Index Ventures 合伙人 Martin Mignot：Figma、Scale、Wiz——Index 百亿美元独角兽工厂内幕

Beware of gross margin in the early days. That's a mistake we've made a couple of times. You have a lot of businesses that, in the early days, have really bad gross margins. All the LLM providers were very clear examples of that. I think if that's the only thing that's holding you up, in most cases, I would totally ignore it.

We never lose a deal or pass on a deal because of price in the early stage. We've been around for 30 years. We invested $11.5 billion, we've returned close to $30 billion, and we still have $20-plus billion in holdings. Most of that is concentrated in 8 or 9 companies. We invested in probably 300, close to 400 companies over the years.

Martin, it's been 8 years since our last show. We last did it on Skype. A lot's changed, man. You still look just as young, but thank you so much for joining me, dude.

Thanks for having me, dude.

I want to start with a statement that you said before, and you said it actually at a Kauffman Fellows event. You said, "Venture is about playing the right game," and I loved this statement. I wanted to turn it back on you and say: What is the right game for you?

I think the way I put it for this particular statement was very much playing the long game. It was very much playing the long game. The fact is that if you are to get into this industry and this job, you've got to commit for 10, 15 years at least and focus not on the outside reward and not on the external progression as a career, but very much more on the internal and doing it for the right reasons, which is investing in great companies and supporting great founders.

1. Why Most People Shouldn’t Become VCs

I think in the last cycle, we added a wave of tourist VCs who liked the events and liked the idea of being a VC. Do you agree that we had this wave of tourist VCs, and has it cleared?

I don't know if I would say tourist VCs, but I would say the asset class has institutionalized. Funds have become larger, and there are more people in general and, by and large. You bring in people who may sometimes want to have a career, choosing it as a career more than as a calling.

Personally, I think we at Index see this job as a calling.

Doug Leone said on the show that we've moved from a high-margin boutique community to a low-margin, commoditized industry. Do you agree with that statement?

Not entirely, no. I know there is a meme that the industry is diverging into 2 camps: You either have the megafunds, the asset gatherers, or you have the tiny boutique shops. I don't truly believe in that.

I think there's a third way, and Index is in that third way, where you need enough scale to help support the founders. We always think from the founders' point of view: How can we best serve them? You need, I think, a minimum size to really help them invest across stages and support them from inception to IPO.

You need a minimum size, but I also don't think you need a massive size to really support them. I think this push toward larger asset gathering is very good for the VCs who do it. It can make a lot of sense financially, and it can make a lot of sense for them. I'm not sure it makes so much sense for the entrepreneurs themselves.

So, I do believe there's a third way.

What do you think that minimum size is, then?

Exactly where we are.

How big are the latest funds?

We have a $300 million seed fund, an $800 million venture fund, and a $1.5 billion growth fund. That's the latest.

And that is the minimum for what you need.

I wouldn't say that's the minimum. I would say that's the right size to both support entrepreneurs with the right amount of capital and have enough to pay for the infrastructure that we have.

My mind has changed on this. I thought that the mega AUM gatherers would see a denigration of returns and, bluntly, just be fee accumulators. Now, when you see the expansion of outcome sizes and more trillion-dollar companies than ever, and a very few number of people being able to write a billion-dollar check, I think actually they will do incredibly well investing in your OpenAIs at $300 billion and your Anthropics at $60 billion, and see venture-like returns at scale in a way that has really changed my mind.

Do you think I'm wrong to have changed my mind in that way?

No. I think I'm not sure you're going to have venture-like returns at $300 billion. I think you can have amazing returns. Can you have 7x? 5x? Yeah, absolutely. I think the math makes sense.

Do you need dedicated funds to do that, or can you do it in a more ad hoc way?

I think that's a question. But I think that is on the later-stage side of things. Obviously, on the early stage—seed, early venture, or early growth—I don't think you need those mega-assets.

I think they distract you, and they tend to pull you toward the later stage. If you have so much capital to deploy, obviously you will tend to focus more on the later stage, on the very big checks. If you want to help and support at the earlier stage, it can be an impediment.

For the AUM gatherers, is seed simply an entry ticket to the real product, which is moving $100 million to $500 million at the C and D?

That is not our model, so I don't want to comment on their strategy.

That is such a cop-out. I totally think it is. I think I would admit it if I were them as well.

I always walk around London with my mother, and I always say the same thing: I have to give analogies. I'm like, you know when you went clubbing and you had to pay the entry fee at the door? That's like seed for the AUM gatherers, and the table is the C and the D.

This is not how we see seed at all. Every check is high conviction. We don't make as many as a result, but we have high-conviction checks and we work closely with these founders, even at the seed stage. It's the same as if you were a Series A.

Our goal is very simple: We want to be as early as possible, become the largest shareholder, and become the most valued and most referenced investors in those companies.

I chatted to Danny before the show, and he said that Martin didn't always have this perspective on where funds would win, and this kind of third path—being in the middle and being your path today. What did you believe, and what caused you to change your mind?

What I've changed my mind on is that if you start from the founder and really think through how you can best help them—what is the most helpful way that you can interact with them at the early stage, especially?—how does it help them that you have 10 different products, that you do LBO, that you do credit? How is that helpful to an early-stage founder? It's not.

If you really think from that first principle of, "Okay, what are the resources you need to be really helpful in those early-stage packages?"—and again, in the service for us of building both the biggest ownership and the best reference from those founders—it's not this super-large-scale, multiproduct model.

You need enough, again, to support them, but you also need to be small enough to keep that interpersonal relationship and that close support, where they know they can call 10 people at Index and get help on anything that may happen to them.

You don't necessarily have that in such a personal and trusted way in a much larger company, where people move around a lot more. A lot of our people have been around for 10 years-plus, even on our strategies team. That creates a level of trust and competency that's really hard to replicate in much larger organizations.

It's hard, because I love you, but team turnover has been high. There's been a lot of team turnover. Surely it's not that you don't have much consistency in the Index team, do you? You've got Shardul Shah—

Yeah, and if you look at the principal rank, we have a lot of people who've been around for a long time. If you look at the strategist rank, we have a lot of people who've been here for a long time. So, there has been turnover in the industry at large.

Interesting question: Do you think consistency of team correlates to venture returns? I was chatting with Ili at QuantumLight about it the other day, and they said the number-one factor they noticed that was a good predictor of future returns was whether a partner was on the Midas List—a partner who was an early-stage investor in the company was on the Midas List—which kind of tends to show that there is persistence of returns in terms of proven investors.

Do you buy the Midas List? Again, you're like, "Jesus, Harry, I thought this was an easy interview." But I look at the Midas List, and none of the people on there did the deals that they said they did. I'm like, "Guys, come on."

2 things. One is, I didn't investigate it as much as you did. But my view on the Midas List is that it's a really good list for who was a great investor 10 years ago. That's how I would describe it, because if you look at a lot of these companies, they were deals that were made 10 years ago.

I think it's really accurate to show you who made great investments 10 years ago. Is it very accurate to see who is a great investor today or in the future? Again, I think there is some persistence of returns, and there are a lot of studies that have shown that. But it's not definite. There are a lot of great investors today who are not yet on the list but will be in the future, who should be on it.

