Spotify’s VP of Personalization believes there is one underrated trait that all founders need for success. — Lightspeed recently hosted the first ever Generative NYC meetup for an audience of operators and investors in the generative AI ecosystem. The featured speaker was Ziad Sultan, VP of Personalization at Spotify, interviewed by Lightspeed Partner Michael Mignano. Ziad and his team are directly responsible for the algorithmic features that…

Meet the founders of Tome and LangChain, and AI investors and entrepreneurs, at Lightspeed’s SF office — Sign up here. Demo application here. In 1975, a group of hippies with thick glasses congregated in a garage in Menlo Park, CA. With piles of electronics, hackers from across the Bay were engaging in incredibly productive pursuits like homemade knockoffs of popular arcade games and faking telephone control…

Check our our AI Reading List guide for May 2023 — At Lightspeed, AI is not a fad. We’ve been investing in startups with artificial intelligence-based products and services for over seven years, with 30 companies in our portfolio, including Snorkel, Stability AI, and Tome, and we’re tracking dozens more. Successful platform shifts always rest on a set of underlying foundational…

Lightspeed’s Generative meetup series expands to the West Coast — Building on the exciting demand from founders, designers, engineers, and PMs for Lightspeed’s Generative NYC event series, today we’re launching Generative LA — a community for builders in the Los Angeles AI community to come together, learn from industry leaders and from one another, and share the exciting new products…

While VCs have flocked to proptech in recent years, we think few have segmented the category correctly. By the Lightspeed Fintech Team Venture capitalists often act in packs. One of the challenges with proptech investing is much of the capital can be focused on the asset — i.e. the property…

Mostly Metrics’ CJ Gustafson interviews Lightspeed Partner Sebastian Duesterhoeft, the “Michael Jordan” of TAM — Total Addressable Market is something you can’t unsee once you see it. It changes the way you assess the world around you. To the chagrin of my wife, I can’t visit a bakery without doing the back-of-the-envelope TAM on blueberry muffin sales in the greater Boston area. Having built a…

Lightspeed’s investment team shares what’s fascinating them and what to watch for in the year ahead — Our global fintech team covers all sectors — from infrastructure, to enterprise application layer, to consumer across India, China, South East Asia, Europe, Israel, and the Americas. As we collected our thoughts on what’s ahead, the world is experiencing rising interest rates, falling equities, and rampant inflation. It’s clear…

A forward outlook as Lightspeed closes on over $7 Billion of committed capital to serve Founders around the globe — Today, Lightspeed is unveiling three Lightspeed US funds ($6.6B), a Lightspeed India early stage fund ($500M), and debuting Lightspeed Faction, an independent team dedicated to building on Lightspeed’s nine year history of backing exceptional founders in blockchain infrastructure. This brings our total committed capital across the firm to $18B. You…

Reflections on the market meltdown, and what startups can do today to emerge stronger. — The boom times of the last decade are unambiguously over. No single metric shows the magnitude of the current downturn more than the dramatic retreat in revenue multiples for technology businesses. Witness, for example, the rise and fall of AMZN in the dot-comm bubble vs. SHOP in the last year…