 Neil, I'm so excited to be here with you today. For everyone in the audience, I'm sitting here with Neil Reimer. He is one of the original founders of Index Ventures, a company that you started over 25 years ago and that has since transformed the trajectories of multiple well-known and loved global brands. For example, Roblox, Supercell, Discord, Slack, Skype, Farfetch, Datadog and so many others. Neil, you are one of the most celebrated investors in the world and you are also informally referred to as the Godfather of Venture Capital in Europe. And it is a true honor for me to be here with you today. Thank you, madam. So today we're going to be speaking about something very specific and it's something you know a lot about. The topic we're going to be talking about is the personal characteristics of the world's most successful founders. And you're an expert on this topic because you've met with so many founders and worked with them closely throughout your career. So to kick things off, I'd like to ask you how many founders do you think you've had a chance to meet with? Either in pitch meetings or in other contexts during your career. So I thought about this a few times and I think it's in the thousands for sure. If you assume one per day for 25 years, it's probably over 10,000. 10,000 is a huge number and it's really astonishing really and I think I can only imagine that through this type of exposure you've developed a lot of pattern recognition as to what types of investors you are willing to back. For sure. I guess it was Malcolm Gladwell who said 10,000 hours and you know those meetings are roughly an hour. So you definitely get to get some muscle memory and pattern recognition. It's also been one of the great pleasures of my life and my career to be able to spend that much time with entrepreneurs. So many inspiring, just incredibly compelling people you want to spend time with. You know, I think the greatest thing about it is in this business you can show up in the office in the morning and be completely unaware of some opportunity and then you have this meeting and at the end of the day you go home and it's the only thing you can think about. That's truly special. So you and I, we both live in Geneva, Switzerland and before coming over here to Finland we had a chance to get together and as we were meeting you articulated that in your mind there are three distinct personal characteristics that set apart the best, the very best founders that you've ever worked with. So let's start unpacking that statement a little bit. The first characteristic that you said you look for is that you look for founders who are truly genuinely passionate about the mission of their company. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and also about how you test for that in a pitch meeting? Yeah so you know we're looking for people who have a deep insight into a problem that could give rise to a big market opportunity and that has to come from some you know almost physical concern for this problem. You know sometimes you get a sense that somebody's come in with an idea that was one of five completely different ideas and they sort of weighed them up and decided to go with this one but they're not really that committed to it and that's that's from my perspective that's much less appealing. We want to be able to ask somebody you know of all the things you could be doing in the world why are you doing this and how is it being done today why are you gonna you know change the way that's done and win but that needs to be coming from a very deep place it can't be rehearsed it can't be choreographed. That makes sense I think it's often something truly palpable they're living and breathing the mission of the company. Absolutely. Can you give us an example of a time when you met with a founder whose personal engagement was so strong so evident that you decided to back them even when there were perhaps some flaws in the business model. I mean this happens all the time because as early stage investors you know nothing is ever completely done right so very often you know there's this idea the marketplace is the market is an interesting one they have a unique insight but there's no product yet there's no revenues you know it's too early to really think about go to market but they have a very strong belief in in what what problem they want to solve. The one that comes to mind is you know when when Dylan and Evan came to talk to us about Figma you know they had a fairly loose definition of what they wanted to do it was basically they they were convinced that they could use this powerful new WebGL technology to build what they called Photoshop in the browser but we knew that that was kind of shorthand for an area they wanted to go into we knew that probably at the end of the road the product would be something quite distinct from Photoshop but their vision and their commitment to this idea was so strong and so compelling that we absolutely and we knew that this was going to be a big market space no matter how they decided to you know to redirect their efforts away from the original definition product definition and we also knew that they'd be able to communicate that enthusiasm to other amazing talent and build an amazing team and raise the money needed you know and today Figma is really focused on on interface design and as you know off to the races but they started in a fairly different place. Does it also happen sometimes that maybe you're in a pitch meeting and everything checks out everything the all the numbers and all the data look solid but there's just something in the presentation where you feel like the founder's heart not not quite in it and that it's led you to pass. Yeah also often you know things that might look good on paper but when you meet the team you realize that they you know they came up with a matrix and kind of had four different ideas and five different geographies and they they kind of selected something they're expert at presenting it but you don't feel this visceral passion for the problem or empathy for the customer and you also might recognize that they they're not really driven to see some change in in the world because of what they're doing you know they want to have financial success they want the business to be worth you know X amount but then when that happens they'll probably look to exit and then go start something else they're not as you know they're not kind of defining their existence by this mission. That makes sense and actually I heard another talk that was held in this stage earlier today where somebody was talking about the fact that sometimes sometimes a pitch can come across almost like a management consultant talking about it's not coming from the heart and that for her too was a red flag. So the next question I have to ask you because I was actually born and raised here in Finland I grew up here in