Yeah, no, I totally get you. I’m going to leave some names out. Some I look at and I’m like, “Really? That’s interesting.” We have different memories on that one.

You’ve mentioned service and help a lot. Keith Rabois said on the show before, “The best founders don’t need your help as an investor.” Do you think the best founders need your help?

2. The Founder Trait That Trumps Market Size Every Time

They don’t necessarily need your help. The best founders I’ve seen are very good at reaching out to investors and people around them on very specific topics. It’s about leveraging the right people at the right time and being very specific about that, versus going to—I think that’s a little bit of the approach that we see in the market: it’s a one-stop shop for everything. I don’t think the best founders use their investors or their supporters that way.

Okay, so when we think about, bluntly, new deals, there are 2 types of founders. There are those who come to an industry fresh, with the joys of naivety and open eyes, and then there are those who come to it as industry insiders. How do you think about which founder type you prefer, and what lessons do you take from them?

I don’t prefer any of those types. The way I think about it is slightly different. What I love in founders is unique insight, and that unique insight can come from 2 places. One is experience and knowledge of an industry; the other is sheer intelligence and the ability to break down a complex problem into very simple ones.

If you think about all the best founders I’ve worked with, and that you have worked with, I think they tend to have this 1 similarity: they can come up with a very simple insight—something that sounds very simple but is actually incredibly deep, profound, and defensible. They typically come at it from first-principles thinking. First-principles thinking gets thrown out a lot, but the very best founders have that.

If you take Nik Storonsky as an example, a lot of his decisions and a lot of his core insights were linked to first-principles thinking. He thought, “Okay, FX for large corridors, where you have a lot of volume, the transfer costs nothing, so it should be given up for free to the market.” Once you have that, it’s a really good hook, and then you build something else.

If you think about most of the great companies, they have 1 simple insight that is very deeply original. To me, that’s the core of what I look for in founders. I want to sit there and have them teach me something that they have come up with, either thanks to their experience, but more usually from that deep thinking they’ve done, where they’ve solved a problem.

Look at Will Shu at Deliveroo, for example. His insight was very much that the product is the delivery, which sounds obvious, but it’s not the digital experience. It’s the speed and quality of the delivery. If it can come in under 20 minutes, and you can get that consistently, that is the product. Everything else is a distraction. That’s the core product, and that’s what we should entirely focus on.

It’s funny, I had Micha Kaufman, the founder of Fiverr, on the show recently, and he said a fascinating thing: the most important thing that’s changed is time to copy—how long it takes for someone else to copy your product. When you see a dramatically reduced time to copy, does the value of unique insight go down? You could have a great idea, but I see it and, bluntly, with the tools that we have available, I can copy it super fast. I’m better at branding and marketing than you, so I’m going to crush you. Does the value of unique insight go down?

I think it goes down without the great execution that comes with it. I think that, on its own, is not enough. I still think it gives you an advantage, but then I agree: I think it’s all about execution.

Can I ask, when you think about market timing risk—it’s something where I’ve gotten burned before—how willing are you to take market timing risk when you think about unique insights?

What do you mean by market timing?

I believe this. I don’t know how long it’s going to take for the market to see what I believe, versus, “Hey, I have a product that’s super fucking great right now and it’s going to fly off the shelf.” That’s a very common way of making mistakes, and—

So you could look at Cowboy and say, “Hey, actually, in a world today, everyone appreciates the importance of innovation in transportation and the benefits of cycling in cities—”

Well, it would be very different 5 or 6 years ago.

So I think, look, market timing is a real thing. You can be right, but it can be that, again—if you look at food delivery, it’s interesting. People tried to do delivery 5 or 6 years ago. There was a French company—I forgot the name—that was doing delivery, but what they didn’t have was smartphone penetration. They had to call people, and they had to call drivers to tell them where to go and where to deliver. Obviously, that didn’t scale. There was no efficiency, they would take 50 minutes, and it would be very expensive.

You needed to have not only the invention of the smartphone, but you needed to have everyone, including drivers, having smartphones for something like Deliveroo. Clearly, the concept was there, but the technology just didn’t follow.

I think in the case of Cowboy and micromobility in general, the timing was absolutely correct. The challenge here in this industry is that if you’re selling the hardware, it’s mostly a hardware product, and hardware is really hard if you don’t sell software on top. You rely on a very complex supply chain, which has suffered a lot over the past years, obviously. It’s a volume game. You need distribution. You need relationships.

You need to raise a lot of money to build all of those assets, and the return on that capital is not as good as on pure software businesses. If you’re selling a service, like Lime and Bird, then I think you can have large scale, but it is so operationally complex. You’re also competing with a lot of subsidized transportation.

You’re charging full price for a service that is offered at a discount by a lot of municipal services, and you’re fighting against a lot of regulation and a lot of challenges. I still think that some companies will do well, actually, in that space. I think Lime is doing well. I think Dott is doing pretty well. So I think they’ll be okay in the end, but it’s clearly been a really, really difficult space.

Dude, I had the CEO of Lime on, and he said that at one point they had a 33% break rate every month. One in 3 broke every month—destroyed. I mean, a hard fucking business.

We mentioned Cowboy. It’s a hard deal, being direct. How do you prevent hard deals or losses from impacting future decision-making? I’ve met so many great fintech investors who never did Stripe because they thought it would be commoditized. They thought it was a race to the bottom. They let the past dictate the future. How do you not do that?

Yeah, that’s probably the hardest one. And actually, it’s funny: it isn’t only the bad investments or the mediocre ones. Any investment gives you some form of bias. If it’s a great investment, then everything else may look not so great in comparison.

I’ve suffered certainly from that on the fintech side, for example, where I was lucky enough to be early in Revolut, and then I looked at a lot of other fintech investments and thought, “Well, Revolut can do this, so it does it better.” So I think it goes both ways.

And you’ve missed out because of that.

Yeah, exactly.

What did you miss out on because you thought Revolut was great?

We could have invested in a lot of other neobanks. Qonto would be a really good example. There were also a lot of opportunities in remittances and certain corridors.

To put it in the nicest way, do you actually regret it? I didn’t mean this horribly or to single out any players. I’m not a dick journalist, but I just think so much value accrues to the number 1 in most markets. I get it, but when you’re in the number 1, who gives a fuck? I didn’t mean it that bluntly, but it’s so demonstrably different in terms of value accretion.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that’s absolutely our position. There are still some really good companies that we could have invested in, I would say.

So, going back to your original question, this idea of keeping a beginner’s mindset is absolutely essential for any investor. It’s really hard to do. The example we always use at Index is Spotify. To your point, it wasn’t because of a bad investment; it was because of a mediocre investment, which is different.

We had just invested in Last.fm, which was a totally reasonable outcome, but we saw how the sausage gets made in that industry and the power of the labels, and we were like, “Gosh, this is impossible to make money.” We really loved Daniel Ek, and we saw that the product was phenomenal and there was some early traction, but we had this bias of, “Oh, the music industry is so hard. It’s never going to happen.”

That’s why we passed multiple times. When we wanted to come back, it was too late.

It was not too late.

Yeah, exactly.

I love Danny. I love Danny and I love Daniel, and Daniel wanted Danny every freaking round.

