Prediction Held up
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.”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Supported
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…”
Assertion Supported
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.”
Assertion Supported
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.”
Insight
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.”
Opinion
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?”
Opinion
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.”
Insight
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.”
Disclosure
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.”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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.”
Disclosure
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”
Insight
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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
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…”
Insight
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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Volpi: AWS holds an estimated 85% to 90% market share among developers
“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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Volpi: Index Ventures' portfolio has roughly 20% female CEOs
“My firm has probably about 20% of its CEOs that are women.”
Disclosure
Volpi: Female partners at Index Ventures find more women entrepreneurs
“Now that we have eight partners at Index, two are women now, and I will say they find more women entrepreneurs.”
Disclosure
Volpi: Index Ventures prefers investing in data producers over data collectors
“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.”
Mike Volpi