Mike Volpi
General Partner, Hanabi Capital. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorexecutiveoperator@mavolpi ↗LinkedIn ↗hanabi.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
After serving as Chief Strategy Officer at Cisco Systems, Volpi established Index Ventures' San Francisco presence in 2009. He is a venture investor whose investments and board directorships include Scale AI, Confluent, Cockroach Labs, ClickHouse, and Sonos.
2shows
2appearances
34statements
5resolved
4supported
1contradicted
80%fully supported
67said about them ↓ Everything Mike Volpi said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Volpi: Self-driving trucks will operate on freeways within 18 months
“And if you ask me, like, for those use cases, I think you're going to see self-driving trucks on freeways within the next 18 months.”
Volpi: Younger VCs ignore diversity and fund people who look like them
“Younger VCs will tend to ignore all those issues and just say, how do I get my hands on the best company? I don't care. Like, and generally they tend to fund people that look like them. I think generally more experienced VCs will have a little more open-minded…”
Volpi: The era of large closed-source enterprise software platforms is over
“I generally think that we've seen the last of enterprise software companies, large enterprise software companies that are platforms that are closed source.”
Volpi: AWS launched DocumentDB to bypass MongoDB's SSPL license
“Mongo took an interesting similar approach. They have something called SSPL. In that case, it says you can take it, but any software that you build around it to run it, you have to open source it. So Amazon will have to open source its entire software base use…”
Volpi: Google and Azure partner with OSS creators to counter AWS
“And then the other thing that you do As a business is you partner with Google and Azure who, because they're pretty far behind Amazon, they're more than happy to have the original item and to pay you something for the privilege of running your version.”
Volpi: Employees write 95% of code in open source startups
“Nowadays, most of these open source companies, you know, 95% of the code is written by employees, and the five percent are like patches or connectors or something like that that the community is building.”
Volpi: Open source communities replace product management, not engineering
“So the community is still very important, but it's gone from basically substituting for your engineering org to substituting for your product management organization.”
Volpi: VC industry and Index Ventures have failed on diversity
“I think the industry at large, and our firm included in this, has not done a good job at all Funding against diversity or including diversity in our own firms?”
Volpi: Europe Has Far Fewer Skilled Investors Than the US
“There are far fewer skilled investors in the European market than there are here in the U S”
Volpi: High-Volume Corporate M&A Is Right Strategy Despite High Failure Rate
“Track record of M and A having done a little bit of it at Cisco in my era is broadly speaking, not super successful. You know, you have to do a lot of them and many of them fail, which is the right methodology.”
Volpi: Traditional enterprises remain clueless about extracting value from data
“There are millions of businesses out there, even the big ones that I just cited, like somebody like American Airlines or Marriott Hotels, and I hope I don't insult anybody in the room, are clueless on how to get insights out of their data.”
Volpi: Machine learning experience over a decade old is mostly obsolete
“A lot of people will say they did machine learning, but if they did it more than 10 years ago, they did it in a pretty obsolete way.”
Volpi: Great entrepreneurs rarely listen to advice from many people
“A great entrepreneur very rarely listens to advice from lots of people.”
Volpi: Early-stage entrepreneurship is about understanding human incentives, not analytics
“Entrepreneurship, especially at the early age, is less about, you know, analytics and numerics, and it's really about understanding human beings, their incentives, their motivations, and what makes them great.”
Volpi: World-Class Venture Capital Firms Require a Silicon Valley Presence
“If we wanted to build a world-class firm, we had to have a presence in Silicon Valley. We were not going to do that remotely.”
Volpi: Slack's enterprise viral growth velocity is unprecedented
“Slack, which is spreading virally at a, you know, velocity that's, I don't think I've seen before in the enterprise environment.”
Volpi: Enterprise Consolidation Will Drive Startup Opportunities Over 3-4 Years
“I actually would argue that that either today or in the next three to four years is Opens opportunities for repeat entrepreneurs and opens opportunities for a new companies that will fill the gaps of those that have been acquired.”
Volpi: Index Ventures invested in Elasticsearch one month after discovering it
“The next day I called Elasticsearch. We ended up investing in the company a month later, and then it went public.”
