20VC: Index's Ilya Fushman on The Key Lessons From Scaling Dropbox To 400m Users, Is Excessive Amounts Of Capital Driving Valuations Too High In The Valley & Why Venture Is Like Being On A Swim Team Not A Soccer Team

Ilya Fushman is a Partner at Index Ventures where he has made investments in the likes of Slack, Intercom, Dropbox and Optimizely. Prior to joining Index, Ilya was the head of product at Dropbox. As one of Dropbox’s first 75 employees, he helped build and run the company’s business and corporate development functions, before taking on a product leadership role and building out Dropbox, Dropbox for Business and the developer platform. Before Dropbox, he was a principal at Khosla Ventures and the Director of Technology at the solar cell startup Solar Junction. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Ilya made his transition from Dropbox to return to the world of VC with Index? 2.) Does Ilya agree that to scale successfully you have to reinvent yourself every 6 months? Why does Ilya believe you must infuse an element of delight into the people side of the business? How can this be done effectively? 3.) How did Ilya and the Dropbox team look to effectively manage and scale the employee on boarding process with the growth of the company? 4.) Question from Lars @ Balderton: Does Ilya believe his extensive operational background allows him to get into deals he would otherwise not have been able to win? 5.) Question from Lars: Does Ilya believe an excess of capital is driving prices in the valley excessively high? Will we continue to see this in the coming years? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Ilya’s Fave Book: Mikhail Bulgakov: The Master & Margarita Ilya’s Most Recent Investment: Slack, Culture Amp As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ilya on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Eve make 1 perfect mattress – made with 3 layer technology and next generation memory foam. It comes packaged in a beautiful box and arrives the day after you order. You get 100 nights to try it with free return pick-up – it really is the perfect mattress for everyone. Just go online to evemattress.co.ukand enter the code 20VC for £50 off. Everybody deserves the perfect start with Eve. Cooley are the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley, Cooley has formed more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with 50+ years working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments and handle the myriad issues that arise through a fund’s lifetime. So to learn more about the #1 most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public. Head over to cooley.com and also atcooleygo.com.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Hello and welcome back to the 20 Minute VC with your host Harry Stebbings on H Stebbings on Snapchat. Now, what a week we have here for you on the show and to kick off this incredible week of guests, I'm thrilled to welcome Ilya Fushman to the show today. Now, Ilya is a partner at Index Ventures in San Francisco, where he's made investments in the likes of Slack, Dropbox, Optimizely and Intercom. And you can listen to Intercom founder Owen McCabe on Sasta today, and then 20 Minute VC on Friday for Founders Friday. But prior to joining Index, Ilya was also the Head of Product at Dropbox. And as one of Dropbox's first 75 employees, he helped to build and run the company's business and corporate development functions, before taking on a product leadership role and building out Dropbox, Dropbox for Business and the developer platform.

• 0:44Harry Stebbings?

  Before Dropbox, he was a Principal at Coastal Ventures and the Director of Technology at the solar cell startup Solar Junction. Now, I have to also say a special thank you to Ilya for welcoming us so warmly into the Index office to record the episode. And a huge thank you to Jason Lemkin for making the introduction to Ilya, without which the episode would not have been possible. But before we meet the man himself, many things make up a great venture fund, and one of them is the highest quality backstage operational support. And that's where Cooley come in. They're the global law firm built around startups and venture capital. Since forming the first venture fund in Silicon Valley in the late 50s, Cooley's form more venture capital funds than any other law firm in the world, with more than 50 years of experience working with VCs. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments,

• 1:29Harry Stebbings?

  and handle the myriad of issues that can arise through a fund's lifetime. So to learn more about the number one most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public, simply head over to Cooley.com and go to CooleyGo.com. However, whether you're a VC or a lawyer, everyone needs sleep, it's imperative, I've been told. And that's where Eve come in. Eve is the UK's number one direct-to-consumer mattress company. Because they don't sell through high street stores, they have the ability to cut out 70% of traditional costs and pass those on to you and I, the consumer. Developed over four years with thousands of prototypes, Eve is so confident of their product, they give customers 100 nights to try it at home before committing.

• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

  For those of you that don't love it, they give you a free return pick up and full refund. So what's the risk? Simply head over to eve mattress.co.uk and to 20 VC and you'll get a staggering £50 off. And it'll be with you the next day with next day delivery. However, enough from me, so I'm now delighted to hand over the mic to the main man, Ilya Fushman, partner at Index Ventures.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 2:40Harry Stebbings?

  Ilya, welcome to the 20 minute VC. Firstly, thank you so much for having me in your lovely offices. Really kind of you and it's great to have you on the show.

• 2:47Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, excited to be here.

• 2:48Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I'd love to start off by hearing a bit about you and how you came to be a partner at Index and your story, what's your origin story?

• 2:55Speaker 02

  It's a pretty long story. So a very long time ago, I was an academic. I did a PhD in physics. I worked on building quantum computers, did semi successfully. I then realised I don't want to be in academia, wound up doing a startup with a bunch of my grad school friends. We built the world's most efficient solar cell. It was also the world's most expensive solar cell. So that didn't quite work out. A company wound up being acquired and I wound up getting to venture for the first time at a place called Coastal Ventures. And so there were a few things I learned when I was at Coastal. One was that I love venture and two was that I wanted to be a venture capitalist who's been an operator, who's seen things before, who's done it and who can actually provide real value. And so my journey then took me to Dropbox, which was amazing because I joined it around 50 people and was there for about four years when we grew through to almost 1500.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  Wanted being able to do a lot of interesting things on that ride, building, launching Dropbox for business and ultimately running product. And then I realised that I'd hit kind of a level of maturity in what I was doing and I wanted to find a new thing. And I went on a bit of a soul search to figure out what is it that I really want to do? I went from, hey, doing the same thing over again at a rocket ship company to, hey, I'd really like to start my own company, to realising I don't have ideas that I really would go all in on for the next 10 years. And in that process, spending a lot of time with the folks at Index who led the series B and Dropbox, which is how I knew them in the first place. And they were immensely helpful and they sort of said, look, we know that you have

• 4:21Speaker 02

  an entrepreneurial ambition, you don't have any great ideas yet, but we're building Index. So how about you come over and you help us build the next, help build the next on the west coast in the States. It felt like an incredible opportunity to me. And I found through personal investing and through just working with entrepreneurs outside of my day job, that I had accumulated a set of knowledge in building Dropbox that was really impactful to other people and could be really transferred across a variety of sectors because it wasn't just about building a cloud file sync and share service. It was really about how do you build a company?

• 5:01Speaker 02

  How do you go through scaling from 50 to 100 to 150 to 300, 500 and 500 plus people? How do you kind of restructure and realign yourself? How do you make sure that people really know what they're doing? And how do you steer the ship towards a common set of goals? And so being able to take that knowledge, transfer it to entrepreneurs, do it across a variety of different sectors and ideas was incredibly compelling to me. And taking Index and building it as well alongside of that felt like a dream job.

• 5:30Harry Stebbings?

  You said about scaling there, Dropbox while in hypergrowth and all the different lessons that you learned. I recently had Jeff Buskang from Flybridge on the show and he said that to scale successfully, you need to reinvent yourself every six months. How do you kind of respond to that? Is that something you agree with? And what were your lessons from scaling Dropbox whilst maintaining that startup culture?

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think as you scale, you go through these pivotal moments. If you think about the beginnings of a company, you have people in one room who can typically just shout across the room or, and maybe they don't even have to shout because they're just so aligned and they're thinking that they can just look at each other and know what, you know, the other person's thinking, what they should be doing, what the right answer is. That's, you know, that works pretty well until you're about 15 to 20 people and then it doesn't work anymore because you have folks who've just come on board, they're new, you need to kind of get them up to speed. But you can still do it because everybody is in the same room. At about 50 people, you start getting to the room limit. The first thing that goes are conference rooms and the second thing that goes are bathrooms.