Exactly. But I think the learning here is, again, it goes back to the founder. When you have—and we knew because Daniel was working at one of our companies, so we knew the guy was incredible—and when you have such a unique founder who does have a unique insight about their industry and has the ability to execute on it, and also in this case you see real signs of execution, don't overthink it.

I think that's a problem that we have, and I'm chatting with a lot of VCs who say it's pretty widespread in the industry. You think you want to be very smart, you want to be very diligent, and so there's a tendency to overthink. When something has a fantastic founder and has real movement, then sometimes you just need to—even if it's an industry where you're thinking, “Oh my God, I've been burned in the past”—don't overthink it.

3. The Case for a European AI Giant (and Who Might Build It)

I'm early stage, at seed. If I have a world-class founder, I don't give a shit what they're doing. I genuinely don't know. There's this brilliant curve—I don't know if you've seen it—where you start your career and you think it's all about team. You then go 3–5 years in, where you're like, “Oh, I'm smart. I should analyze markets.” And then 10 years in, you're like, “Just team again.”

4. How Spotify Still Haunts Index Ventures & What They Learn From It?

Yeah. I remember Matt Turck showed that meme at some point. I'm getting there too. I'm back on the other side of the curve.

Okay. You have team, you have traction, you have market. 1 through 3, most important. I mean, team, team, team and team. I would say that's—I’m back to that as the number 1. I probably used to think market, team and traction. Now I'm kind of putting the other around, so team, traction and market.

Given how unparalleled revenue scaling is today for so many companies, does revenue mean less? Does traction mean less, given that $0 to $10 million is kind of commoditized now? Does it mean less?

I don't think it means less. As you know, finding product-market fit is the hardest thing in any business, and tons of founders walk around in the desert for years without ever finding it. So I think we shouldn't minimize or trivialize finding real traction and having real revenue traction. I think this is remarkable, and it should be celebrated.

Obviously, if you are talking about AI, auditing the quality of that revenue is critical. That's what we spend a lot of our time doing: Is that revenue lasting? Is it sticky? Sometimes, obviously, the more cohorts you have, the more you can see the numbers. If you don't have that, then it's going to be talking to customers and really trying to understand their use case.

Is it something that's more project-based, and they want to use it once and then switch to something else, potentially? Or is it something that, especially if it's inserted inside their workflow—Cursor is a good example; we've made a bunch of those types of investments—then, in all likelihood, even if the number doesn't show it yet, the stickiness of that product is going to be a lot higher.

Totally agree with you there. Can I ask you about keeping that pure mindset? Partnerships can help in terms of preventing mistakes based on, “Oh, I've done it before and it's lost,” which is a very dangerous heuristic, obviously.

When you think about decision-making internally, how does decision-making look on net-new deals, and how does that differ based on the size of the check?

We have a different size of quorum depending on the size of the check. There are always folks from each office, which is very important because we work as 1 team across offices. Then we vote. We vote 1 to 10. You can't vote 5 or 6, so you have to be for or against, and it's a qualified majority, essentially. If the average is above 6, the deal is approved.

That mechanism is the same, and there's also some latitude if you have very high conviction on a deal. At the early stage, I think we have a bias for action. Again, going back to having a beginner's mindset, the person who spends a lot more time with a certain team is obviously better placed to make a judgment call on that team. So there is a collective trust in the partner's judgment.

But if you want to write a $5 million check on the spot, you can do that?

Not exactly on the spot, but you can definitely make the deal happen.

What was the most controversial deal that got through?

I'd say Revolut was pretty controversial, actually, of all the deals. It's funny: in retrospect, it sounds bizarre, but it may end up being one of the most successful, or maybe the most successful. It was definitely one of the most controversial.

The reason for that was quite a fewfold. The first one is that it was a very European product. I think the product made a lot of sense for the European audience but didn't make as much sense in the US context, where FX, frankly, is not a big topic. So that was 1 element where US-based folks were less familiar with the product, and it didn't resonate as well.

The other issue we had was that, especially in the early stages, it was a negative gross-margin business. They were basically giving away FX but weren't charging for anything else. So you had a little bit of interchange, but not that much, and you had a very low gross-margin business. Obviously, that wasn't that attractive.

The more they scaled—and they scaled very fast, all organically and through word of mouth—the more they were burning capital. So it wasn't an obvious deal. I think Nik at the time wasn't a natural storyteller and fundraiser, so for all those reasons it wasn't an obvious deal.

Which, by the way, I think is 1 of the learnings: gross margin—beware of gross margin in the early days. I think that's a mistake we've made a couple of times, and I think Snowflake was a similar story.

What do you mean by that?

It means that you have a lot of businesses that, in the early days, have really bad gross margins, very low gross margins. Revolut and Deliveroo were examples. All the LLM providers were very clear examples of that, and a lot of the AI apps have similar characteristics.

But I think if that's the only thing that's holding you up, in most cases I would totally ignore it, because the reality is that when you're getting started, optimizing for high gross margin is the last thing you should be doing. You're entirely focused on growth and building the product.

In most cases, especially in pure software businesses, you will find ways to optimize your gross margins, and the cost—whether it's the underlying cost of the technology you're using—is going down. The AI apps are a good example of that, where the price per token keeps going down. Or you can just optimize your infrastructure a lot better when you have a lot more volume. That's what happened with Revolut.

It's so funny how you say statements a year ago and look back now and you're like, “What was I saying?” The speed of the industry transition is so significant when we look at the cost of tokens and where it was 18 months ago. It's 99% cheaper.

There was even a conversation that if you made your judgment based on gross margin at that time, on the price of the token at the time, you would have missed out on really great companies and great investments.

5. The Brutal Truth About European vs. U.S. Founders

Honestly, that was my take on Lovable's gross margin: what it is today is not what it will be in the future.

European stack rank was what I wrote down here. If I was on the Europe team, I would honestly be a little bit perturbed by the dual structure of having US people on my decision-making, because I'm stack-ranked against the growth of Silicon Valley companies. I'm never going to get a deal done.

I'm not saying they're worse, but they grow slower and the execution speeds are often slower. I just think if you stack-rank them, it makes it harder for European teams to get deals done.

It may be, but it's not really what we see. We consistently invest about half in Europe and half in the US. We have 1 global bar, and I think that's the way we see the world.

We don't fight for a local maximum. We're fighting for a global maximum. We want to be in the very best businesses globally and be the reference investors in those.

Is there a culture challenge in presentation? What I mean by that is, Americans are brilliant at marketing and storytelling. I mean that nicely, not badly, but respectfully to your fellow countrymen.

French people, I'll meet them and they're like, “Yeah, we're doing $50 million in ARR.” And I'm like, “Wow, that's amazing.” It's okay. If this was American, it'd be great.

So my question is, is there a culture chasm that doesn't carry over with European founders to your American partners?

Yes, I think the answer is yes, by and large.

So we know—if there's one team that is aware of those differences, I would say it's Index. We're very well aware of it, and we take it into account when we vote on deals. That's also why we leave a lot of latitude, especially when you have data. It's different because, obviously, data can speak for itself, but I think at the earlier stage, to your point, the presentation matters a lot more. That's where leaving more latitude to the partner or investor who is closer to the founder and spends more time with them is super important. We've had that in the past, for sure.

Peter Fenton said on the show that price is a mental trap. Interesting statement.

