The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Randle: Capital deployment velocity drives promotions at mega funds like General Catalyst
“If you were to say, well, our GC or Lightspeed or some of these mega funds is the strategy investment velocity as a north star. To answer that question, I would have you go talk to the principals, the junior partners and the associates at those firms. You inte…”
Stebbings: VC Winners Will Be Mega-Platforms or Specialized Boutiques
“To me, I think it's like a specialization in leadership that's kind of correlated to actually the winners and losers in venture in the next 10 years, and I think the winners are Walmart, which is your mega platforms, it's your Thrive, it's your Lightspeed, it'…”
Dax Dasilva: Lightspeed must refocus after overexpanding products and regions
“And I think right now, now that I've been back at Lightspeed for five months as CEO, you know, I was executive chair for two years. I think there are areas where it's going to be helpful for us to focus again, where we've decided to like spread our wings, mayb…”
Quinn: Venture investors will return to syndicate co-investing across rounds
“I think we spent far too many years with the multi-stage funds and then suddenly realizing, wow, now I'm the only one on the cap table. There's no one else to turn to. There's no one else around to like help support this company with me. And so I think we're g…”
Lemkin: Multi-stage seed funds create negative signaling if they skip Series A
“Of course, if Sequoia or Excel or Andreessen or Lightspeed has two years of data and they don't preempt the A, of course it's a problem. Of course it's a bad signal. So that was a problem, and that exists today.”
Bahat: Very few multi-stage VCs historically produce top seed-stage winners
“We did an analysis looking at the top company performers. And what you see is that since the era that seed funds have existed and who funded them at the seed. And what you see is that some of them were funded by seed funds, first round true others funded some …”
Shah: Sequoia or Lightspeed seed funding does not guarantee follow-on rounds
“It sort of like a false narrative that like, if you take a seed from a Sequoia or you take a seed from a Lightspeed, they're just going to continue to do your next rounds.”
Taussig: Lightspeed risks losing most capital for small chance of unbounded upside
“Lightspeed is really a Silicon Valley firm founded in Silicon Valley, but we invest globally, but everywhere we invest, we bring that Silicon Valley mentality and technological optimism. And what I mean by that is we're definitely willing to take risk, perhaps…”
Nicole Quinn: Brand is a key network effect that outweighs TAM
“I certainly believe that brand is a key network effect. And yes, user economics, TAM are important, but at the end of the day, your margins and the size of the market, not quite as important if no one's buying your product.”
Mignano: Lightspeed's biggest regret was passing on Substack over price
“So one company that I would have loved to invest in a long time ago, which we didn't at Lightspeed, we met them a few times and I think we could never really wrap our head around Kind of price. Also at the time where they fit in the market. Now I think with th…”
O'Driscoll: Lightspeed put $1B into Anthropic across two rounds
“In the last 1224 months, Lightspeed put, you know, by all accounts, a billion in two rounds of Entropic.”
O'Driscoll: VC Funds Must Choose Between Max Multiple or High Ownership
“Fundamentally, the way they've been able to produce eight and 10 X funds has been in part by, I mean, keeping it at 40, 60, a hundred million dollar funds. I mean, obviously, you know, if you want, it's hard to simultaneously keep your ownership and keep your …”
Hamid: Kleiner Perkins co-led Glean's early round at $35M post-money
“We'll be back to Arvind Glean. We did it as a co-led it with Lightspeed at 35 post. And Arvind is a G. You know, he started Rubrik. He's like one of the, you know, Google fellow type of person. He raised a lot. He's like fifteen million at 35 post, so gave up …”
Dax Dasilva: Quadrupling initial pricing transformed Lightspeed's revenue and product development
“Showed that business plan to a colleague of my father, and he was like, times four. Multiply that, that, that price times four. And I was like, that's crazy. Like, I can't ask for times four. That changed everything. We had four times the revenue. We had four …”
Lightspeed converted a third of its customer base to Lightspeed Payments
“Last year, we spent the almost the entire fiscal year rolling out lightspeed payments and making, and converting a third of our base.”
Quinn: Seed stage startup valuations have not dropped in over ten years
“Like the valuations in Seed have not dropped. And we've looked at this data really over like 10 plus years.”
Snapchat Raised Seed Capital When Server Costs Exceeded Spiegel's Credit Card
“Frankly, I think the thing that probably changed the most was that they finally had a need for financing. You know, at that first meeting, they ran us through some of the metrics of the business, and it looks tremendous. And we said, well, is there anything we…”
Nicole Quinn: Lightspeed requires a 33% DAU/MAU ratio for social apps
“So we like to think about DAU divided by MAU. If you're A social media app , then we want it to be over a third. If it can be over 50%, then it really is a daily use case, and that's exactly what we saw from Snapchat back in the day, but we definitely need for…”
Lightspeed's Snapchat Investment Originated From a Partner's Daughter Using the App
“I think it was at light speed, I think, where one of the partner's daughters was on Snapchat permanently, and he was asking her what it was, and that stemmed their investment.”
Stebbings: Lightspeed turned $257M into $1B on Navan for ~4x return
“Lightspeed was two 57 to a billion, so it's just under a four X blended.”
