Accel's Philippe Botteri on His Key Learnings in VC Investment and the Potential of Generative AI

**Philippe Botteri** (0:05)
On Generative AI, there is one side. How can existing company integrate Generative AI in their products to make their body composition even more compelling? And then there is what are the technology and the companies that couldn't happen before, but can happen now because you have Generative AI.

**Carlos Espinal** (0:37)
Welcome, everyone. On today's episode, I have a good friend, Philippe Botteri from Accel. We have several investments in common, so this is a long overdue episode talking about all the decisions that we made jointly together over the years, the overlap there. But as with every episode, we do a little bit trying to understand the man behind the legend, where it started, where it is today, and thoughts on things like AI regulation, cyber security. So welcome, Philippe.

**Philippe Botteri** (1:09)
Thank you, my pleasure to be here.

**Carlos Espinal** (1:10)
So today, I want to start off with your background on McKinsey and Bessemer. You graduated from school, and you worked as a consultant, and then you moved into venture. But maybe walk us through how that journey looked like, why that transition, you know, you're originally from Western Europe, and then how did you end up making all the moves around? Just tell us a little bit about that background.

**Philippe Botteri** (1:33)
Sure. So I was born and raised in France, as you can tell from the accent. Engineering background, decided to start my career with McKinsey. I was lucky in terms of timing, because I started in 1998, which in Europe was when the dotcom boom really started. I mean, the dotcom boom was short-lived. In Europe, it was from 1998 to 2001 I was lucky to just start my professional career at that time, and so that gave me the opportunity as a young consultant at McKinsey in Paris to work actually on a lot of technology projects. So I brought several business plans for e-commerce companies. I don't know if you remember at the time, like every company wanted to have an e-commerce business plan. So we did a lot of that. I actually worked for a company that was called O'Podo, which is kind of the online travel agency, which was actually a project that McKinsey put together with 11 or 12 European airlines. And the idea was to build basically an online distribution for all these airlines company. And so I worked for close to a year on that project based in London. And we actually started with 45 consultants and ended up with a company of 60, 70 employees and that no consultants at the end. So that was probably the least efficient way to build a company I have seen. But the company went on and was successful and was bought out, I think, several times by different P firm. But that was kind of my foray to tech. And that opened my eyes about what was happening in technology. And I said, well, this is where I want to work and spend the rest of my career. So at that point, I applied for transfer to the Silicon Valley office. Because I was like, if I want to do tech, the one place to be, that place is Silicon Valley. And so I wanted to find my way there. My transfer was approved in October 2000, which was, as you can imagine, very nice for it to be approved, but also very realistic in terms of timing. Then everything crashed. And so my transfer got postponed. And I ended up, I think in life, you need to be lucky.
You need to create your own luck, but you also need to be lucky. And I was very lucky that in 2003, there was a partner from Silicon Valley who transferred to the Price Office. And that person, when he was in Silicon Valley, was in charge of the transfer to that office. And so I knew the head of the Price Office well. He was in tech practice as well, worked in many projects with him. And so I asked him to say, well, now this is the time to make it happen. And so he asked that partner to help me. And we made that transfer work. And it's interesting because that partner from Silicon Valley stayed at McKinsey for just a year. And then he went on to join Nokia. And during that year, he helped me transfer. And then I moved to Silicon Valley, went on to serve a lot of technology clients in the Valley. And after three or four years there, I got my green card. I was like, okay, now McKinsey and consulting, that was great experience. But now I really want to do something closer to technology, to go to companies. And I wanted to combine my passion for technology, for investing and for working with young technology companies. And I thought about that. I think natural conclusion for me was that I needed to go into venture. That's where I kind of started to look for venture role. And I was lucky at the time to meet the buyer and deter at Bessemer and he was looking for someone to help him build their cloud practice. And I done a lot of work in software. And I was like, well, that's fantastic. So I left McKinsey and joined Bessemer and started my journey in venture and never regretted it. It's been an awesome journey for the past like 16, 17 years now.