Next Steps: Lightspeed Venture Partners

This August, I had the honor of joining the all-star investment team at Lighstpeed Venture Partners.

I had my first exposure to Lightspeed while an undergraduate at Stanford, where Lightspeed sponsored a host of student activities and offered competitive summer fellowships that allowed students to spend their summer working on their startups.

Over the past two decades, Lightspeed has partnered with outstanding founders and market leading companies across enterprise and consumer sectors, including Snapchat, Honest Company, Affirm, Blend Labs, GrubHub, Nutanix, MuleSoft, Elementum, Docker, Clever, StichFix, and many others. I’m lucky to be joining such a stellar group of individuals with an average of over 10 years of venture investing experience and a global footprint that includes India, China, and Israel.

I cannot be more excited to be working in venture capital at this moment in history. Technology and business innovation continues to increase at an exponential pace, making an outsized impact on our economy. A decade and a half ago, the top five companies by market cap included only one technology company (GE, Microsoft, Exxon, Citi, Wallmart) — contrast this with today’s picture where all five of the largest companies are technology based (Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook). Just this past month, America produced 151,000 net new jobs, and over 42 percent of them were formed in California. The ability to work in this industry is a privilege as we partner with companies looking to change the way we interact with each other, conduct work and commerce, travel, and impact a greater part of our economy and lives.

I will be spending time focusing on software, marketplaces, and fintech. The way we work and conduct commerce is fundamentally changing as a new generation enters the workforce expecting their technology solutions to have the look and feel of the consumer and mobile apps they grew up with. These trends are being augmented by enhanced machine learning advances that allow individuals and organizations to work more intelligently and efficiently, while new data sources and inputs add additional layers of insight into existing workflows. These new innovations are not only occurring in large organizations through horizontal workflows, but also through continued growth in software and solutions for vertical industries.

I look forward to meeting with founders attacking these problems and creating newly imagined solutions that build on these trends, leveraging our firm to be the greatest partner on their journeys toward changing the face of our economy.

Onwards!

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(See here for a post about expanding the investing team by one of the founding partners of our firm, Chris Schaepe. Also, see here for my interview with VentureBeat around joining Lightspeed.)