The Ledger
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Moore: Only five to six mega VC platforms will dominate the market
“It doesn't appear as though the supply of capital from platforms like the one that I've just joined or some of the others that we've talked about is going to go up in, in, in size. And so again, you could argue that these five to six firms kind of have this ca…”
Moore: Extra startup runway can be punitive due to founder opportunity cost
“Having that extra, you know, two or three years of runway can actually be really, really punitive Given the opportunity cost associated with amazing founders time.”
Lightspeed Passed on a Snapchat Follow-On Investment at a $13M Valuation
“If we'd invested, I think that if we'd done that round, I think the terms were three on 13 or something like that. It would have been a great outcome for the company and for Lightspeed.”
Liew: Former operators turned VCs are most prone to over-steering founders
“People who used to be operators are most prone to, because they're actually used to making the key decisions, and if they had senior roles in their operating companies in the past, they might actually be used to, quote unquote, overruling the team when their j…”
Goldberg: Value in crypto projects accrues to equity or tokens, rarely both
“Value will usually accrue into either equity or a token network. It's very rarely both, but if it is both, it's probably like a 95%, five percent split.”
Jeremy Liew: Young women and Black youth predict future consumer tech trends
“If you follow what young women and young African Americans do today, you'll get a window into what we'll all do in the future. I think they're the really, the early adopters of popular culture, and so we always look for apps and services that over-index to tho…”
Bucky Moore: Traction Signals Founders Capable of Overcoming Market Limits
“I've already told you why I think people are more important than everything for one, and I think that some of the biggest mistakes I've made as an investor is when I've ignored traction because I've had reservations about the market. Traction is so hard to man…”
Moore: Perks don't win competitive VC deals, deep founder insights do
“Look, these parlor tricks exist. Every firm engages in them. Depending on founders, like, they either respond positively to it or not. But ultimately what I've found in practice is that none of that stuff really matters. What matters is did you put the work in…”
Moore: Investment selection is harder at prominent VC funds
“Look, so that strategy can definitely work, but I would argue, and this is maybe world's smallest violin, that picking is actually much, much harder. In these larger firms that have notoriety in the market. And the reason for that is because the opportunity se…”
Moore: Industrial applicability in robotics could surprise to the upside
“And when I look at like a trend like robotics that is still so, so early, but at least in my mind, I've convinced myself that this time is truly different in terms of the industrial prep in terms of the industrial applicability of these products. It really, to…”
Bucky Moore: The Bar for Startup Growth Rates Has Dramatically Risen
“And right now, to your point, the bar is going up for what best idea looks like when it comes to growth rates and momentum. We can talk about the quality of that revenue and how it's very mixed, and this has been discussed many times on this show and outside o…”
Lightspeed Invested in Snapchat's Seed Round at a $4.25M Valuation
“At the seed at four and a quarter pre, and, like, here we are looking at 13, and just thinking, well, you know, that's three times higher.”
Eggers: Lightspeed allocated 100% of 2020 scout slots to racial minorities
“For twenty-twenty, we decided that our entire Lightspeed Scout program would be a hundred percent racial minorities, and so we put the word out in our network informally that we were going to do this. Within two weeks, we had 350 people apply for 25 spots, and…”
Eggers: Lightspeed expanded its female investor team from one to ten
“We have one female investor four years ago. We have 10 now, which I think might be the highest in the industry.”
Messerschmidt: Growth velocity beats overall revenue when raising a Series A
“So we'd much rather back a company who's gone from like zero to 500 K in a few months with strong organic traffic than a company who hit a million dollars a month rate, but the growth has slowed significantly.”
Liew: Investors cannot make a good company great through investor value alone
“Folks who believe that they can take a good company and make it great by sheer value being an investor, I think in general, maybe being a little bit too optimistic.”
Lightspeed is drafting a template term sheet for early crypto rounds
“So we haven't released it yet, but we are in processing Of writing up a template term sheet for both fungible token and non fungible token projects at the formation stage.”
