Mike Volpi

Volpi began his career at Hewlett Packard's optoelectronics division in 1989 where he was both in engineering and marketing.[1]

While at HP, he met his future wife Toni C. Cupal.[4]

Volpi joined Cisco Systems in 1994 in the nascent business development group. He was promoted to leading acquisitions at Cisco starting in April 1996. As chief strategy officer he led corporate strategy, business development, and strategic alliances. Their acquisition strategy of Volpi and his team at Cisco is used as model for technology mergers and acquisitions.[5] he was promoted to the chief strategy office working for CEO John Chambers until 2000. Some press speculated he was heir apparent to Chambers.[6][7]

Moving into an operational role as a senior vice president and general manager, he led the routing and switching teams, then co-led the routing and service provider group with Prem Jain until 2007.[8]

During this time Cisco's first Carrier Routing System product was announced, the CRS-1, in 2004.[9]

After Cisco in 2007 he became entrepreneur in residence (EIR) at Sequoia Capital.

A few months later, he was appointed CEO of Joost,[10][11][7][12][13][14] an Internet startup focused on online TV which was founded by Skype founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis.[15] In September 2009, a lawsuit was filed against Volpi by Skype’s founders in conjunction with the proposed divestiture of Skype from eBay.[16] The lawsuit was dropped in November 2009.[17]

At Index Ventures, Volpi invests in early-stage companies, primarily across autonomous driving, enterprise and open source.[18] Volpi has served on the boards of Index portfolio companies Big Switch Networks, Blue Bottle Coffee (acquired by Nestle),[19] Confluent Software, Elastic, Hortonworks, Lookout, Pure Storage, Sonos, Ubiquity6, and Zuora.[20][21]

During Volpi's time at Index, the grew its office in San Francisco to an equal presence on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.[22] From 2012 to 2018, the firm had six initial public offerings in the US, including Dropbox, Etsy, Sonos and Zuora, and has invested in early rounds of companies including self-driving car startup Aurora,[23] Bird and Robinhood.[24]