Index Ventures

“There was a conflict in venture that has now prevented a deal. We've spoken about instinct being the AI assistant that's raised from index and benchmark. Well, there's another AI assistant called town, which we just had on the show and index. Were going to …”

“Consensus status as well in the B to B world, because town, which is kind of the B to B enterprise alternative has also been funded to the tune of a billion dollar price by index. And I think it was benchmark who co led that round.”

“Four hundred million at a 3.8 billion dollar valuation led by Index, Kleiner, Sequoia, Dimension.”

“Index, as far as I know, still to this day, has a clause where they can't invest in anything that is a weapon or could be used as a weapon, and I remember they had investments in, in companies like a drone company, where they uniquely could have contracted a p…”

“The company I was the seed investor for that company together with Doug Leone from Sequoia and Sherdul Shah from Index Ventures. And together we created a syndicate of twenty million dollars that Value the company at around, I think the number was sixty six mi…”

“I truly think that's why Sequoia and Benchmark are great and Index are great because they help founders and entrepreneurs recruit amazing talent and people want to work for those funds portfolio companies.”

“When we sit and look at Series A, we don't sit and be frightened by Index or Excel or the big European players. We sit and be frightened of Andreessen coming into Europe. They're the ones who beat you.”

“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.”

“Index preferred to hold nasty gal at cost than do a down round.”

“Which in hindsight was probably the best possible raise that we could have done because by getting a big name early on to take an early bit of signal and no one's heard of it, then it's just the hottest.”

“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…”

“We never lose a deal or pass on a deal because of price in the early stage.”

“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…”

“We have a three hundred million dollar seed fund eight hundred million venture fund, and one and a half billion gross fund.”

“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…”

“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”

“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.”

“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…”

“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”

“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.”

“We consistently invest about half in Europe and half in the US”

“Oh yeah, for sure. Definitely.”

“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…”

“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…”

“We're in Cohere, and in and we have a seed investments in Mistral.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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”

“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…”

“I think, in, by and large, we tend to hold pretty much everything until IPO.”

“We invested in, you know, every round.”

“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…”

“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…”

“And also, you know, I haven't been an operator and a founder, so I won't try to, you know, I will never be on a board meeting and kind of go super deep on your product.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Having kids makes you even less tolerant of wasting time, because any moment you spend on the road, at a conference, at an event that you shouldn't be on, it's time you're not spending with, you know, with the most important people in your life.”

“Well, first of all, there is no one running index, and Danny doesn't have a mantle. You know, it's a pure purely equal partnership.”

“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…”

“Largest shareholder in Figma, largest shareholder in Dream Games, largest shareholder in Wiz you know, second largest shareholder in Scale.ai, Revolut.”

“And they don't, they are the most performant driven culture that we see.”

“I absolutely think they will continue to survive and thrive at that range.”

“The fund multiple is 18 X. Greylock, who did the series A is sitting on an 11 X fund. They did the series A out of a six hundred million dollar fund. KP, which did the series B is sitting on a 10 X fund out of a seven hundred million dollar fund, which is just…”

“That led us to kind of like source and co-lead the seed for bridge, which eventually got acquired by Stripe after I had since left.”

“All of the people at Index are my friends and they were already helping me. And in a way, I already knew the way they were thinking. And so for me, it was really important to bring new people, fresh ideas to the table.”

“What we just released or announced a couple of days ago is our latest funding round. So a new seventy-five million led by Index Ventures. But with significant backing from Motorola Solutions”

“If you looked at the seed pitch for Figma in June it was all over the place. Like, we were saying we're gonna do, like, a million things. None of it made sense. It was all very murky. So, yeah, I'm pretty impressed that Danny at Index was like, yes, let's go. …”

“This guy just raised a thirty-eight million dollar Series A. From, you know, I guess Index and General Catalyst, which was also part of that kind of whole post”

“We raised a pre-seed from Peter Thiel, and Floodgate, and then our seed from Mike Volpe at 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.”

“Yeah, so I think one of the lessons I learned from Index Ventures, and certainly two of my mentors, Mike Volpe, Ilya Fushman, was you want to be in the category winner, and when you need to pay up to be in a category winner, that's something that I think a lot…”

“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…”

“The recent examples I think are most interesting would be like Ethan from Bessemer, Christina Shen from Andreessen Horwitz, and Mark Goldberg from Index Ventures joining, leaving those large platforms to form like a real partnership, right?”

“It's not going to take off until it has an index. I often say it's in the Wizard of Oz, the scarecrow. He wants to be recognized as smart. He is smart, but Wizard says, all you need is a diploma. And then everybody will think you're smart. I've discovered in t…”

“TAM is a trap. Like, go back and look at the S-ones of some of the biggest public companies today. Their market caps are bigger than what they thought the TAM would be.”

“If your goal is to be the best version of yourself and your firm's goal is to be the best firm on the planet, there's no room for assimilation and confirmation, right? Conforming to other norms. So I think it's absolutely wrong. I think if you try to assimilat…”

“When I started my career every meeting default was an hour. Danny reminded me that I probably know the answer in 15 minutes, and so now the default first meeting I have is 30 minutes.”

“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.”