Yeah.

How do you think about your own price sensitivity today?

Yeah, I think he's absolutely right. You shouldn't lose a deal on price, especially in the early stage. We never lose a deal or pass on a deal because of price in the early stage. I think that is absolutely correct. I think it can be a little bit—where does it stop, though?

Is that a price that's too high? I will ask: are we being paid for the risk that we're taking?

That's not really how we think, to be honest. This kind of risk-reward profile—you don't know, right? You don't really have a good sense for the size of the reward. In general, by and large, the industry has even underestimated the size of the outcome. You mentioned the scale of the revenue growth and the scale of the market caps of these businesses. We didn't think that would be the case even 10 years ago.

So at the early stage, if you had known at the time that the outcomes could be so large, then maybe it was a very fair reward for the risk you were taking. I think in the early stage, he's absolutely right. The only question is, how far does it extend? In valuation, when you're looking at Palantir at $200 billion, is $1 trillion still a mental trap? I don't know. There must be some moment where you get into a slightly different realm, where the distribution of outcomes becomes narrower and you have a better understanding of where the company will be.

The closer you get to an IPO, the closer you should have a sense of what the valuation is, and you have a better sense for the risk-reward profile that you are mentioning. At the early stage, this is so far out that you don't really know. Again, if you go back to the first principle—if you have this extraordinary founder and there's real traction—then don't overthink it.

Have you done deals at high prices that, in hindsight, were too highly priced and negatively impacted the company?

Oh, for sure. Definitely.

And so there is a price that's too high.

Yeah. There is the price, there is the amount raised, and there is the maturity of the business. We've all seen these companies that raise tons of capital at a very high price before they had proper product-market fit—or they thought they had it, but a lot of it was subsidized by investments. Then, when they stopped investing because they realized the customers they were acquiring weren't profitable, they needed to stop because it didn't really make sense.

They had all this money and all this team, and they had to spend—especially in Europe, where it takes a long time—a year or 2 reducing the size of the team, going back to the basics, and trying to find product-market fit after they had grown so much and had so much capital at such a high valuation. That makes it really, really tricky. That is dangerous.

I find that's the fault of investors. Series A is so competitive that someone on our team joked yesterday, “How soon after doing the seed is it okay to preempt the A? Is the next day okay?” Because it's so competitive at Series A, I have to stuff you with cash as soon as possible and, fuck it, I'll take the risk on you getting product-market fit, because if you have it, it's too late.

Yeah, we've done it on some occasions. Again, when we found an extraordinary founder with either revenue traction or open-source traction, we've done that in a couple of open-source companies. It can totally make sense, and you can really get amazing rewards for that.

When you think about ownership, how do you think about ownership internally? Is it the age-old 15%? Have times changed around ownership percentages?

Times have changed, for sure. I started 15 years ago, and we were all aiming for 20%; that was kind of the minimum bar. You can still get 20% ownership, but it's obviously getting a lot harder.

I think for us, the goal is to get double-digit ownership at exit. That is typically where most of our returns have been generated. If we look at the performance of the fund, most of our returns have been generated by companies where we owned close to or more than double-digit ownership at exit. That's what we're trying to aim for.

Do you have more elasticity on ownership because you're able to do multistage investing?

Yeah, in the earlier stage, for sure. I think for us, especially at seed stage, our approach to seed is much more collaborative. The idea is we don't want to compete with people like you and other seed funds and angels. We want to bring them along. We want to work together, and we're going to pull our weight and be super involved, but this is not the stage where we want to maximize ownership. We're not going to have sharp elbows at that stage.

Later on, especially at Series A and B, because of the time we're going to spend helping these companies, spending time on the board, and hopefully being the reference investor, that's where we need a minimum ownership.

I make bombastic statements and then ask for opinions on them. I think Series A is the worst place to be investing today. Obviously, we do Series A, so I'm not promoting ourselves; it's a very truthful exposure. The price inflection point is so high—often 3 to 5x—and the company progression is often less than 2x. It's a tough space to play. How do you feel about Series A being a bad space to be in right now?

We don't really think about it that way. First of all, the label on the stage is as good as you want to make it. Is it seed? Is it Series A? Is it pre-seed? I think there are 3 stages: there is a pre-product-market-fit business, there is a post-product-market-fit business, and then there is a scale business.

We have our funds—Seed, Venture, and Growth—that kind of represent those 3 stages, but they're not really labels. For us at the early stage, the goal again is to be a double-digit owner and reference shareholder as early as possible. We don't try to think, “Is it now a good time? Is it now a bad time?” Great companies are created at any time in the cycle. If you can get in early enough and have enough ownership, we don't overthink whether it's Series A or Series C, or how much we own. Having a multistage fund helps with that flexibility.

Do you have investments in any of the LLM providers?

We do.

Which ones?

We're in Cohere, and we have a seed investment in Mistral.

Do you worry about dilution sensitivity down the road? You mentioned Deliveroo; that's kind of version 1 of dilution sensitivity, if you want, and LLM is, I guess, the latest version, where there's a fundamental question of whether it's actually a good venture product because the dilutive nature of the business is so high.

We'll see at the end of the journey. I think as a pure venture multiple, it 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, very importantly, the speed at which that size is going to be reached means that, especially if you can deploy a lot of capital, you will still be able to generate a lot of absolute returns.

In terms of performance, this will still be very high. In terms of pure multiple on early-stage investments, it may be slightly lower because of dilution.

Do you worry about the distribution of value in the LLM market when you think about the 2 titans, obviously OpenAI and Anthropic, and what we said earlier about the importance of being number 1? How much value actually accrues to the long tail with other providers? Do you worry about that?

Yeah, of course. Of course I worry about that.

Does Europe need an LLM provider?

Yeah, I think it does.

I think it does.

Can you paint that case for me? I'm not asking as a journalist. I'm asking as a student. Why?

Well, I think the notion of sovereignty and tech sovereignty is a real notion. I think it's important to recognize that there's a big part of the economy that has to think that way, where geopolitical realities matter. If you are a government entity or a quasi-government company, you may want, or even have to, use local providers eventually, at some point.

I do think there is a large part of the market that needs and wants local providers, especially assuming that they are close to the frontier or at the frontier. I think there is a real market case for that. There's also a lot of localization and customization that can and needs to happen, so I think there's going to be a great enterprise market for those providers. So, yes, I think there is a market.

Is it going to be smaller than OpenAI?

Yes, for sure.

Fair. I didn't disagree with you. Do you think we need government intervention in AI? I spoke to Danny, obviously. Paul said he was the only one who said this, actually. He said you should ask him about China. Do you think we need government intervention in AI, pushing you to use one model over another or shutting off access to certain providers?

I do believe that having government entities or quasi-government entities support local innovation in that critical field is important. I think the way to do it is not necessarily to intervene. I think they should be customers. They should buy those products, and they should help them as customers rather than as investors, necessarily.

Do you think TikTok should be allowed, though, for example?

I think it should be allowed, but there should be a bigger conversation about social networks and about the openness of algorithms. That doesn't only apply to TikTok; it applies to X and Facebook. I think those algorithms should be public and should be able to be audited by anyone, but should also include independent auditors.