Volpi: Consumer investments help VCs discover winning enterprise infrastructure tools
“So by being in consumer companies, you learn how infrastructural tools get used. And you often find the good ones, and so that's super relevant, and oftentimes whether they're using good or bad tools can also be an indicator of whether they're going to be a su…”
Volpi: Enterprise software is sold by developers, not executive slideware
“Whereas software was once sold through slideware to executives, software is now sold by developers who self-discover and evangelize that software.”
Volpi: Index Ventures made 5x return on Hortonworks investment
“We invested in Hortonworks, The company did go public. We made five times our money on the investment”
Volpi: Open-source startups must build proprietary features to survive
“Big lesson there, definitely have proprietary software, and understand where that boundary condition should be between free and commercial.”
Volpi: Machine learning infrastructure faces a critical human resources shortage
“I think one of the big challenges that we face in industry right now is there are Not enough people that know how to build, stand up, operate machine learning infrastructure. So you can provide a lot of people tools, but right now the actual problem is a human…”
Volpi: Practical AI startups should focus on simple ML on tabular data
“So if you want to be really practical in modern use cases, focus on tabular data with schemas that do really simple machine learning, like do fraud detection, do inventory forecasting do simple, straightforward predictions, and just about every business in the…”
The other half of the tape: Mike Volpi's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 67 times in 21 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 11George Sivulka 11David Cahn 6Aaron Katz 6Reid Hoffman 5Matt Turck 4Danny Rimer 4Anjney Midha 4
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 60
the MAD Podcast 7
2026 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2025 11 mentions in 1 episode
2024 15 mentions in 6 episodes 3 per episode
- David Cahn: Why Servers, Steel and Power Are the Pillars Powering the Future of AI | E1186 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Aidan Gomez: What No One Understands About Foundation Models | E1191 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Mark Goldberg: Why Politics is Rife & Decision-Making is Broken in Large VCs | E1219 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Danny Rimer: The Biggest Lessons from Missing Snap, Airbnb, Spotify and Facebook | E1166 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- David Schneider: Why the Worst VCs are "Seagull VCs" & VC Value Add - Is it Real? | E1200 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- How ClickHouse powers Netflix, Uber and Spotify’s Analytics | Aaron Katz, CEO of ClickHouse
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2022 3 mentions in 1 episode
2021 9 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: Sonos CEO Patrick Spence on His Biggest Lessons Building and Growing Blackberry, The Right Way to View Competition and Innovation Cycles & How To Make The Transition From COO To CEO Most Effectively
- 20VC: Coinbase President & COO Emilie Choi on Building Coinbase Ventures into One of the Best Performing Funds with 0 Employees, How Coinbase Thinks Through Internal Resource Allocation and Prioritisation & Why, When and How To Hire Your COO and Head of C
- Fireside Chat: Aaron Katz (Co-Founder & CEO, ClickHouse) with Matt Turck (Partner, FirstMark)
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2020 9 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
- 20VC: Reid Hoffman on Investing in Airbnb and Passing on Stripe, The Different Styles of Truly Great Leaders, How To Think Through Ownership and Price in Venture & How To Ensure Venture Partnerships Always Have Trust and a Learning Mindset
- 20VC: Index Ventures Partner, Mark Goldberg on The Questions Founders Must Ask A Multi-Stage Fund Before Taking Their Money At Seed, Why Most Angels Will Lose Their Money & Why We Will See Our First $100Bn Neo-Bank Shortly
- 20VC: Accel's Dan Levine on The Current State of Seed & Series A, The Rise of Pre-Emptive Rounds, Solo Capitalists and Multi-Stage Funds Entering Seed & Market, People and Product; What To Prioritise?
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
2019 9 mentions in 2 episodes 5 per episode
- 20VC: What Makes The Best Venture Firms Today So Special, The 3 Structural Impediments That Face Venture Today and Why The Debate on AR vs VR is BS with Anjney Midha, Founder & CEO @ Ubiquity6
- 20VC: Scale Founder Alex Wang on How To Hire Incredible Talent Before You Are A Hot Company, Why Beating Competition Is Not As Clear Cut As Investors Believe & Why AI Is Under-Hyped Today In Terms of Total Impact
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Mike's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| MADLEDGER | General Partner, Hanabi Capital | 1 | 20 | 100% 4/4 | full record on the MAD Podcast → |
| 20VCLEDGER | General Partner, Hanabi Capital | 1 | 14 | 0% 0/1 | full record on 20VC → |