Bucky Moore: Top venture returns come from concentrating capital in seed winners
“If you look at some of the best venture investments in history, they've been these seed investments in these companies that have gone on to grow really, really large, and they've come from an investor who's continued to concentrate more and more capital in tha…”
Moore: Multi-stage VC firms actively seek collaboration with seed funds
“I can tell you that none of the multistage firms that I know well do anything but seek to be very collaborative and follow what the C firms are doing very closely for that reason.”
Moore: Writing Small Early Checks Does Not Guarantee VC Access
“If you're going to start doing that as a later stage firm, you've got to be committed to putting the legwork in to actually use that as a wedge to develop that relationship that does give you the access. Because I think The check itself does not.”
Moore: Countless talented founders are currently trapped in mediocre startups
“There are countless companies in the industry right now where you have really talented founders working on something that's kind of working, but maybe not working to the degree that they hope. And in some sense, they're kind of stuck with it.”
Moore: Lower startup valuations make successful M&A exits much easier
“The ability to find a good home for the company and do good by your investors and your employees is let's just say much easier to come by when you keep valuation down.”
Quinn: Lightspeed's fund sizes grew from $700M to $7B in ten years
“When I started a decade ago, we were raising seven hundred million dollar funds. They're now seven billion dollar funds.”
75% of Snapchat's Early Users Were High School and College Women
“When we met Snapchat, one of the things that really caught our attention was that 75% of the user base were young women in high school and college”
Snapchat's Monthly Burn Rate Exceeded $1M Within a Year of Seed
“Burn, within a year from our investment, Burn was in excess of a million dollars a month”
Eggers: Lightspeed's 2020 seed rounds resemble Series A rounds from 2010
“When we refer to seeds today within Lightspeed, they look a lot like what we used to call Series A's 10 years ago. We've just almost shifted everything to the right one.”
Collaboration software growth relies on account expansion over top-of-funnel acquisition
“Strong revenue growth in this sector really comes from expanding within customers you've captured, more so than just the top of funnel.”
Investors should offer immediate operational help to engage early-stage founders
“One of the things that's been helpful for me is I have a lot of very relevant operational experience, and so I can say, hey, let's do a working session on product market fit. I would love to talk to you about go-to-market things that are really low effort for …”
TripActions manages $1B+ in corporate travel, growing 15% to 20% monthly
“They now manage over a billion dollars in corporate travel. They're growing 15 to 20% month over month.”
Startups should land $75K enterprise deals and expand them to $5M
“Really, the reason they do that is mid-market customers move faster, but of course, you capture less value, but you can get some velocity and you can get some market signals about product market fit in the mid market. And meanwhile, you're executing on a longe…”
Enterprise tech was a contrarian VC focus in 2008
“In 2008, they had a strong point of view that enterprise would be one of the largest market opportunities, and this was almost a contrarian point of view back in 2008. Not a lot of people were looking at very closely at enterprise”
Liew: VCs should limit diligence to 3-5 thesis points over checklists
“If you have a very clear investment thesis, and, like, there's two or three things that you would need to believe to believe that this company can be extraordinary, and one or two things that you would need to verify to make sure that it's not going to be a di…”
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: Lightspeed delivered $1.8B in liquidity to LPs in 2017
“Last year we delivered about 1.8 billion dollars of liquidity to our LPs.”
Goldberg invested in an unannounced project using a dual-token structure
“One interesting approach that I've seen that's used by at least one of the projects I've invested in, although unfortunately it's one that hasn't announced, is to have two separate tokens. One that's a payment coin, just for the utility of the service itself, …”
Jeremy Liew: Lightspeed invested $475k in Snapchat at $4.25M valuation
“It was a 475 A thousand dollar investment at a four and a quarter million dollar pre-money valuation when the company was just the two founders.”
Lightspeed announces investment in quantum computing startup StrangeWorks
“Yeah, so we announced our investment in StrangeWorks, Earlier today, actually. It's a quantum computing software company.”
Jeremy Liew: Lightspeed backed Rothy's due to explosive word-of-mouth stockouts
“We invested in a digitally native vertical brand called Rothy's. They make comfortable, fashionable women's flats, and they're growing incredibly through word of mouth, and we invested because They were growing so rapidly that their only constraint was that th…”