Growing our Team at Lightspeed.
Welcoming Mark Anderson, Shan Shan, Nnamdi Iregbulem, and Pete Steinle to the Firm.
For more than 20 years, Lightspeed has served the world’s most extraordinary people building tomorrow’s companies today. And as our firm has evolved, we’ve seen firsthand how the more diverse viewpoints and experience we can collectively bring to bear, the more additive we can be to the entrepreneurs and companies we serve.
Today, we’re proud to announce the addition of four new team members: Mark Anderson (Venture Partner), Shan Shan (Growth Partner), Nnamdi Iregbulem (Enterprise Partner), and Pete Steinle (Executive Talent Partner). More on these talented individuals, their backgrounds, and what they’re focused on at Lightspeed is below
Mark is a seasoned executive with a proven track record in guiding enterprise technology organizations as they grow and scale. As the former president of Palo Alto Networks, he helped grow the company from pre-IPO to a leader in enterprise security. Before Palo Alto Networks, he led worldwide sales activities at F5 Networks and was instrumental in the GTM success and growth to dominate the Application Delivery Controller marketplace. Applying product market fit to a large and expandable TAM, the teams at both companies achieved long-term sustained hyper-growth. While he may be “new” to the Firm, we first got to know Mark after he joined Avi Networks board as the company’s first independent board member many years ago. His hands-on experience managing the variety of stages that companies go through in a long-term, hyper-growth journey, make him an invaluable asset to Lightspeed’s portfolio. In addition to Avi Networks, Mark serves on the board of directors of Cloudflare, Inc. (NET) and Alteryx, Inc. (AYX).
Shan is focused on investing in category-defining consumer and software companies. Prior to working in venture, she spent three years investing in the public market as a hedge fund analyst at Point72 Asset Management. There, she covered 70+ U.S. and European TMT and consumer companies. Born and raised in Changsha, China, Shan grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. Facing new challenges head-on was something she experienced and was inspired by at an early age and it’s part of the reason she pursued a career in Venture Capital. As an undergraduate at The University of Virginia, she studied subjects ranging from international relations to algorithmic trading. Her focus on the intersection of technology and commerce trained her to break down business problems and industry changes with a rigorous analytical mindset while maintaining a high level of intellectual curiosity.
A self-taught programmer and lifelong technology nerd, Nnamdi is focused on investments in technical enterprise software, including developer tools, application infrastructure, and machine learning. Before joining the firm, he was an investor at ICONIQ Capital, where he deployed over $500 million into high-growth technology companies including GitLab, Fastly (NYSE: FSLY), Alteryx (NYSE: AYX), ezCater, Uber (NYSE: UBER), SurveyMonkey (NASDAQ: SVMK) and Epic Games, among others. In 2018, he took a break from investing to pursue his MBA from Stanford, where he continued developing his programming skills by leveraging Stanford’s computer science resources, and simultaneously gained operating experience by working in product at developer-centric technology companies GitLab and Confluent.
One of the most critical ways we support our portfolio companies is by helping them navigate building their executive teams; identifying, hiring, developing, and retaining top talent. Pete has been working in the venture capital ecosystem for 25+ years and has worked hand-in-hand with some of the most iconic enterprise companies over the years. Early in his career, he spent 10 years operating inside two successful venture-backed enterprise technology companies, including Salesforce when the company grew from $5M to $100M and went public. More recently, he’s spent 15 years at Kindred Partners recruiting C-level executives into enterprise technology companies including Coupa, Anaplan, Proofpoint, HashiCorp, Marketo and Looker, among many others. His combination of operating and recruiting experience has created a unique lens and deep network for Lightspeed’s portfolio to leverage.
Please join us in welcoming Mark, Shan, Nnamdi, and Pete to the Lightspeed family.