They are not regular companies. I think they are utilities. They are critical infrastructure for the economy and for political systems, and as such, I think they require a level of treatment that is different from any random startup.

When we look at the different players today, we're seeing this real concentration of value, almost like never before. You mentioned that OpenAI is going to be bigger, but your OpenAIs, your Anthropics, your Cursors—there are probably 5 to 10 in this ilk. The concentration of value within startups seems to be more prevalent or dominant than ever before. Do you worry about this concentration of value and, bluntly, the platform play that comes from that, meaning it is much more concentrated and makes it more difficult for us investing in smaller players?

I don't think it's that different from before, really. If I look at Index, I was looking at the numbers. I think we've invested $11.5 billion. We've returned, I think, close to 30, and we still have 20-plus in holdings. Most of that is basically concentrated in 8 or 9 companies, and we've invested in 300, close to 400, companies over the years.

The concentration of returns in a small number of names is something we've experienced ourselves at our level, so I don't think it's that different from what it was before. I don't see anything that indicates it's going to be that different. That's why making sure you are in those category leaders early enough to have big enough ownership, and also earning the preference from the founder by being the reference investor, is the most powerful thing. It's the only thing that really matters.

What did you miss at the early stage that made you think, "Oh, shit, we just have to be in this," and then you came in later?

That was just before I started, but we did that with Zendesk, for example, where we passed on the seed and the A. Especially if you look at the memo and the valuation at the time, it's quite funny in retrospect. I don't remember exactly where it was, but it was very different from where it is today, as you can imagine. We came in later with our growth fund.

Do you worry for your companies about the concentration of talent? We are in a war for talent like we've never seen before, and the compensation packages truly are like we've never seen before. I speak to so many of my companies, and when we're competing against Meta and OpenAI, what do you expect? Do you worry about that for your companies?

For sure. You have to worry. Having said that, a big part of the compensation for these early-stage companies is around options and ESOP, and I think that's the only way for startups to really compete with these large, established players, whether it's OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, or the established publicly listed large tech companies.

If you can tell a good enough story about this future value creation, there is no compensation package that can compete with that.

6. The Return of the 7-Day Founder Work Week

Talking about European founders competing, I obviously posted about the importance of working 7 days a week in an increasingly intense world, where we are competing against China and the US, and that being the new normal. You very rightly said the same, and then I got all the blowback while you avoided it all. My question to you is: Why do you think we're in a new world of work intensity, and that a new caliber of work is required to build a $10 billion business?

Again, I'm not sure it's changed so much. If you look at the most incredible companies in the past, 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. It was 7 days a week, nights and weekends. That's what it was.

I think that's what it takes when you're going into hypergrowth mode and you're going for the venture-backed route. That is part of the journey. In many ways, what you're saying is that you need 2 things. 1 is that you need to do a lot of experimentation and iteration, and that typically means the longer you work, the more things you can try. Then you need to have a very high growth curve and be able to learn very quickly from those experiments.

The main change to me is how open people are, and I think it's good because then there is no mismatch of expectations. You're not joining a company and thinking, "They're working so hard. I can't do this. This is not for me." At least there's real alignment between what you're saying and what you're doing, and I think that's actually positive.

When you think about liquidity, what are your biggest lessons on when's the right time to sell?

We talked about market timing, and we don't try to time the market at entry. We don't try to time it at exit either. We're not public-market investors. We tend to have a very standard liquidity program when a company goes public, where we sell every quarter over 3 years in a recurring, regular, preset way.

In many ways, we obviously set up an exit committee where you have 4 people, including the partner who led the deal and another partner who didn't lead the deal and is not as close. We always have healthy debates, and we can adjust at the margin. By and large, our view is: Don't try to be too smart.

It's always the same. When things go really well and you've sold, you think, "Oh, shit." But then you also have the opposite, where if you hadn't done that very systematic approach, you wouldn't have realized a lot of liquidity. All in all—

What did you sell too early that you're most annoyed about?

We were a very large investor in Robinhood, and we sold quite a bit at a lower price than where it is today. We still have a large stake, but there's always going to be counterexamples. That's one of the clear ones, given their recent price action.

Do you think it is the right strategy to sell in these quarterly increments when companies go public, given all the information that you have? Are you not in a place of asymmetric information where you are better placed? I actually look at a Shopify-type company, where you would have lost 98% of the value.

Again, they're all counterexamples, for sure. When we ran the analysis—and we did run the analysis, obviously; we didn't come up with it randomly—it came out that that was the decision we took. It works. Obviously, it's hard to do the counterfactual because you can never sell only at the top.

I wish we could, but that’s just not going to happen. If we had taken different schedules, we would have been worse off. And so we felt that overall, if you look across a basket of portfolio companies—and again, it’s a portfolio approach—you may be wrong on 1 or 2, but if you take a portfolio approach and do it for long enough and consistently enough, then we realized that was the best outcome.

7. Biggest Lessons from Leading Revolut’s Series A

Does the extension of private markets change that perspective? When you look at, say, Revolut now, I think it’s like $75 billion in private markets, whatever it is. It’s just an example.

Yeah.

The extension means that secondaries are so much more real. You have the chance to sell much earlier, and that public profile is delayed a lot longer. Do you engage in proactive selling in secondary markets?

We may, again, over time in certain situations. Revolut is one example—we’ve been in it for 10 years, so you’re getting to the end of a fund cycle.

I think, by and large, you sell secondary in Revolut?

We didn’t share that, but we’re definitely not opposed to it in general. By and large, we tend to hold pretty much everything until IPO.

Do you think that will change?

It may. We don’t have any taboo. We may have funds that are just at the end of their life cycle and want to realize some level of liquidity. I don’t think we’ll ever sell a lot. Again, it goes back to my first point about the returns being so concentrated in a small number of names. When you’re fortunate enough to be a big owner in one of those names, you want to ride it for as long as you can.

Also, the best price discovery is on the public market, so you want to get access to that price discovery. By and large, we will keep everything until IPO and after.

When we think about ownership accumulation across rounds, the thing that I find hard is that Figma is a great example of an incredible business that wasn’t maybe obvious for quite a few years, actually. It took a while for Dylan to come out with any product.

It just wasn’t up and to the right from day 1. Let’s put it that way.

Well, it was nowhere for many years because he was just building the product.

Okay. So there we go.

My point being, I do not believe your winners are instantly obvious, which means that I think you will often misallocate your reserves and your ownership concentration desires. Do you agree?

Yes. I think it’s inevitable.

So we are not able to accurately predict our winners.

No, definitely not.

So then we should just do the same.

It’s funny—Figma is a great example of that. You picked a really good one. I always tell this anecdote: We have this co-retreat every year, and Danny would keep coming back—year 1, year 2, year 3, year 4—and it still wouldn’t have launched. You’d think, “Why are we still inviting him? What’s going on?”

To Danny’s absolute credit, his level of conviction behind Dylan at Figma is unparalleled. I don’t think there are many examples in the business of an investor who has had that level of conviction for so long. We’re talking years of saying, “I really believe in this. I think this founder is really special.”

I think the product was special, too. The fact that he wasn’t launching—that he wanted to build all the right features for good reasons—not that he didn’t want to launch, but that he couldn’t launch because he knew he needed to have that minimum level of feature set to be competitive and for it to work. Danny was always a massive supporter, even in that long period when there wasn’t even a product out there.

