Last week, I talked with Mike Volpi, longtime Index Ventures partner and the former head of M&A at Cisco for many years before that. We originally planned to talk about Index and general market trends, and we did. The topics we discussed included whether self-driving technologies have attracted too much funding and the damage inflicted by SoftBank on its portfolio companies.
Still, few could have predicted how extraordinarily trying the week would be leading up to our interview. Little wonder we spent much of our time talking about who is likely to snap shut their checkbook first, and why, in some cases, the best thing to do now is to keep the money flowing.
We have parts of our conversation available in podcast form here; other pieces, including those not included in the podcast, follow. These excerpts have been lightly edited for length.