“I think we have succeeded without over-rotating on brand.”īy its returns, Lightspeed appears to be one of Silicon Valley’s standouts: 19 of its 21 IPOs have happened in the last decade, and its 2012 fund currently stands at a net return of 3.6x, with 1.7x already distributed to limited partners. “Organizations reflect the style of the people in them,” says Mhatre. Liew, Quinn and the newer generation of investors at Lightspeed – many, but not all consumer-focused – are younger, brasher, more adept at social media than some of the firm’s veterans, who express discomfort talking to press but are happy to meld styles. Liew has turned mentor, meanwhile, to a growing group of partners like Nicole Quinn, a member of the Midas Brink List of up and coming investors in 2020, and who says Rothy’s was an example of a company they wooed – and work with – as a team. Today, many of Lightspeed’s best-known portfolio companies are from its consumer practice: celebrity messaging app Cameo and meditation app Calm, Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop media and retail business, Jessica Alba’s The Honest Company, Rothy’s shoes and wedding registry Zola. Lightspeed partner Jeremy Liew won big with Snap he's now a mentor to the firm's consumer practice. When Snapchat went public in 2017, Lightspeed owned a stake valued just under $2 billion at its IPO price. The patience paid off in what has become Silicon Valley lore: Eggers’ teenaged daughter came across Snapchat at school and showed Eggers, who alerted Liew Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel, still a student at Stanford, relented to a meeting in part because Liew’s Facebook profile photo pictured him with President Barack Obama. “And put as many surfboards on it as you can.” “Ride the wave, don’t try to pick a surfboard,” says cofounder Barry Eggers of their mindset. With so many companies starting globally and in new categories like social media, Lightspeed felt it couldn’t afford to miss out. 21 on the Midas List, in China, or Somaia in India, Lightspeed waited for Liew to build a foothold, even across several funds of relative under-performance. Getty ImagesĪ veteran of Netscape, AOL and Barry Diller’s IAC, Liew had joined Lightspeed in 2006 as its first consumer tech-focused partner but had yet to fully make his mark. When Snap went public on March 02, 2017, Lightspeed held a stake valued at just under $2 billion. 34 Jeremy Liew, that established Lightspeed as a consumer startup force. That changed with Snapchat, a career-making win for Midas List No. But a decade into its existence, before those companies had gone public, Lightspeed was better known among IT circles than it was among aspiring entrepreneurs. The firm built a reputation through investments like flash storage business Nimble Storage (IPO 2013), infrastructure company Nutanix (IPO 2016), MuleSoft (IPO 2017) and AppDynamics (acquired by Cisco in 2017), all billion-dollar-plus exits.
#Lightspeed partners software
Receiving permission from Cisco to take back the name for a startup they’d previously sold to the tech giant, they set up shop as Lightspeed with a $1 billion fund for early stage investments.įor the next decade, Lightspeed remained an enterprise software and infrastructure specialist.
Some firms had closed up shop others were looking to play it safe, investing in established businesses that were already well-funded and had meaningful sales figures to point to. Lightspeed got its start in 2000 when six investors from a then 30-year-old firm called Weiss Peck & Greer decided they wanted to split off in the wake of the dotcom bubble bust. Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch Ravi Mhatre, seen here at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2017, was one of Lightspeed's founders who brought.
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