With respect, then, why let Greylock lead the A?

It’s the same with every company. You don’t invest in every single round of every single one of your companies. I don’t think it’s any different, but we invested in every round.

Is there one way you really backed up the truck where, with the benefit of hindsight, you go, “Wow, I got a bit ahead of my skis there?”

No, we never felt that way, because as soon as the product was launched, the traction was undeniable.

Across the whole portfolio? Oh, you mean—okay, I thought you meant about Figma.

Oh, no—not Figma. Okay. Yeah, no, no. Across the portfolio, yeah, of course. We’ve made that mistake before. Again, anything evens itself out.

Is there anything that you wish you had seen? You don’t need to say the company, but—

I think there were times, especially in high-valuation, frothy times, when you have moments where you doubt yourself. You run your own analysis and come up with a valuation and the potential for the business, and then someone comes on and says, “I’m going to pay 2× the price, and I’m going to put 2× the money that we thought we would put,” sometimes with an incredibly high level of conviction and speed.

You think, “Did I miss something? Do they know something I don’t? Did I miss something?” Also, I think there is a tendency—sometimes you talk about asymmetry of information, but it goes both ways—where sometimes you’re so close to a business, you really see how the sausage gets made, and you can end up being more negative, or more focused on the negative than the positive.

Having external validation from people who are new to the business, who just look at the data and the team and say it’s worth X—and that X is 2× what you think it’s worth—you may think, “Maybe I’m being too negative because I see some things, but if I were a new investor, I might be willing to pay 2× the price.” So there are some moments where you say, “Let’s do a pro rata and be part of it,” because maybe we’re missing something. Clearly, it’s a different trajectory, and sometimes that was the wrong call.

Do you do outcome scenario plans? The biggest mistakes in venture are when we underestimate the size of our winners, which is so common. Do you do outcome scenario plans, and is it worthwhile as an activity?

We don’t waste cycles going incredibly detailed into those. We do—I think we focus more on sensitivity analysis. We focus on the few levers that really matter for this business and where we think they’re going to go.

8. Betting Against Nick Storonsky? Don’t.

But again, we focus much more on the founder, the founder dynamic, and the talent that they bring to the team than on number crunching.

We’ve mentioned Revolut quite a few times. I do have to ask about the story. I don’t actually know it: How did you first meet Nick? Can you just take me to this? Who was he? Why did you meet him? Just tell me the story.

It was a while back—more than 10 years ago now. I saw them pitch at Seedcamp at one of the demo days. Typically, when you have exceptional companies, one indicator is that you will have multiple touchpoints about that company over a very short amount of time.

I would see them at Seedcamp, but someone else would mention them to me, I would see an ad, or I would download the app and a friend would mention it to me. In general, you have 3 or 4 touchpoints, and for me, that’s a big signal: There’s something happening here. If I hear a lot about something in a very short amount of time, they’ve really hit a nerve.

I think that’s what happened with Revolut. I saw them at Seedcamp, but somebody else mentioned them to me, I was using the app, and one of my partners had also been introduced. It was multiple signals, but I think the Seedcamp one was the first one.

And so then you ping Nick and set up a meeting?

I don’t exactly remember how I got introduced. I may just have gone to him after the pitch. Also, I think we had been introduced through another source. I think one of my partners had also been introduced. Again, typically, there are multiple touchpoints with some of these companies.

The reason why I had a lot of conviction was that I came in with a prepared mind, meaning that I had been looking at the space for a little while. I had looked at a company in the US called Simple. You probably were not born then, but it was the first real neobank.

It sold to BBVA.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, dude. There you go.

I’m a student. Don’t underestimate me. I know.

Simple had been around and, again, interestingly, going back to beginner’s mindset, a lot of people who had backed Simple were like, “Well, this doesn’t work. It can’t work. Look at this. Best-case scenario, you get bought by an incumbent, and it will never work because people don’t want to switch bank accounts. It’s a pain. Why would you switch bank accounts? It’s going to be on mobile, but my bank has a mobile app.”

Why do I care? I had looked at Simple, and I had met Monzo as well. I was looking for a trigger: what would convince people to switch bank accounts, which is such a pain?

What I really loved about Revolut was the simple trigger with FX. They didn’t sell people, “Oh, you’re going to switch bank accounts.” They sold, “Oh, you’re traveling to Portugal for a stag weekend. You’re going to get fleeced by your bank. Why don’t you get a Revolut card?”

I thought that was such a clever insertion point. From the beginning, Nick’s view was that he wanted to be the global money app, offering every product. But the insertion point was really effective, and that’s how they managed to grow so quickly and organically for the longest time: they had this very clear value proposition that was a lot easier than saying, “Oh, you need to sign up with a new bank,” which no one wants to do.

I remember chatting to Antoine Le Nel there, and he was like, “We won in many respects because we offer snacks to start. So don’t try to convince people on the main meal. Just have a little snack and come back for some more, and more, and more, and then suddenly you want the main meal.”

Yeah, totally agree with you there.

Okay. And so you saw that. Do you think Revolut won in large part because the lack of a banking license allowed them to move so much quicker?

If you ask Nick, I think he will say the opposite: if you were to do it again, he would probably go for a banking license earlier.

No.

Yeah.

No, seriously.

Yeah. I think it would. I heard it said a couple of times, because you see it today: it’s a lot easier to get a banking license before you have scale than after you have scaled.

But he would have been prohibited from most of his product expansions.

Exactly. I think we don’t know the counterfactual, so it may have been the case. Look, I think the reality is that they had the right strategy. It’s hard to argue with the outcome, and if you look at the outcome and compare it with all the other players in the space, they clearly had the best strategy based on the outcome.

But it is true that it’s harder to get a banking license later when you have very large scale.

What was really interesting with Revolut, though, and which I think is more important than the banking license, is the global approach to the business. Again, that was something that was very contrarian at the time and came from his first-principles thinking.

The conventional wisdom at the time was that banking was highly local, with massive regulation, and so you had to go very deep in one market. Once you had won that market, then maybe you would expand into a second or third market. But that was the conventional wisdom at the time.

His view was the opposite. It was, “Look, banking is a digital service, meaning a single, unified platform. A certain amount of code can deliver the exact same experience across every market in the world. There is no different product required in Indonesia versus Poland or Estonia, and the same app can do it all.”

The regulation, compliance, front end, and which products you can offer to whom—all of that varies. But the underlying principles of storing money, lending money, and transferring money are just a software and data play, which is the same. You can have a single piece of code that works across the globe.

That was his vision. From the get-go, he started multicountry as well as multiproduct, but he really started multicountry. One of the decisive factors in Revolut’s success is the ability to passport across the European Union. Having a license in Lithuania meant that you could then export and serve the entire European Union without having to go market by market.

They had to go market by market eventually to get local eyeballs and go deeper, but they could start offering the basic product across Europe with just that one license. That’s what really gave them the scale and geographical expansion to keep growing, growing faster, and compounding over time.

I think that’s why it’s important. It shows that when you give European founders one unified market to compete in, they can be as big, if not bigger, than anyone in the world. I think Revolut is probably one of, if not the best, neobanks in the market in many ways. It’s better than anything in the US.

