Evangelos Simudis

Founder and Managing Director, Synapse Partners · 1 appearance on the record.

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investorauthorfounderexecutive@esimoudis ↗LinkedIn ↗synapsepartners.co ↗

Evangelos Simoudis advises multinational corporations and governments on AI and autonomous mobility while investing in early-stage enterprise AI startups. He is the author of several books on technology transformation and previously served as Managing Director at Trident Capital and Apax Partners.

13statements → 4claims → 2claims resolved → 3.77/5average certainty → 2.08/5average debate potential → 4.0/5argument clarity · the sources →

1 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 3 assertions · 2 opinions · 7 insights · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved, and 2 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 Evangelos 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

Simudis: BMW structured iBrand separately to pursue new mobility services

“Another example is BMW's iBrand, an organization that has been set up very differently from the major business units of BMW trying to look at not only the manufacturing aspect, the design and manufacturing aspect of the car, which is what BMW and other automak…”

Evangelos Simudis Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 19:12 a16z Podcast | On Corporate Venturing & Setting Up 'Innovation Outposts'

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

4.0 / 5 directness 4.2 · coherence 4.3 · precision 3.6 · compression 3.5

redirected or did not address 1 of 12 assessed questions (8%). Watch them ▸

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? →

191 words/min while actually speaking · 28.6 um and uh per 1k words · 31.3 false starts per 1k · 36.7% of pauses land inside a clause

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 3,359 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 →

What they said13 Episodes1

Everything Evangelos Simudis said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight

Simudis: Corporations should build business development before launching venture groups

“90% of the times is to establish a venture group. And in retrospect, we determined that maybe establishing a venture group wouldn't have been the right first step. Maybe they should have established a business development capability before they even think abou…”

Evangelos Simudis Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 8:15 a16z Podcast | On Corporate Venturing & Setting Up 'Innovation Outposts'

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Simudis predicts 50% of corporate VC arms will close next recession

“Now by, I would call them unofficial statistics, there are Roughly a little over a thousand corporations, which in a sense makes sense because many more geographies have opened up in the intervening, you know, 1015 years, and I wouldn't be surprised if we have…”

Evangelos Simudis Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 9:28 a16z Podcast | On Corporate Venturing & Setting Up 'Innovation Outposts'

Insight

Simudis: Corporate moonshots that go exactly as planned lacked sufficient risk

“And when you're, our point is that when you are involved in moonshots, not everything is going to go as planned. And if it goes as planned, it means that you didn't take enough risks.”

Evangelos Simudis Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 21:33 a16z Podcast | On Corporate Venturing & Setting Up 'Innovation Outposts'

Opinion

Simudis: Silicon Valley tech companies will not completely overtake the auto industry

“There's also a lot of enthusiasm in the Valley from our own companies that we can completely overtake the automotive industry, and I think this is a fallacy. Completely obliterating it and making Silicon Valley the, you know, the next Detroit, it's hard for me…”

Evangelos Simudis Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 30:36 a16z Podcast | On Corporate Venturing & Setting Up 'Innovation Outposts'

Insight

Simudis: Corporate venture funds do not guarantee high-quality deal flow

“Just because you're establishing a fund, it doesn't mean that now you're going to start seeing a tremendous deal flow and the right deal flow”

Evangelos Simudis Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 3:19 a16z Podcast | On Corporate Venturing & Setting Up 'Innovation Outposts'

Insight

Simudis: Capital alone does not make corporate VCs valuable to startups

“Just because you have a venture fund and just because you're willing to spend some money doesn't mean that you become a value add partner of a startup or of a group of startups.”

Evangelos Simudis Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 4:36 a16z Podcast | On Corporate Venturing & Setting Up 'Innovation Outposts'

Insight

Simudis: Corporate outposts require continuous executive engagement to succeed

“The ones that have a particular reason, they're trying to solve a particular problem, They have engagement from the highest levels of the corporation. It's not only anointment, but there is actually engagement on a continuous basis. They are the ones who are p…”

Evangelos Simudis Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 4:48 a16z Podcast | On Corporate Venturing & Setting Up 'Innovation Outposts'

Insight

Simudis: Corporations must learn rapid, low-cost experimentation from Silicon Valley

“What can a corporation take away from Silicon Valley or from any other innovation ecosystem is not the fact that you come into touch with Two or three or 10 startups is the fact that there is a set of now best practices, and one of these that you can take away…”

Evangelos Simudis Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 16:54 a16z Podcast | On Corporate Venturing & Setting Up 'Innovation Outposts'

Insight

Simudis: Large corporations cannot solve complex innovation challenges with capital alone

“In this environment, regardless of how much capital they want to throw at the problem and how big and how good they are, they cannot solve things on their own, and they need to co-innovate.”

Evangelos Simudis Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 25:52 a16z Podcast | On Corporate Venturing & Setting Up 'Innovation Outposts'

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Simudis: Co-innovating with peers helps corporations adopt startup-driven innovation

“Steve and I are finding that corporations that have adopted open innovation principles, where they are co-innovating with other large corporations, are becoming more successful At adopting startup driven innovation.”

Evangelos Simudis Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 26:05 a16z Podcast | On Corporate Venturing & Setting Up 'Innovation Outposts'

Assertion Partly supported

Simudis: Half of 1990s corporate venture arms closed by 2003

“So back in in the late nineties and roughly between nine, 90 seven, 98 and 2000, there were roughly 500 corporations that had established venture groups in our area. And of those 500 by 2003, 50% had closed down.”

Evangelos Simudis Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 9:05 a16z Podcast | On Corporate Venturing & Setting Up 'Innovation Outposts'

Opinion

Simudis: Alphabet successfully integrates corporate venture arms with core operations

“For me, a very interesting example is what Google is doing with Alphabet. And the reason I find this interesting is because you're seeing their venture capital groups working in tandem with their, the rest of the corporation.”

Evangelos Simudis Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 18:28 a16z Podcast | On Corporate Venturing & Setting Up 'Innovation Outposts'

Assertion Supported

Simudis: BMW structured iBrand separately to pursue new mobility services

Evangelos Simudis Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 19:12 a16z Podcast | On Corporate Venturing & Setting Up 'Innovation Outposts'

Appearances (1)

Episode	Date	Speaking time
a16z Podcast \| On Corporate Venturing & Setting Up 'Innovation Outposts'	Jan 2, 2019	22m

Evangelos Simudis

The record, in short

Their most notable supported claim

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

How they sound: speaking style how? →

Appearances (1)

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