The Ledger
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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…”
Dasilva: Simpler merchants are better served by Clover, Square, or Shopify
“You know, you may be better served by a Clover or a Square or a Shopify.”
Dasilva: Public market leadership offers founders more independence than VC backing
“How it feels different from VC, and we've had really, we had some really great VCs with Inovia and with Excel and some pension funds. But you really feel like there's a couple of personalities that are your bosses or not your bosses, but your key partners was,…”
Dasilva: SaaS Startups Shortcut Product Basics to Chase VC Metrics
“But when I've mentored companies that are building these SaaS solutions in order to have a track Tip metrics that are going to be interesting to VCs. They're shortcutting a lot of the product development and like they're the basics of building a business like …”
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.”
Dax Dasilva: Writing a multi-year business plan is necessary for founders
“I think people are a little bit scared by the rigor of what Having to write an essay and then have a three year spreadsheet of what you're going to do. I don't know. I think it's necessary. I don't think we'd be the same company if we weren't forced to do that…”
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 …”
Dasilva: Physical retail stores are more eco-friendly than e-commerce shipping
“If you think about retail stores as like a local warehouse, they don't, they're not sending boxes to your house. You're going to a place where it's already there and you make a selection. I think that these are environmental choices and not only people thinks …”
Dasilva: Successful M&A integration requires strong corporate identity
“When you bring, when you merge other companies into your company, you have to have a strong sense of identity to allow other companies to be able to flourish as a part of your company and not try to suffocate them out of insecurity”
Dasilva: Early POS rivals raised hundreds of millions on simple initial products
“They started to come out and even though they were very simple, they had hundreds of millions of dollars being funneled into them.”
Dasilva: Lightspeed expects $1B in revenue this fiscal year
“So this fiscal year that we just finished was about 900, but this fiscal year, we were forecasted to be a billion in revenue.”
Dasilva: Lightspeed has achieved three quarters of positive EBITDA
“And, you know, we've got three quarters of EBITDA positivity under our belt.”
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.”
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”
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…”
Dasilva: Lightspeed should have launched its cloud product earlier
“We could have done it a couple of years earlier and it could have benefited us to have done it a few years earlier. Our cloud product was out by, you know, 2000 13. You know, Square some other folks like Shopkeep had which we acquired later maybe had a couple …”
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.”
Dasilva: Lightspeed spent zero on advertising during its first seven years
“In those first seven years, it's zero. We spent zero money on, on advertising, right?”