The thing I always find quite funny is that the US always bluntly laughs at the size of our companies. I’m like, well, banking is one of the biggest industries in the world. We shit on your neobanks.

Yeah. But I think Europe should look at that example and really study it. What are the other ways we could replicate that and really have a unified market?

Obviously, we’re very involved with EU Inc., which is this initiative to have one single, unified status and a super-simple way for companies to expand across Europe. I think that could be an absolute game changer.

Do you think Revolut will win the US? I think the pathway to $500 billion will be largely dictated by US expansion. Do you think they will win the US?

I don’t know what winning the US means.

Gaining meaningful market penetration in a way that others haven’t in the past.

I think they will.

My bet is never bet against Nick.

Exactly.

Nick and Elon are 2. That’s the other way to put it. What do you think makes him so special? I’ve interviewed him several times over the years, not nearly as well as you have done. So I know mine. Why do you think he is?

It’s the first-principles thinking. It’s the fact that he never takes anything for granted. He never listens to conventional wisdom. If you tell him, “Oh, that’s how it’s done,” he will challenge that: “What? Why?”

Then he will think about it himself, really break it down into small pieces, solve that problem, and come up with his own answer. He will use experts to inform his thinking, but he will never just take things at face value. The result is that he comes up with very original ideas and original ways of working.

He does have some inspiration. Ray Dalio is obviously one, and the way he runs Revolut has a lot of similarity with Bridgewater. But I think that’s what has made him so special.

Then you add that to an incredible intensity and ability to maintain that intensity over time, over a very long period of time, in very difficult situations. I think that’s what really sets him apart.

Then there’s the scale of the ambition. A lot of founders want to win something small, and he doesn’t. He never thinks there is anything too big or too complex. Eventually, he thinks—he’s convinced—that there will be one global money app, and that he can be that one global money app.

That could be bigger than anything. When we first met, he wanted to be bigger than JPMorgan. There’s still some way to go, for sure, but that’s how big he thought from the get-go. It wasn’t something that came over time. It was because he thinks about it rationally. He’s like, “Why wouldn’t it? There’s no reason, no law of physics, that says it can’t be as big.”

Final one before we do a quick-fire. When you think about your investor self, what tool in the investor armory do you not have, or do you feel weak on, that you would like to have or be better on? You can think about it. Pause. Totally.

Yeah, that’s a great question. I think about it a lot for myself and for us as a firm. Why did we hire J.C.? Our customers are founders, and some founders want people who have scaled products to millions of people and teams of thousands. We didn’t have that as a fit on the team before, and he brought a very different consumer-product perspective that we didn’t have.

I’m a generalist in terms of sector focus, but going very deep on a specific sector’s nuances is not my strength. I also haven’t been an operator or a founder, so I will never be in a board meeting and go super deep on your product.

I will try to go to the level that is generalizable and help share what I’ve seen in other places, instead of just going super deep and owning that one thing.

When has not being deep hurt you?

I think there are certain investment decisions that, had I known more about a certain industry, I probably wouldn’t have made the investment.

9. Quick-Fire Round

Listen, I want to do a quick-fire round. I say a short statement, and you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

Let’s do it.

What one thing do you believe about venture that other people will think is crazy or strange?

It’s not a career. It goes back to one of the early points: I don’t think people should want to have a career in venture. I think that’s the wrong motivation.

I don't think it is like an investment bank or like a consulting firm where you join and you can move up the ranks, and that's kind of a well-established thing.

Do you think I was wrong then? I don't mean that badly, but I watched The Social Network when I was 13, saw this intersection of finance and technology that I loved, and thought, “That is something that I have to be a part of.”

No, I think that's exactly the right reason to do it. What I'm saying is not that. What I'm saying is people shouldn't join venture for the status that it brings. I think that's what I mean by that.

You didn't do it for the status. You did it because you were extremely excited by the technology, by working with founders, and, to your point, by being part of it. Whether it was which title or which fund didn't matter to you. What mattered to you was working with the founders and being part of that movement because you couldn't think of anything else to do in your life. That's the right motivation to do it.

Dude, 11 years ago in Europe, it was not like being in venture was a status game.

Exactly. It was the same for me 15 years ago.

Totally agree. Okay, you can choose 1 partner who is the best picker in Index. Who is it?

I'd say Jan is probably the strongest. If you look at his track record, the consistency, and some of the incredible winners that he has, I think he's a great picker.

Which competitor do you most respect?

Sorry?

Which competitor do you most respect, and why them?

For me, it would be Point Nine with Christoph. I think the discipline, the focus, and how incredibly articulate they are around what is and isn't that type of deal are impressive.

Historically, I've always admired USV. Fred Wilson's blog is the reason why I joined venture, to be honest. I think what he did there in terms of educating people, explaining how venture works, explaining how entrepreneurship works, his level of sophistication in understanding and explaining business models, and picking the right themes early—I think historically I would say Fred and USV were huge inspirations.

Now that I'm in New York and I've spent time with them, the way they operate is very unique and very collegial. The way they've decided to stay small against the grain of the industry, always being against the current—I really admire them.

If you could invest in 1 seed fund, which seed fund would you invest in?

I like Nico at Adjacent a lot. I invested personally, and I think he's a very unique investor.

I totally agree. I love Nico. What's the single most memorable first founder meeting, and why?

I still remember meeting Hanno at Personio. That first meeting was a yes immediately, and I think that's actually the case with most investments. You meet the person, you hear them talk for 5 minutes, and you're like, “Yeah, we should do the deal.”

If I had done that with every investment, I would probably have done a lot better than I have and not overthought it. The clarity of the vision—

Sorry, I'm interrupting. My biggest lesson is that I didn't meet many companies, and so if I had said yes to every company I invested in, I would have made more money. I would have done the Deel pre-seed, the Vanta pre-seed, and the Flexport pre-seed.

Yeah, exactly. We had the same experience, and we ran the same analysis: if we had said yes to every single company that had come to present at the partnership, we would have done a lot better than we have, simply because it goes back to the power law. You miss 1, and we missed a few. I mean, just imagine Spotify. That’s it.

Is that the one in the firm that everyone goes, “Ah, that's the one”?

Of course. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Listen, dude. It's only $148 billion, so you missed out on double-digit ownership. It's fine, dude.

Exactly.

But you know what? You would have sold incrementally, so it's not $148 billion.

Absolutely.

What's 1 book that you really freaking loved and you're just like, “Everyone should read this”?

I just finished The Gambling Man about Masayoshi Son—

From SoftBank. Oh, this was—what's his face from the FT? I forgot the name of the author. Yeah, yeah, Lionel. I'm with you. I loved it. Barber—no.

Yes, Lionel Barber.

Yeah, well done. Was it good?

It's amazing. It's such a unique story. I mean, it's bigger than—

An underground golf course.

Yeah. Everything is just a life that's bigger than fiction. What's amazing about him is this ability to, again, talk about ambition. He could have been the king of Japan and just run a very successful company there, but no, he thought globally from day 1. Nothing was too big for him.

He went out to raise $10 billion and then, on the go, decided to raise $100 billion and become the biggest and most successful. That was the target: to be the biggest and most successful investor in the world. So he had no limits. He took—and keeps on taking—extremely big bets. He lost it all multiple times but never stopped and just went back at it.