the 70s and early 80s and when I was growing up here I definitely there's a kind of a cultural aversion toward people who wore their heart on their sleeve or who expressed enthusiasm to avert you know too overtly about anything and definitely I remember many times growing up here when I was maybe too enthusiastic about something and and that was just not a good thing. So given given given all your investments here in the Nordics have you found any cultural differences in how that passion by the founder expresses itself. I mean first of all you know we started INDEX in Europe knowing that we would have to hunt foreign wide for great companies to compete with Silicon Valley and part of that was understanding and and embracing the differences in culture. So and we have we built a team that you know is is aware of that as diverse and and and can do that. I think what you're describing was probably more the case 10 years ago than it is today. I feel like the difference between entrepreneurs is is narrowing in terms of how they express themselves what's acceptable but I do think that a country like Finland has a you know kind of a strong appreciation for the value of facts and numbers and logic and no amount of snazzy presentation skills can outweigh the fact that you may not have a great business plan or or product idea and I and I agree with that I think that's an advantage but it doesn't remove the requirement of any founder fin finish or other to be able to communicate the enthusiasm that they have for for the mission and for what they're building and when I think about you know Ilka who you know who we backed for with Supercell his enthusiasm for gameplay which is the cornerstone of Supercell was was infectious so he was not he was not challenged in that way you you felt you felt it you were able to feel it wonderful for sure so then so then in our conversation we had before flying over here to Finland we also talked about a second trait that you always look for when you're when you're evaluating a founder and that trait you described as a sort of a dogged determination those were the words used like a willpower to to do whatever it takes to remove whatever obstacle in order to execute on the the mission of the company can you tell us a little bit more about this trait and how you go about sort of assessing whether it exists in a pitch meeting it's it's probably the most often referred to characteristic of a founder right that they need to be completely determined and focused on this mission and I always tell young young founders who may be thinking about starting a business even if I don't think it's a particularly good idea that they shouldn't let me or anybody else talk them out of their idea because it's impossible to prove that something cannot be done you know you can try to do it it may or may not work but it's very hard to to basically prove that something is is you know will not work without trying it so I always encourage them to just ask themselves if they really want to do it and this takes an enormous amount of self-belief because you're going to face a lot of skepticism and a lot of pressure to conform and not do this wacky thing that you're doing I mean frankly if I had listened to people we never would have started a venture capital firm in Geneva in 1996 that was lunacy but you want people who have this determination who are not stubborn in the sense that they don't listen to things that are are being asked of them that they're actually answering the hard questions that they're not avoiding them but that they are using those questions to reinforce their commitment to this idea so yeah we look for that that's great and as somebody who who like myself you know has really worked with a lot of the these types of very successful founders um I feel like it's a trait that is sort of infectious if a founder has this trait uh they're able to almost wordlessly transmit it to everybody else in their team everybody in their organization have you found that as well yeah yeah and I I wish I had your track record in choosing companies to work with because you've you've been um you're really a student choosing great leaders and great companies and I think you're right I think the mark of a great company in many cases is this almost you know it's in the water you know the the founder believes this so strongly that they don't have to put on any kind of a show or sell anything to anybody they're just being themselves and communicating this every day to the company and then if you talk to anybody in the company at any level of the company in any office or in any market they're actually telling you something that's coherent and consistent with what the the founder or the leaders of the company are saying and a lot of that is articulating a vision the other is just creating a culture that um elevates the right kind of values you know clarity of thought commitment performance honesty accountability empathy for the customer and those things are reinforced every day in the way in the way they live their lives in the way they they they work at the company I know just what you mean it's almost like a cellular change that happens but that's originated by the head of the company yeah so um as you think about the companies you've worked with is there one company in specific that embodies this spirit of determination particularly well and were that spirit of determination has allowed them to achieve things that maybe nobody would have thought would be possible I have to say Roblox uh is and you know that company well and I was here a few years ago with David on this stage when you think that that company started on a path to build you know their version of the metaverse 12 years ago and they basically started with what looked like stick figures on a screen uh you got you've got to imagine the amount of of of vision of leadership of humility um discipline that that took and all of those things really were embodied by by Dave in the way he he led the company to this point the way he continues to lead the company and in hindsight you look at 12 years and you think wow they went really fast I agree fully the third attribute that we talked about is perhaps a little bit contrary to the second attribute and it is basically a willingness to go out and seek feedback seek advice from external sources um and integrate that feedback you know even even when actually things might be going well and maybe especially when things are going well um and even when you're you're super busy just executing on the mission of the company um can you tell us what you've seen um and what your advice is regarding this specific trait this one is a little less intuitive I think um at least to my mind because you don't often find people who are you know have the kind of self-belief and drive to focus on this you know on on knocking down obstacles and being almost