Index Ventures holds investments in LLM providers Cohere and Mistral
“We're in Cohere, and in and we have a seed investments in Mistral.”
Mignot: Index sells post-IPO shares quarterly over three years
“We tend to have a very standard liquidity program when a company goes public, where we sell, you know, every quarter over three years in a very, you know, recurring, regular, preset way in many ways. We obviously have, you know, we have an, we set up exit comm…”
Mignot: Index Ventures holds nearly all investments until IPO
“I think, in, by and large, we tend to hold pretty much everything until IPO.”
Mignot: Proximity to portfolio companies creates negative bias in VCs
“Also, you know, I think we have a, there is a tendency where the, sometimes, you talk about, you know, asymmetry of information, but it goes both ways, where sometimes you're so close to a business, you really see how the sausage gets made, and you can end up …”
Mignot: Multiple touchpoints in a short window signals exceptional startups
“Typically, when you have exceptional companies, one of the indicator is that you will have multiple touch points about that company over a very short amount of time. So, you will, I will see them at Sitcam, but someone will, you know, I will see an ad, or I wi…”