When you read these kinds of stories, it shows you that a lot of the limits are your own. You make your own limits. You could think, “Oh, if you fail, oh my God, I'm bad. It's never going to work.” He never thought that way. He thought, “Okay, let's get back on and move on to the next one, and then let's focus on launching the next business and make it all back.”

It came from not much, and the story is incredible. I think it's such a lesson in the power of ambition, hard work, and thinking big. I thought it was really inspiring and a fascinating story.

Everyone told me about your marriage and your weddings. Weddings—not to different women, to be clear. To the same woman, multiple events. To be very clear, that sounds terrible. What's your biggest advice?

That sounds terrible. I wouldn't judge them.

Well, having several—a portfolio approach—in a short period of time might be challenging, but what's your biggest advice on marriage and having a great marriage?

When I met my wife, I was anti-wedding. I wasn't sure I wanted kids. So it took me a long time. We only got married, I think, 11 or 12 years in. It took me a little while, and we already had kids sooner than that.

Yeah.

So it took me a little while, and I absolutely love it and recommend it. I think it brings a level of commitment that is amazing. It kind of grounds you.

A level of commitment that you don't have when you're not married.

Yeah, exactly. Obviously, having kids is part of that and really helps with it. You start thinking as a family instead of as an individual, and I think that is so powerful. It changes your relationship with your parents. You don't see yourself as the spotlight anymore. You start thinking in a longitudinal way. You start thinking in generations, which is very different and much more long-term.

In terms of getting married, we are very, very different. We come from very different cultures and very different families. I'm an only child; she has 3 brothers and sisters. She comes from the Congo originally, so it's very communal and there are always a lot of people. Mine is very different.

At first, I was pretty judgmental. I was like, “Oh, it's different from what I know. I have the truth, and that's how things should be.” It was so different, and I didn't fully appreciate that she was totally French.

Now I've learned to appreciate and value those differences a lot. I think she's right on most things, and I think we're trying to bring and build a culture in our family that is a mixture of both of our respective cultures.

I think that lesson of appreciating people's differences, how they make you better, and how they challenge your set mind is great. I thought what I love about this job, in some ways, is when you meet—

A challenge about you that was maybe uncomfortable for you to appreciate—

The importance of family is a big one. The importance and the beauty of having a large family, and the beauty of having kids. I was close to my parents, but I never thought in such a communal way. The importance of family is a big one.

I worry about kids—that I will be less on it and less obsessed about what we do. How did having kids change how you are as an investor?

It is true that it has an impact. I think we shouldn't lie. You're obviously more focused and, again, more of a long-term thinker in many ways, but it is true that you don't have as much time.

So you have to limit what you do and really prioritize. It makes you a lot more relativist versus what’s happening at work, where you come home and know that there are these people who don’t care about any investment. That’s especially true when you talk to young kids and try to explain what you do. My oldest is 8. He’s going to turn 8 soon, and he still doesn’t fully understand what I’m doing, so for another 10 years, they won’t understand.

Then you realize that if you can’t explain it to your child and they don’t fully get it, it’s quite abstract. It’s not really the true reality; it doesn’t really impact people’s lives that much on a concrete basis. So it makes you a lot more—I think it’s easier to distance yourself in many ways.

I was talking to a $100 billion founder the other day, and he said, “You know, the thing I love about kids is that, in my day job, I’m a $100 billion founder.”

“When I come home, 1, my baby does not care, and 2, my baby shits on me.”

Exactly.

So, it is very humbling.

Yeah. Then I think you just don’t waste time. You have—I know you’re very good at prioritizing and managing your time—but I think having kids makes you even less tolerant of wasting time, because any moment you spend on the road, at a conference, or at an event that you shouldn’t be at is time you’re not spending with the most important people in your life.

Final one for you, dude. It’s kind of a horrible one in some ways because it’s just obvious and [expletive], but we spoke about people’s ambition and Nick’s ambition. What’s your actual ambition? Do you want to run Index when Danny hands over the mantle?

Well, first of all, there’s no one running Index, and Danny doesn’t have a mantle. It’s a purely equal partnership. I was looking at the data: There are 8 companies that represent the largest share of the return, and there has been involvement from 7 partners in those 8 companies.

Is it an equal partnership?

Yeah, it’s a very equal partnership. Even in terms of performance, the 8 companies that represent the largest share of the return have had involvement from 7 partners. The performance is totally spread across the partnership, and the responsibilities are totally spread across the partnership as well. We don’t have a CEO, and we don’t have a managing partner, so we make collegial decisions. I have no ambition of becoming Index CEO because there is no Index CEO for me.

When you look at the 8 or 9—sorry—you’ve got Revolut, Figma, Wiz, Scale AI, and Adyen?

Yeah, Datadog and Roblox.

Well done.

I don’t know if that’s 8, but there should be. In 30 years’ time, I so hope that we can have a portfolio airline. But, yeah, they’re all from 7 different partners and from 5 different locations, too. They’re not all in the Valley. That was always the key focus at Index, as I was saying: Entrepreneurs can come from anywhere. There’s Amsterdam, there’s London.

But the distribution of value across the partnership is really rare. We know that concentration—that’s nuts.

So that’s definitely not my ambition. I will keep doing this job.

Who did Roblox?

Neil.

Wow.

Yeah. I will keep doing it for as long as I can, to be honest, because I love it for 2 main reasons. One is the people. Index is all about the people, and that means both the founders I work with and the people at Index. It’s obviously pretty incredible to see them—seeing Nick at seed versus Nick now, and Will at seed versus Will now. I love seeing them becoming so successful, wealthy, and established, and transforming as leaders. It’s incredible to witness, and I learn so much from them. I’m so grateful to be part of that.

It’s also the people at Index. The good thing when you’ve been around for a long time is that pretty much everyone who works at Index has had a part in hiring at some point. They’re all people I really enjoy being with.

It’s also the people in the ecosystem. What’s very special about venture is that there’s a lot of beef on Twitter and so forth, but if you compare it with any other industry, it’s nothing. Most of our relationships are very cordial and cooperative because we’re creating value. There’s so much value creation that happens that you don’t have to—of course, you compete to win a deal, but then you can still go on at the next round, and it’s okay. You can still make a really good return, and you will end up working closely with so many different people. I enjoy most of the people in the industry that I work with.

The second thing is more philosophical. I’m kind of a techno-humanist in many ways. I think it’s a fact that technology is so critical to alleviating human suffering, pain, and disease. Imagine a life without technology and how exposed you are to wild animals and the elements. We forget about that, but our life was [expletive]. We would get sick, we would get eaten alive, and everything that we’ve done is to extract ourselves from and escape that condition.

To me, that’s still what we’re doing today. We are building the tools—and, in our case as investors, helping founders build the tools—that will make our lives less painful, longer, happier, and more meaningful. Every technology will come with its downsides, but then you have more technology to solve the downsides and keep that wheel going. I think that’s an incredible human adventure, and I love being a very small part of it.

Dude, I cannot thank you enough for being a friend for many years. I so appreciate you. I so appreciate Index paving the way for firms, hopefully, like mine and like Nico’s. I’m so grateful to you, and thank you for doing this, man.

No, thanks. I really appreciate it.