• 6:28Harry Stebbings?

  Okay.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  So you need to expand. But what you wind up finding is that as you scale, you need to start investing a lot more in communication and transfer. The knowledge that's in your heads and verbalizing it and putting it in some kind of processes for everybody else. Because new folks who come in don't have the same context as you did. And those are probably the biggest challenges and they're challenges associated with not just understanding, but also execution. Because as you become bigger, you start having teams that are pretty big monoliths and you need to start splitting them up. And so, yeah, I think every six months, we did a pretty significant reorg. And we also would start building new processes. Whether it was things like defining a set of company values or a set of processes for how we build products.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Or a set of processes for how we did interviews. Or expanding our candidate pool from everybody being all around athletes who were full stack engineers. To bring in specialization. You go through these kind of pivotal transition moments. Or starting to bring in folks who are not just on the product side, but on the on the sales and go to market side. And integrating them and defining processes for how the product side of the company works with the sales side of the company. So all of that winds up being something that you need to rework probably every six months. And then there are these kind of macro points where, you know, one of them is the 150 person kind of dumb bar limit, right? Which is the point at which you don't know everyone's everyone's name.

• 7:52Harry Stebbings?

  Uh huh.

• 7:52Speaker 02

  And that's a pretty critical one because you really don't know everyone's name. In a world where you don't know everyone's name and you're not in the same room. How do you make sure that everybody in your team is doing the right thing and making the right calls? When you're not there to make every call yourself.

• 8:06Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. I I'm intrigued then, how did you deal with the, when you have such rapid hiring? How did you deal with establishing kind of onboarding for new hires and ingratiating them into the team well?

• 8:17Speaker 02

  So we we wanted to be lucky because we had an incredible recruiting team early on. Kudos to Drew and Raj for really focusing on company culture as one of the top priorities. And I think that's one of the things that really differentiated Dropbox. We had an incredible pool of talents, incredibly talented people who were incredibly focused and bought into the company culture. And so we made onboarding a top priority, parts of the executive and leadership team. Uh, do an onboarding talk for uh first individuals and then classes of people coming in. Uh, we had a whole process for onboarding people for a few weeks, one and building a real team around uh new employee onboarding. The other thing that we did really solidified

• 9:01Speaker 02

  the culture was infuse an element of delight into everything that we did. So if you recall some of the uh.

• 9:07Harry Stebbings?

  Including the people person, because often we hear infusing delight into products, you know, that wow feature. How do you infuse that into people?

• 9:13Speaker 02

  Especially the people.

• 9:14Harry Stebbings?

  How?

• 9:14Speaker 02

  Especially the people. So, so one way we did it was we, we had company all hands, which, you know, most companies do. Uh, but we never took ourselves too seriously in these company all hands. And we always made sure uh that we infused some element of making fun of ourselves. You know, we had an incredible uh designer, uh John Ying, who is responsible for the stick figures, you know, the shark with the velociraptor, the AK forty seven and the panda, uh, who uh really focused on bringing kind of this notion of delight into everything that we did. Because to take a step back, you know, we were building a file sync and share product. So our competition were network attached storage drives and, and USB sticks, which are definitely not delightful.

• 9:52Harry Stebbings?

  No.

• 9:53Speaker 02

  Right? We knew that delight, not just at the product level, but at the culture level, company level, had to be a, a thing. And so John was really the guy who crafted a lot of the content and built a team around himself to really kind of be a culture team that infused delight and fun into everything that we did. We had uh things like interesting, fun motivational posters where maybe some folks were photoshopped into uh movie scenes. We, we never forgot that we're building products for people. Uh, and in fact, in one way in which we solidified it, uh, at a later time, point in time was we added a company value, which was uh cupcake. And it was literally a cupcake, a drawing of a cupcake.

• 10:27Harry Stebbings?

