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

**Harry Stebbings** (0:00)
Hello, and welcome back to The Twenty 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. Before Dropbox, he was a principal at Khosla 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 are 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 formed 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 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.
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**Ilya Fushman** (2:37)
You. You have now arrived at your destination.

**Harry Stebbings** (2:40)
Ilya, welcome to The Twenty Minute VC. Firstly, thank you so much for having me in your lovely offices. It really kind of you, and it's great to have you on the show.

**Ilya Fushman** (2:47)
Thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

**Harry Stebbings** (2:48)
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?

**Ilya Fushman** (2:55)
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 realized I don't want to be in academia. I 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. It's done everything quite work out. The company wound up being acquired and I wound up getting to venture for the first time at a place called Khosla Ventures. And so there were a few things I learned when I was at Khosla. One was that I loved 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 I wanted to be able to do a lot of interesting things on that ride, building, launching Dropbox for Business and ultimately running product. And then I realized that I had hit kind of a level of maturity in what I was doing and I wanted to find a new thing. And I wanted 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 realizing 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 Be in 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 an entrepreneurial ambition, you don't have any great ideas yet, but we're building Index.