EP 92: Mike Volpi (Partner, Index Ventures) Top AI Investor Predicts How The AI Wave Will Play Out

**Logan Bartlett** (0:04)
Welcome to The Logan Bartlett Show. On this episode, what you're going to hear is a conversation I have with Mike Volpi. Mike is a general partner at Index Ventures, where he has invested in companies like Confluent, Scale AI, Hortonworks, Sonos, among a bunch of other very successful businesses. Mike and I talk about a number of different things, including his early career at Cisco, what made him lean in early into artificial intelligence, as well as how he views his role as a board member, and the types of investments that he looks to make as a VC. Really fun conversation with one of the legends in the venture capital industry that you'll hear now.
Mike, thanks for doing this.

**Mike Volpi** (0:43)
Great. Great to be here.

**Logan Bartlett** (0:44)
So you were early in investing in artificial intelligence. I assume it was an outgrowth of a lot of the data investments you were doing, but I think your first one was Aurora, self-driving company, and then maybe a derivative of that was Scale AI. Now, you've invested in things like Ohere.
What did you see in AI in the early days that you said, hey, this is going to be the next frontier, this is something I want to lean into?

**Mike Volpi** (1:08)
Truth be told, the story is a little more serendipitous than that. And I went to TED. In fact, Satish, I think, was there with me back in, I want to say, 13, 14 And this guy called Chris Ermson, who is now the CEO of Aurora back then, he was the CTO of the self-driving venture at Google. It was called Chauffeur, now it's Waymo. He gave a talk about self-driving. And I was mesmerized by this idea. I was like, this is incredibly cool. And I didn't really comprehend AI particularly well at that point. But I thought, well, how is it that a vehicle can drive itself? So dug into that a little bit and found out that underneath it was this deep learning AI kind of concept.
And I sort of just got curious about it and started to educate myself more on it. And I also basically started stalking Chris Ermson for the next two years until in 16 when he left Google and ended up starting Aurora. And we did the Series A there.
But that was really the genesis of it. And I think what kind of sparked my interest, and I think that's still genuinely true today, which is, if you look at software programming in general, it's a representation of human logic, right? It's sort of how we codify in some thread of logic that we want to follow. But that's not exactly how the human brain actually works. And what actually fascinated me was that AI was the closest thing that we could manufacture that looked and smelled like.
Even today, I think a lot of people that draw the analogies don't quite understand how different they actually are. But it was the closest thing to comprehending how human minds work.
And that's why I got fascinated by it. And then obviously, I like to align what I'm interested in and what I invest in. And so then the investment sort of followed that thread of interest that I had.

**Logan Bartlett** (3:11)
How do you go about going down in figure, besides stocking Chris and I'm sure following him around to different conferences and stuff, how do you go about unpeeling that? Like you're curious about something and then what do you do next to figure out if there's a there or there?

**Mike Volpi** (3:25)
Well, in that particular field, it's very academically influenced. And so there, it was really about following the academic threads. So if you kind of go through the history of AI, right, there was a lot of work that happened at CMU originally in Carnegie Mellon University in robotics and deep learning, etc. Jeff Hinton, who is largely credited today for being kind of the father of some of the modern AI concepts, was at CMU. He left and went to University of Toronto.
A bunch of his students ended up permeating through Berkeley, some through MIT, Stanford, etc. So it was about kind of following that map of the leading academic thinkers in the area that sort of gave me a little bit of a roadmap.
And oftentimes I actually used Chris Ermson, who was highly respected because he was actually an associate professor at CMU before he went to Google. And his co-founder, Drew Bagnell, who is still a professor at CMU, they sort of led me down the path because they had the credibility to kind of introduce me to some of these folks. And I think that really was able to kind of broaden my view around it. Generally, I think that's always a healthy approach to say, like, who are the domain experts in this field? And let's get to know them, right? If you're a database person, you want to know Stonebreaker because he's the guy in databases. And you sort of follow that thread of, like, who are the knowledgeable people? And that gives you a map of the market.