Sep 4, 2018 · 30m · 20vc
20VC: What It Takes To Found and Scale A Global Venture Firm Like Lightspeed, 3 Ways Firms Do Not Succeed in Generational Transition & What Makes The Truly Special Board Members Like Jim Goetz with Barry Eggers, Founding Partner @ Lightspeed Venture Partn
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of The 20 Minute VC, host Harry Stebbings interviews Barry Eggers, founding partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, to explore the evolution of venture capital, strategies for institutional firm building, generational succession, and board governance.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 36.2% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 3.4 Guest teaching 4.0 Guest disagreement 0.4 Harry pushing back 1.6
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 11:35 Barry rejects the premise of market domination
When Harry praises Lightspeed's dominance, Barry immediately corrects the framing by stating they do not dominate anything and emphasizing peer firm performance.
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 8:28 Harry presses on market overcapitalization and impending bustHarry explicitly refuses to accept a smooth market outlook, citing massive fund sizes from Sequoia, SoftBank, and General Catalyst to ask if a crash is coming.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 5:51 Barry's detailed three eras of venture capital thesisBarry educates the host by breaking modern VC history since 1980 into the Craftsman, Scale-Up, and Specialization eras.
Harry holds his own ▶ 10:34 Harry cites Peter Fenton on venture ownership targetsHarry demonstrates informed pushback by citing Peter Fenton's claim that classic ownership targets are no longer possible in modern venture dealmaking.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| The Founding of Lightspeed and Three Eras of Venture Capital | 2 | 5 | 0 | 1 | Harry opens with general questions regarding Lightspeed's founding and firm trajectory. Barry takes charge of the conversation by laying out a comprehensive three-era framework detailing modern VC history. | |
| Market Cycles, Capital Overpopulation, and Valuation Sensitivity | 5 | 4 | 1 | 4 | Harry brings strong industry knowledge by referencing mega-funds from SoftBank, Sequoia, and GC, while citing Peter Fenton on ownership targets to challenge Barry on valuation realities. Barry responds with detailed nuances on capital intensity and private market expansion. | |
| Building Lightspeed, LP Strategy, and the Snapchat Seed Story | 3 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Barry lightly pushes back on Harry's premise that Lightspeed 'dominates' venture before outlining LP portfolio construction and the iconic Snapchat seed deal story. | |
| Generational Transition, Crypto Opportunities, and Effective Board Governance | 4 | 4 | 0 | 2 | Harry probes into firm governance and calculates Barry's thousands of board hours. Barry explains why VC generational transitions fail and what separates effective board directors from dysfunctional ones. | |
| Quickfire Round: Book Recommendations, Narwhals, and Board Excellence | 3 | 3 | 0 | 0 | A friendly quickfire round where Harry asks rapid questions on books, board members, and wardrobe. Barry explains his preference for 'narwhals' over 'unicorns' and praises Jim Goetz's board style. |
Statements from this episode (12)
Eggers: VC from 1980 to 1995 was a hands-on craftsman era
“If you start in 1980, starting 1980 to 1995, I like to call that the craftsman era of venture capital, and that was where venture investors Didn't make a lot of investments, but when they did, they got in very early, and they stayed all throughout the company'…”
Eggers: Modern stage specialization in venture capital is unsustainable
“So there's a lot of specialization now, and so people are sort of cutting, slicing the pie of value creation based on time. I don't think it's sustainable, but that's sort of, I think, the phase that we're in right now.”
Eggers: 2007 to 2009 VC fund vintages are among the best
“You go back and look at the venture funds that were raised around 2007, eight, nine. Those are some of the best vintages in the last two decades.”
Eggers: Venture returns will suffer due to 2018 capital oversupply
“I do think, though, that we've got too much money coming in, and so I do think returns are going to suffer a bit. For these vintages, and that we probably need some kind of a correction to decrease the amount of capital that's coming into venture.”
Eggers: Maintaining 15% ownership in capital-intensive startups is nearly impossible
“Yeah, I think that it depends on some of these projects that require a ton of capital. It's really hard to get 15 or 20% of them over time. You look at the Ubers of the world, and some of the guys who are, you know, the electric bike companies and scooter comp…”
Eggers: Lightspeed's Series A in Riverbed returned hundreds of millions
“The first big early stage outcome we had was Riverbed, where we were in the Series A with our friends at Excel, and that returned, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars to our investors.”
Eggers: Snapchat had under 100,000 users when Lightspeed made seed investment
“They still had less, less than a, about a 100,000 users when we invested and they'd gone up from 10,002 months before. Really good engagement, and so we made the seed investment.”
Eggers: Three reasons venture capital firms fail at generational transitions
“I think there's three things that where a venture firm can fail. Number one, you got to have great performance. That's an obvious one. Number two is you got to make sure that the young people coming up get the opportunities to grow economically and sending the…”
Eggers: Boards function better when driven by the CEO
“You never really want any one person on the board to be able to block or hold up the board on a decision, and frankly, it's way better to have the CEO driving the board than the other way around.”
Eggers: Lightspeed delivered $1.8B in liquidity to LPs in 2017
“Last year we delivered about 1.8 billion dollars of liquidity to our LPs.”
Eggers: Paper 'unicorns' are misleading; real $1B exits should be called 'narwhals'
“I just don't like the word unicorn, because it's sort of like unfinished business. It's like celebrating a touchdown before you know whether you've won the game or not. And so I like to use the term narwhal. Unicorns are not real. Narwhals are real. They also …”
Eggers: Jim Goetz excels on boards by balancing constructive praise and pushback
“I really appreciate the style of someone like Jim Getz. And he's obviously done quite well for himself as a venture investor of one of the best, but for nimble storage, I sat with him on the board and I got a chance to sort of see him. What makes him really go…”