Lightspeed Ventures

“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…”

“We're not only going to cover Lightspeed stuff. I think there's an immense opportunity to just be this place where people can digest what's happening in startups, what's happening in deep tech, what's happening in AI. And what we'll do is cover a couple storie…”

“And so you have companies like Sycamore Labs that, that Lightspeed just invested in Raindrop just released something new. This idea that around this ecosystem of agents, you have to build audit trails, like you have to build harnesses for them.”

“So they recently invested in a company called Modus which is doing a lot in the audit, audit space which traditionally like Dominated by small medium businesses or like the KPMGs of the world. Now you have an opportunity to build like an AI native audit servic…”

“When he told me he was building something new with Sam, it was like, doesn't even matter what you're building. Sure. We will invest.”

“Lightspeed From a very early on in, in sort of the AI kind of revolution took this position that actually AI and foundation models are more akin to software and code than they are to business lines and strategies.”

“In the last 1224 months, Lightspeed put, you know, by all accounts, a billion in two rounds of Entropic.”

“And I believe that at least General Atlantic, General Catalyst, Andreessen, maybe Insight, maybe Lightspeed, go public.”

“You know, with Suno, I feel like we kind of got lucky that we met the team at a certain time and, ah, were able to invest like kind of just as it was inflecting, and Yeah, sometimes you just get lucky and maybe overpay just to be able to do it.”

“I mean, all of the best consumer startups that are pitching us, they have these crazy growth charts, and they're all doing exactly this to do it.”

“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'…”

“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 …”

“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…”

“Lightspeed was two 57 to a billion, so it's just under a four X blended.”

“I spoke with the Lightspeed investor who wrote a billion dollar check into Anthropic and he basically for the Dario profile did the math for me and sort of explained it in a way similar to the way that you just explained it.”

“Our friends at Lightspeed did a great job in AI, for example. I think it's gonna work out really well for them.”

“Iconic is a lead for this round and Lightspeed led the last round.”

“At one point Lightspeed invited me to be a scout for them, and, you know, I put half my scout fund into the seed round at Rippling, so that worked out well.”

“And then when they were good at, when they were really good at the software, after one or two years, they became our international distribution network. They became our resellers and they started to sell Lightspeed in their neighborhoods. And that's where the …”

“My only goal was not to build a company with a public company that's at a billion dollars. I have no finance background. It was not, I had not even a clue what that even meant. All I wanted out of this whole thing was to win an Apple Design Award from Steve Jo…”

“What the original version of Lightspeed was almost set up like iTunes now called Apple Music. Now it makes no sense anymore. But back in the day, like iTunes had like playlists on the side and like content on the other side. And we built, you know, the origina…”

“We would not be here today if we didn't times four. There's just no way. That allowed us to build the software that ended up being adopted by All of those users on a large level. And if we had kept the software cheap and had the same number of it, just nothing…”

“After seven years of bootstrapping, cause that was our journey, a seven year of bootstrapping, we got to ten million of annual revenue, which was all software. All of that was driven by 400 resellers around the world, making 25% on times four pricing.”

“They're making 25% after off the 5000, but they're also selling You know, at the time it was all on-premise. They're selling servers. They're selling computers. They're selling networking. They're selling training. You know, we were selling five, 5000 dollars …”

“I think the lesson is like, if you're building a product, like who are the adjacent people in the ecosystem that could be selling what you're doing alongside with what they're doing, right? They're, these guys were used to selling software, but they were reall…”

“The problem with a ten-page deck is you could go in and Change your whole strategy by changing two slides, you know, like that's not focusing, you know, it's and I feel like that's so easy to just throw a couple of ideas on and not have to really go through th…”

“I saw in those early days, a lot of other companies that the founder was still coding after a very long period of time and they didn't scale, you know, like it was the founder was still debugging things in, in the middle of the night, instead of going out to m…”

“I was buying real estate with our profits and just building it like a real, I felt like if anything happened with a software business, I wanted some assets for the company, you know, so I would buy the company, buy the, buy these buildings and rented to light …”

“It wasn't until like we brought in a VC that we actually transitioned to the cloud. And that was actually, that was a huge part of the transformation that we did with Excel that was huge, hugely successful and allowed us to do everything we're doing now.”