stubborn in their commitment to this mission who are also at times willing to stop and say wait a minute this is really important I if I get this wrong it's gonna set set us back for a year or longer um I really need to stop and get advice from a bunch of people I trust and think this over and that's what they do they they kind of switch off their their kind of stubborn bullheaded mode and then they go and on a walkabout and talk to people and get this information and they process it and then they come up with a decision they don't get bogged down in analysis and they communicate that to the team and then they go back into beast mode you know just just flying forward on this you know with this new decision and that's pretty rare I don't you don't see that in a lot of people but I think when I've seen that in some of the the best entrepreneurs I've worked with and um it kind of dovetails with the idea that you know you can be confident about an idea but still willing to be vulnerable and recognize when you don't know everything uh and that's something again we look for in in meetings even early meetings with entrepreneurs because we want to see that people know what they don't know and it's okay to say I don't know um not to everything you know they have to know certain things cold um but some things and and not because they've never thought about it either that's not a good answer but sometimes it's something important uh but they don't have to decide on it yet and they know they're going to need help in getting there and they know what they know and they know what what answers they need to still get what data they need and I find that very compelling you've you've um one of the things that you've written about uh on a related note here is this whole idea of a playbook and how a playbook can be a bit of a misleading word because as soon as there's a book you know a book or a formula it's something that's codified something that we may be reluctant to change to evolve over time can you tell us about a time when maybe you've worked with a team uh and everything was going great but they failed to to be looking for that external feedback in order to evolve the play yeah I I can think of a few examples usually this happens with companies that um our consumer businesses so when they take off they take off quickly and they have complex models sometimes like a three-way three-sided marketplace um like a delivery for instance and what happens is they get early success because they launch with the right product in in a good market and maybe maybe an ideal market and they get early success that kind of validates what they're doing and then they say okay let's let's distill this into a formula and then just look for other markets that look like this market and they go and they find markets and they launch in those because they they match the characteristics of their original uh formula but they pass over markets that don't specifically fit and um they're quite convinced that those markets won't work until they see somebody else making it work in those markets who actually looked at their model and tweaked a few parameters and figured out a way of making it work and of course then they go back and tear down their model again and and turn a few constants into variables and they find a way of making it work and you know volt is a good example of that making making that model work in in smaller cities like Helsinki yeah volt and also bolt is another good example i think because it's basically people who have adapted somebody else's playbook in order to take advantage of a slightly different situation slightly different market conditions exactly i think you need to think about these these early successes as promising but not kind of definitive uh in terms of you know the only thing that will work so nil we've talked about the three attributes that you look for in successful founders so you we've talked about um sort of a genuine passion for the mission we've talked about a strong sense of determination and we've talked about a willingness to go out and seek and integrate feedback but you're also a founder you're one of the world's most successful founders and i'm wondering how you've been able to evolve to embody these three attributes and who and what helped you along the way uh i mean i i feel silly sitting up here listening to these these uh accolades because really you know you can't build anything of significance without a team and i had co-founders uh and had and still have great partners and uh and partners in life you know who help you uh kind of figure out what you're good at um figure out what your what your your blind spots are and you know my partners i knew i tried to choose partners who were really compatible but not identical you know you want partners who are gonna not disagree with you over the core things like values um and uh kind of core principles but challenge everything else including the way you do everything else and i think that's been something that's that's really really really helped us along the way has there has there been a specific time when you realized that you needed to change has there been any specific moment that you you're willing to talk about or you can talk about where you've decided all right that's enough like let's throw out the playbook and let's do something totally differently from how we've done it before yeah like every day uh i think that that the thing about our business that's amazing is that uh you know we get to invest in lots of companies over a long period of time in parallel and every one of those companies is a learning is a compound learning experience you learn from the entrepreneurs you learn from the great people on their team their experience in the market but you also learn as an investor what worked and what didn't work and you learn from your partner's investment so it's a very very uh rich learning experience and you know 25 years into it i'm still learning very humbling experiences but it's it's very rewarding um you know what's important i think is to not hold on to the failures too long and to realize that it's okay we're human as long as you integrate it and look forward um you know you can make you can you can you can do great things uh afterwards um and just remind yourself for instance in my case or in our business to really focus on what this could become if everything works uh because lots of things will fail but um and some some things may succeed but the things that really matter are the things that can really be uh ubiquitous and have a huge impact if they work so that's what that's what i try to remind myself not to be weighed down by the past to trust my instincts and to allow myself to dream the dream on that note thank you neil so much for sharing of your insight and all the wisdom you've gathered over the last quarter century thank you very much minna