Taneja: Lightspeed's broad AI indexing strategy will work out really well
“Our friends at Lightspeed did a great job in AI, for example. I think it's gonna work out really well for them.”
Kanji: Hoxton led $10M check into AI foundational model startup
“We put in 10. It was an AI company, a foundational model, didn't necessarily need all the money on compute, so 10 in a foundational model, and 10 is a really large number, but 10 in foundational model land is still a small number. We took it off the table, and…”
Dax Dasilva conducted his first layoffs in nearly 19 years at Lightspeed
“I'd never done layoffs personally at the company, and that's almost been 19 years, you know.”
Dax Dasilva: Balancing profit and growth is a positive constraint for enterprise value
“I think that maybe because we were so growth-oriented I thought that the balancing of profit and growth sounded like something really limiting, but actually now, now I feel like it's a really positive constraint that's going to build like that long-term busine…”
Lightspeed grew from $70M ARR at IPO to $1B in revenue
“When we went public in 2019, you know, we were, A much simpler company is seventy million in revenue. Now we're a billion in revenue”
Taussig: Lightspeed evaluates market opportunity by surface area, not dollar TAM
“At Lightspeed, when we think about addressable market, we don't really think about it in dollars first. We think of it as surface area. We think of it as like, how, what is the surface area we're gaining access to here uniquely in our strategic wedge? Because …”
Quinn: Lightspeed has deployed over $1B across 54 AI startups
“We've invested at lightspeed in 54 companies in AI. We've spent, we've invested over a billion dollars in AI, but big, but that was not all this year. That is not all generative AI, right? That's been over the few years, over the last few years”
Levanon: Over 150 global venture funds signed statement supporting Israel
“There is now a wonderful supportive letter being posted, being, you know, signed by, I think now there's a 150 different venture capital funds globally that have signed on from, you know, eight VC to upfront to Bain to all these wonderful, you know, Lightspeed…”
Snapchat Had 50% MoM Growth and 50% 90-Day Retention in 2012
“But I remember seeing 50% month on month growth. 50% DAU to MAU ratios, which suggests very high engagement, and 50% retention after 90 days, which again suggests high engagement, high retention, high growth.”
Snapchat Had 90,000 DAUs on 180,000 Installs When Lightspeed Invested
“So when we met them in, you know, March, April of 2012, they had about 90,000 daily active users off of a base of 180,000 installs.”
Lightspeed Ventures invested as an LP in Female Founders Fund II
“The other thing that helped for our second fund was that Lightspeed Ventures was an LP of ours, which has been tremendously helpful and validating for traditional institutional LPs.”
Taussig: Highland and Lightspeed reject VC superstar culture for service mindset
“In both firms, both at Highland and Lightspeed, there's no superstar culture. Neither are firms where we really like to go in front and be the star of the show. We prefer to think of venture capital as a service business, and that it's our job to remain behind…”
Nicole Quinn: Lightspeed avoids e-commerce startups with 30% gross margins
“So if we're bringing a 30% gross margin e-commerce company to the table, then that to us is not going to quite hit the bill or cut the mustard.”
Nicole Quinn: Lightspeed requires $1B+ acquisitions to return its $1.2B fund
“We definitely need billion dollar plus acquisition to move the needle for our funders at 1.2 billion dollars.”
Fifth Wall will not compete with Benchmark, Sequoia, or Lightspeed
“And we're not going to compete, obviously, with Benchmark and Sequoia and Lightspeed.”
Lemkin: Iconiq leads Anthropic's new round after Lightspeed led previous round
“Iconic is a lead for this round and Lightspeed led the last round.”
Dasilva: Accel provided Lightspeed a term sheet weeks after meeting at NRF
“Well, it took, actually, the diligence took a few months, but our two, within a few weeks, we had a term sheet.”
Taussig: 90% of Vinted's GMV was in France when Lightspeed invested
“And at the time that it got resurfaced, 90% of the GMV was in France.”
TripActions Raised Over $980M From Lightspeed, a16z, and Zeev Ventures
“To date, Ariel has raised over nine hundred and eighty million dollars for TripActions from some of the best in the business, including Lightspeed, Auron's Eve, and Andreessen Horowitz, to name a few.”
Nicole Quinn: Zola customers refer 2.2 other couples to the platform
“We've invested in Rothy's and Zola, and if you speak to Zola for every customer that has their wedding on Zola, they refer to point to other couples to also have their registry on Zola, the online wedding registry business.”
Stebbings: Gainsight raised over $156 million before its acquisition
“Prior to that, Gainsight raised over one hundred and fifty six million from some of the best, including Lightspeed, Battery, Bessemer, Insight, and Bain, to name a few.”
Eggers: Lightspeed launched with four partners, no LPs, and no fees
“The four of us splintered off and started Lightspeed and started from scratch, really. We had no LPs. We had a track record, which was helpful, but we had no portfolio, no fees coming in, so we raised a fund and started from there and then started hiring out t…”
Harry Stebbings: Calm has raised over $143 million from top investors
“To date, the company's raised over a hundred and forty three million dollars in financing from some of the best, including Lightspeed, Insight, TPG, and then some very cool names, including Ashton Kutcher, Harry Styles, Brad Feld, and Jason Calicanis.”