Index's Martin Mignot on Sourcing Rocketship Companies, Evaluating Founders and His Attitude Towards Risk At The Early Stage

**Harry Stebbings** (0:00)
Welcome back to another phenomenal week on The Twenty Minute VC. I'm your host, Harry Stebbings, and today I'm fulfilling a mission I've had for a while. Today's guest I've wanted to have on the show for many, many months now. So I'm delighted that he's here. And joining us today is Martin Mignot, early stage investor at Index Ventures in London, where he focuses on SaaS, marketplaces and mobile.
Martin handles many of Index's investments, including the likes of Deliveroo, Algolia, Blablacar, Swiftkey and many more incredible companies. If that wasn't enough, he has worked on over 50 transactions to date, including SoundCloud, Just Eat, Code Academy, Flipboard and many more. And prior to joining Index, Martin was in the TMT team at UBS Investment Bank and also co-founded the beauty subscription business Boudoir Prive, which was acquired by Birchbox. And I've also got two thank yous before we begin today's interview.
One, a huge thank you to John Henderson at Whitestar. This interview would not have happened without your intro, so we're very, very grateful for that. And I'd also like to say a huge thank you to Mattermark for providing all the data for the show today with Martin. And check out Mattermark's new search tool. It allows you to find a mass of data and stats on thousands of companies for absolutely nothing. It's always the best with Mattermark. And by the way, this actually isn't a sponsor. I just love Mattermark so much.
Anyway, enough from me. So without further ado, ladies and gents, I'm so delighted to welcome Martin Mignot, early stage investor at Index Ventures.
You have now arrived at your destination. Martin, a huge pleasure to have you on the show. Massive fan of yours, so it's so fantastic to make this happen.

**Martin Mignot** (1:48)
Well, thanks for having me.

**Harry Stebbings** (1:49)
And we're going to get the ball rolling today by hearing the Martin Mignot story and where it all started for you.

**Martin Mignot** (1:55)
That's a long way back.
I guess I come from an entrepreneurial family, so my dad has always been, I've always seen him being an entrepreneur and still running his company, which is the kind of customer support, call center space. So that was an obvious option for me from the beginning. And on the other hand, I guess my mom was more of a, she's a doctor, but she's more kind of an over-cultured and an intellectual type, reading a lot. So in one hand, I had kind of the action person, the doer, and on the other hand, I had kind of a more of a reflective thinker person, and I think VC is kind of a good mix in between those. So I guess everyone is a bit of a mix of their both parents, and I think I'm no exception to the rule. But more practically, when I was at university, I started tinkering along with some web stuff. So I launched a web radio with a few friends, I really enjoyed that, and we've been following the value and the startup culture there for 12, 13, 14 years now. And I always thought VC sounded like a fascinating job, because it's kind of in between the thinking and the acting part of the industry.
And then I did some two years of banking, and after that, in between index and banking and in parallel, I kind of had my girlfriend co-found an e-commerce business, which I was kind of running nights and weekends. And more of a practical experience, which we sold after a year, so that was a good experience of from setting up a business to running it to selling it one year period. So it was a good crash course in entrepreneurship.

**Harry Stebbings** (3:43)
Of that experience, what would you say was the most kind of transformative in turning you into the VC you are today? Was it the experience setting up the e-commerce store? Was it the banking experience? Was it university itself?

**Martin Mignot** (3:56)
And all of these things are valid, and I think it's good to know what kind of stuff entrepreneurs have to do practically in terms of the legal, the accounting, just the complexity of setting it all up.
And all of the behind the scenes work that needs to happen and building the team and motivating people to join you on a mission. So all of that was obviously super interesting and valuable. Obviously, a lot of these skills, they age over time, because tools change and the situation change. So that's not as replicable. I think that the most important thing is really that you get to know and see the world through the eyes of an entrepreneur being on the other side of the table. And most importantly, I think really feeling the stress and what taking risks really means. Seeing your bank account going slowly down to zero for all of those hard-earned money that you've been spending a lot of hours at the bank before to save, that you see disappearing. That's a stressful situation.