“In the early days, we actually worked with Apple to bring all the handheld units that they had to do mobile POS. We had actually had that for non Apple retailers, right?”

“When 43 resellers came to Montreal from Saudi Arabia and Australia and Ireland and all over the US and all over Canada to get trained on a one-year-old system so they could resell it around all over the world.”

“Be willing to throw away that job description every year. You know, be honest with yourself. There's things that you love, the things that you think you're great at, that you add, that add the most value to the business, but be ready to do a real assessment of…”

“As personal a relationship as I have with each founder I work with, I have to remind myself that I was representing Kleiner Perkins on the board of all these companies that I served on, and I think with that, now that I've moved over to Lightspeed, there's thi…”

“4.25 million.”

“Actually, my favorite part of that story is a school nearby invested 15,000 dollars and ended up making, I think they ended up building a new gymnasium or something.”

“The writer first refusal allowed Lightspeed to buy up to 50% of the next round and because of the way that a convertible note works, that meant that they would control that series of stock. So they would control the series A of stock, and that meant that other…”

“The round was led by Addition, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed coming in as new investors, and then existing investors, Valor, Thrive, Altimeter, Trust Ventures, Terrain, and a number of other smaller investors.”

“Build critical infrastructure for the country, and what that looks like is being in all 50 states going up the stack into utility infrastructure, going down the stack into the home and building more products and services to lower costs and increase reliability…”

“The first company I ended up advocating for to invest in was a company called Dhingana, a consumer company doing basically an early version of Spotify for India... Dhingana was the largest by traffic. And so we invested there. We got that call wrong. I got tha…”

“There's a sub-flavor of that, which is India to the world BtoB commerce, that's done really well, and I think that, that is benefiting from a lot of supply chain shifting from China to other sources.”

“I remember coming here in 20 11 before joining Lightspeed. And we had a, we were looking at an e-commerce company not to be named, and there were negative gross margins on it, and as an investor in the U.S. And an entrepreneur in the U.S., I literally never se…”

“You start off, you don't go into a huge negative cash flow. You're going to shallow Jacob and you come out, but you don't grow at, you know, there's no hockey stick. Three X a year. You grow at 70% a year, 50% a year, but you do that for 15 years. If you go 50…”

“So we haven't made one in AI services. By that I mean companies that build AI native applications for enterprises. We've looked at a bunch. We've done one in the US called Distyl. It's not an India company.”

“We looked at our portfolio from 2014, 2019 and 20 24. So five year segments. About, if I remember correctly, about 15% of our founders were second time founders that we backed in that year. Either way, 15%. Today it's 70%.”

“And by the way, two thirds of our investment historically have been seed investments. In India.”

“In many cases, we don't sell anything at the IPO. We hold it. We might hold it for many years, for that matter, depending on our view on the company. But at the minimum, a couple of years post IPO.”

“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…”

“On the supply side. We had net negative churn. So not only were the, like, our talent cohorts were growing every single month when you looked at our waterfall.”

“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 …”

“What happened in the last three years is that there have been a tons of multi-stage funds entering Europe, building a new office. So five years ago, it was Excel index, Atomico, Boulder, and a few competing, and now you have Sequoia. NEA, you have Iconic, you …”

“When I went to Lightspeed, right, and I was talking to Peter. So what Peter did was Peter assigned a junior person from the firm saying that, why don't you help Ashu set a few CHRO calls and see what comes out. So as I was building my thesis, Lightspeed was bu…”

“We were at ten million”

“Well, it took, actually, the diligence took a few months, but our two, within a few weeks, we had a term sheet.”

“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…”

“Last year, we spent the almost the entire fiscal year rolling out lightspeed payments and making, and converting a third of our base.”

“I'd never done layoffs personally at the company, and that's almost been 19 years, you know.”

“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”

“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 …”

“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…”

“What I saw was 50% daily active user to monthly active user. Ratio. I saw 50% D-thirty retention. And I saw 50% month-on-month growth on a statistically significant number of users. I can't remember exactly what it was. It was 10 or 20,000 DAUs. And that had b…”