  All right. I thought it was a cupcake every time you came in. I was like, wow.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Cupcakes. But it was literally the drawing of a cupcake to, to make sure that, that this kind of element of, of uh humanity was top level, present at, at the company.

• 10:40Harry Stebbings?

  And, and now you've been at Index, kind of switching sides of the table from the operations. You've been at Index for six months, six months, say?

• 10:46Speaker 02

  It's been a year.

• 10:47Harry Stebbings?

  A year?

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Exactly. Yeah.

• 10:48Harry Stebbings?

  Sure.

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Time flies though.

• 10:50Harry Stebbings?

  Well, there you go. So a year. And Ryan Sarver at Redpoint said that he went through a rapid and intense education since joining Redpoint. So I want to talk about your learnings since moving back into VC full time with Index, uh, and whether it's been as you expected and what your big takeaways have been.

• 11:05Speaker 02

  Uh. It's been incredibly fun, uh, and incredibly rewarding. I mean, I think the thing for me is that I did a, I did a s- a brief stint in venture uh before Dropbox. So I spent about a year and a half at Cosla. So I kind of had a sense of what I was getting into.

• 11:19Harry Stebbings?

  Is it similar?

• 11:20Speaker 02

  Uh, it's in many ways similar. Venture is similar, right? Uh, I think the firms are in some ways similar and in many ways different. But at the end of the day, uh, what I think has been the biggest learning for me is that the time you spend with a company uh is not just about uh spending time with the executive team. And it's something that I, I, I think we really kind of um embody it at Index overall. I try to spend a lot of my time with not, you know, with the folks who are building things, not just, you know, the founders and CEOs, but also their team and their team's team to really help uh build the company, shape it and guide it. Uh, and that's been incredibly rewarding to me. And that's been the way for me to scratch the itch of building things

• 12:01Speaker 02

  because the feedback cycles in venture are incredibly different from, from the feedback cycles of building and shipping products. And that's probably the biggest gap.

• 12:09Harry Stebbings?

  Does that differentiate you from other VCs? Is that a common theme of VC to get really hands-on operationally with the builders themselves or, or not? And does that?

• 12:17Speaker 02

  I think there's a spectrum of folks in venture. Uh, I, I certainly am on boards with folks who are great uh from a just kind of investor financial perspective. And I think there are also folks who are great operators and former CEOs and founders. So I think you have a spectrum. It's really about, uh, I think, picking what makes you happy. And what makes me happy is, is scratching that building itch, right? Because otherwise it would be, it would be really lonely. I get a lot of value out of it and I, I think that the companies I work with get a lot of values out of it. And I think uh that's really where product market fit for, for me as a venture.

• 12:49Harry Stebbings?

  VC market fit, yeah.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  VC product and, and uh companies as, as a market. Uh, and I think certainly those are the kinds of companies that I, I resonate with a lot and product-centric founders who uh who want to do a brainstorming session or who want to do a strategy meeting or who want to, you know, have me be with their team and help out. That's the kind of stuff that I really love doing.

• 13:09Harry Stebbings?

  I, I do speak to quite a few VCs, as I'm sure you can imagine, uh, and, and some of them with the amazing operational experience. Have say there is sometimes troubles in terms of transferring their operational knowledge on to a different company, a portfolio company. When it might be different times, macroeconomic, different products, different customer base. Is that ever a problem and how do you ensure that it doesn't become, oh, we did this at Dropbox?

• 13:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think I think it's a fallacy to say we did it this way at a company and therefore you should do it that way. I I think that's the wrong approach, actually, and I I don't I never say we did it at Dropbox this way and therefore you should do it. Frankly, because there's not going to be another company like Dropbox. There are going to be companies that are similar to Dropbox and they have similar, whether it's existential issues or go to market strategies or, you know, product challenges. And I think the thing that I can bring from the experience isn't we did a specific thing. It's really, this is the framework that we use to think about it. And I think it's that framework of how you think about it that's really valuable. And I think that's what the folks who I've seen in venture, who were operators and who I think are great investors bring with them. It's not a specific decision point or a specific thing that they did.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  It's really more passing on the knowledge for how founders and executives should be making decisions, how they can be thinking about things more effectively. You know, seeing around corners, right? Those are common themes when you look at a company and it's about to double headcount and go from, you know, three hundred to six hundred people. You can say, here are the things that broke and here is maybe something you should be paying attention to. It's dangerous to be prescriptive.

