Index Ventures Partner, Martin Mignot: Figma, Scale, Wiz: Inside Index’s Decacorn Factory

(instrumental music) ... beware of gross margin in the early days. That's a mistake we made a couple of time. You know, you have a lot of businesses that, in the early days, have really bad gross margin. All the LLM providers were very clear examples of that. I think if that's the only 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. So, we've been around for 30 years. We invested $11.5 billion. We've returned close to 30, and we still have 20-plus in holdings. Most of that is concentrated in eight, nine companies. We invested in probably 300 to close to 400 companies over the years.

Ready to go? (instrumental music) Martin, it's been eight years since our last show. We last did it on Skype. A lot's changed, man. (laughs) You still look just as young. But thank you-

You too.

... so much for joining me, dude.

Thanks for having me.

Dude, I wanna start with a statement that you said before, and you said it actually in a Kauffman Fellows, um, event. You said, "Venture is about playing the right game." And I love this statement, and I wanted to turn it back on you and say, what is the right game then for you?

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

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

I don't know if I would say tourist VC, but I would say it's, uh, the asset class has, has institutionalized. You know, it's become, uh, you know, funds have become larger. There's, there's more people in, in general, by and large. And so, you bring people who, um, may sometimes wanna, wanna have a career, choose it as a, as a career, more than as a calling. And I think, you know, me personally, I think us at Index see this job as a calling.

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