The Ledger, every show

“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.”

“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…”

“I generally think that we've seen the last of enterprise software companies, large enterprise software companies that are platforms that are closed source.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

“There are far fewer skilled investors in the European market than there are here in the U S”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“A great entrepreneur very rarely listens to advice from lots of people.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Slack, which is spreading virally at a, you know, velocity that's, I don't think I've seen before in the enterprise environment.”

“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.”

“The next day I called Elasticsearch. We ended up investing in the company a month later, and then it went public.”

“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…”

“Whereas software was once sold through slideware to executives, software is now sold by developers who self-discover and evangelize that software.”

“We invested in Hortonworks, The company did go public. We made five times our money on the investment”

“Big lesson there, definitely have proprietary software, and understand where that boundary condition should be between free and commercial.”

“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…”

“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…”

“If you actually pulled engineers on the street, you'd probably get 85, 90% market share with Amazon. So in my mind, no matter what the government decides on whether they use the Azure cloud or Amazon cloud, Amazon is stratospherically dominant amongst develope…”

“My firm has probably about 20% of its CEOs that are women.”

“Now that we have eight partners at Index, two are women now, and I will say they find more women entrepreneurs.”

“We tend to invest in businesses that produce data as opposed to collect data, but there are businesses that collect data for sure, and as long as they're compliant with the law and are not doing egregious stuff around it, we will tend to fund them.”

“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…”

“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”

“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…”

“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…”

“I do think that firms like Andreessen and Kleiner and Greylock have done a phenomenal job building services organizations. And there is no question that there is value in doing that. And then there are other firms like say benchmark who have done a terrific jo…”

“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.”