• 14:38Harry Stebbings?

  Would you say it's almost prevention rather than cure?

• 14:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that's that's that's probably a good way of putting it. It's really pattern recognition. You know, I think over time, what I've seen great folks who I've worked with on the venture side develop is this kind of gut instinct and a pattern recognition for things that have happened and and, you know, sounding the alarm bell.

• 14:56Harry Stebbings?

  Now, I can't leave out Lars in this discussion, so we've got to mention our friend Lars at Balderson. So he has a question for you and it's how has the experience been for you with regards to fighting for the competitive deals? And does the immense operational background help with this from Lars?

• 15:11Speaker 02

  Uh, that's a great question from Lars. You know, I think that for me, it's it's really, it's getting to that product market fit, right? Which is what I said before, I think it's finding a resonance between me and the founder where we both agree that, hey, there's. Value to be had in the relationship. The deal, and maybe my partners at Index will be unhappy if I say this, to me is in some ways secondary to that. I think an example of this is I wound up investing in Intercom. And you know, from the moment of meeting Owen, I knew that this is the founder I want to work with, right? And we saw I had experience with a problem that they were going after from the Dropbox days. Because we had this challenge of communicating effectively with our customers who were spread across

• 15:53Speaker 02

  different communication methods, protocols between Zendesk and Salesforce and Marketo. And we had no way of tying those data sources together effectively. And having a consistent way to talk to our customers would have been immensely helpful. But to me, the fact that Owen is a product centric founder and he and I have a great working relationship was the thing that ultimately I think made me excited about the deal and ultimately I think led to me winning the deal.

• 16:17Harry Stebbings?

  And then another one from Oz, do you think the VC environment is too heated in the valley, therefore driving valuations up?

• 16:23Speaker 02

  The VC environment has been heated in the valley for a really long time.

• 16:29Speaker 02

  In fact, probably for decades, if you ask most folks in venture. The reality today is there is a lot of capital flowing into firms, right? Because if you think about it, at the macro level, there aren't that many places to deploy large sums of money with with high returns. So I think there is going to be a continuous supply of capital. That's not going to stop. I do think that because of that, there is a lot of money and there are many companies. But what you see is that I think the companies that are really good can can create a concentration of capital and they become very competitive. But I think those companies are also becoming a lot more discerning about what they want in terms of a investor partner. Really, it's not just about the capital.

• 17:09Speaker 02

  They do want to know that somebody's bringing in a great network or they're helping, you know, in our, in the case of Index, helping with expansion from the States or North America to Europe, or really anywhere to Europe, or helping with expansion from Europe to North America, or they want to work with a particular partner, whether it's somebody who has product background or somebody who's been in enterprise for a long time or somebody who really gets social. So I think there is sort of a lot of noise, but. If you look deep down, the companies that are really good are also a lot more thoughtful about the partners that they bring on. I think that's ultimately what winds it being the thing that you need to focus on, which is your differentiation.

• 17:46Harry Stebbings?

  A super interesting one for me, before we dive into the quickfire, is just establishing Index in the very dominant VC environment in the Valley. You know, in Europe, it's already a dominant, dominant firm. In the Valley, it's not so much. You know, you've got your Kleiners, your Andreessen's, your, you know, all the big guys, you know, and Index is absolutely there, but it doesn't have the dominance it does in Europe. So how is that, establishing it as a premier fund in SF?

• 18:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's why I joined. That's the challenge. So Index SF opened up in 2011, so it's relatively young. General thesis, by the way, for, for us to open the US office was that we'd seen a few trends. One was that, you know, the initial thesis of Index was like, they're great companies, they're going to be built in Europe. What we also saw was that those great companies, once they become big enough, want to branch out to the US, right? And they need a partner who can support them across the, across the Atlantic. So that was one driver. The second driver was that we realized that there are great companies built in the US that ultimately want to get to Europe and have to get to Europe, right? Because that's the next GDP per capita part of the world.

• 18:47Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 18:47Speaker 02

  And, you know, my experience at Dropbox was that before we really did anything, I mean, Dropbox had 70% of its users outside of North America. Biggest chunk of those were, were in Europe. And ultimately, we collected a lot of revenue in Europe and a lot of our business was in Europe. And in fact, if you look at most SaaS companies, and really, I think, most companies that generate revenue, 30 to 40% of their revenue will come from Europe. And so having operations in Europe and having support in Europe is, is critical. And being able to establish a presence in Europe and having a partner who helps you with that is also critical. So I think that's the role that, that Index can play. The idea for us is that we're going to build a great team in the US, right?

• 19:29Speaker 02

  Where individual partners will be able to help, you know, foster growth in companies. And on top of that, we'll be able to provide a bridge, a seamless bridge to Europe.

• 19:37Harry Stebbings?

  Mm-hmm.

• 19:38Speaker 02

  And vice versa, we'll be able to take great companies from Europe and provide a seamless bridge to them back to the US.

• 19:43Harry Stebbings?

  And I want to dive into a quickfire now, so this one. One of my favourites. So let's sixty seconds per answer. Pros and cons of being a VC. You've got thirty seconds, Rich.

• 19:52Speaker 02

  Uh, you can totally scratch your adult ADD itch.

• 19:55Harry Stebbings?

  Rich sharing for me.

• 19:57Speaker 02

  But it's but it's a sometimes lonely job. It's like being on a swim team and not a soccer team.

• 20:01Harry Stebbings?

  Favorite book and why?

• 20:02Speaker 02

  Uh, Master and Margarita by Michael Bulgakov. It's a it's a Russian classic. Uh, it's a surrealist novel, but it's really about uh, love and human emotion and it's uh, it's just a beautifully written piece of work.

• 20:15Harry Stebbings?

  It's actually the fourth time we've had that on the show. It's a surprisingly popular book, uh, not quite as good as Ben Horace's, uh, but when you see yourself in ten years' time, what's the vision for Ilya?

• 20:25Speaker 02

  I have no idea.

• 20:25Harry Stebbings?

  That's a hard question, isn't it?

• 20:27Speaker 02

  I don't think I've ever had an idea. I think, uh, you know, a lot of what's guided me throughout life, you know, I've I've been able and I've been lucky to have opportunity and and and take advantage of it. But what I'd love to to be at is um, build the next into a great global uh, VC and ha- you know, have us be the marquee investors and the next generation of uh, Decacorns or.

• 20:50Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, absolutely. Question from Jason Lampkin. What makes a great board member?

• 20:54Speaker 02

  I think it's somebody who can be your partner, but also be your critical partner. Uh, and what I mean by that is I think you have to be supportive, you have to understand the business, but you also have to be critical and push at the right times. Because that ultimately, that's uh, the value of bringing in a board member is that it's somebody who's going to give you uh, the raw feedback, but it's going to be fair and understood raw feedback. That's the most important. From my experience, if you're lucky enough to be a Drew Houston or a Stuart Butterfield or, you know, Mark Zuckerberg or any one of these iconic founders, there are very few people in the world who can give you candid, unsolicited, valuable advice. And uh, so the hope is that for some amount of time until these guys are grow you, uh, you can do that as a board member.

• 21:37Harry Stebbings?

  And then favourite blog or newsletter, must reads when they come in, other than Saster, I'm sure. What's your favourites?

• 21:42Speaker 02

  And then the twenty minute VC?

• 21:43Harry Stebbings?

  And the twenty minute VC. I'll give you twenty.

• 21:45Speaker 02

  A bit later.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  I love, I actually just love reading news. I love reading the BBC. I think that a lot of times you miss the macro when you're hyper focused on the specifics.

• 22:00Harry Stebbings?

  Is that bad when you're an investor? I find I don't know about earthquakes or volcano eruptions, but I know about Slack's latest round.

• 22:06Speaker 01

  I think if you are hyper focused on your domain, you lose sight of what really drives people. Right. Ultimately, all of us are investing in businesses that build products for people. These macro trends are quite important, you know, obviously for VCs also the macro trends in markets are really important. So I read the BBC a lot, but in terms of tech, look, I love tech memes. It's got a great syndication for all the news I care about. Hacker news I scan through every once in a while and when I'm really digging, I'll go through the archive and read the quantum physics papers.

• 22:41Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah, no, I can't share that with you, I'm afraid. And then let's finish on your most recent public investment and why you said yes.

• 22:47Speaker 01

  Well, the most recent one is the latest financing round for Slack. Saying yes was pretty simple. Slack is one of the fastest growing companies, I think, that's been around. And it's poised to transform how people work and communicate and build a true operating system and platform for productivity going forward. I think it's an iconic company with an iconic team and such a pleasure to work with them. So it was a no brainer to say yes. Just before that, we also invested in a really interesting company that comes from Australia called Culture Amp. And Culture Amp, the reason we said yes was that they're really helping organizations engage with employees, figure out who's happy, who's a good manager, how do you incentivize them properly?

• 23:31Speaker 01

  And the reason that I think this is important is that organizations today rely more and more heavily on people. The notion of a 10x engineer, 10x designer, a 10x person is becoming something that's quite pervasive as every organization becomes a technology organization or a technology driven organization. And understanding how to incentivize, engage and retain talent is pretty much mission critical for any company out there. And I think in a way that hasn't been that way. ...before, but at the same time, well, we have great tools to monitor how infrastructure is doing and how, you know, revenue and sales are performing. We don't have any really great tools to figure out how employees are doing and Culture Amp is building a suite of products around that. We said yes because it was a great opportunity and I think a

• 24:13Speaker 01

  new developing area and also I was a user of the product, the Dropbox, and we had had great success with it, as do most of their clients.

• 24:21Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Ilya, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's been such a pleasure having you. I heard so much from Lars and Jason, so it's been a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

• 24:32Harry Stebbings?

  Such a fun episode with Ilya today and a huge thank you to him for giving up his time to be on the show and for inviting us into the Index Office and to Jason Lemkin for making the introduction to Ilya, as we said, without which the interview could not have happened. And if you loved the episode today and do not want to leave the world of the 20 Minute VC, then you can add me on Snapchat at HStubbings or you can head over to the site, the20minutavec.com, all in letters, where you can sign up for the newsletter so you never have to miss an episode or an update from us. And do not forget what I said earlier, funds would be nothing without the operational support behind them. And in this case, there's no one better than Cooley, the global law firm built for startups and ventures. They help VCs form and manage funds, make investments, and handle the myriad of issues that can arise through a fund's lifecycle. So to learn more about the number

• 25:17Harry Stebbings?

  one most active law firm representing VC-backed companies going public, simply head over to Cooley.com or you can check them out at CooleyGo.com. But one thing we didn't mention with Ilya today that's critical to scaling your company into a rocket ship is sleep, and that's where Eve can help. Eve is the UK's number one direct-to-consumer mattress company. Because they don't sell through high-street stores, they have the ability to cut out 70% of traditional costs and pass those on to their customers. Developed over four years with thousands of prototypes, Eve is so confident of their mattress, they give customers 100 nights to try it at home before committing. For those of you who don't love it, they even offer a free return pickup with full refund. So simply go to evemattress.co.uk,

• 26:01Harry Stebbings?

  enter the promo code 20VC for £50 off and it'll be with you the next day with next day's delivery. As always, I so appreciate all your support. Always email me your thoughts and feedback, [email protected], again, all in letters, and I look so forward to bringing you Wednesday's episode with Michael Scock at underscore.