We All Need A Planner Friend

Jana Messerschmidt
Lightspeed Venture Partners
2 min readAug 18, 2020

We are excited to announce our investment in The Nudge, a San Francisco based company, founded by the sibling duo Sarah & John Peterson. I had the pleasure of meeting Sarah through All Raise’s Female Founder Office Hours, a mentorship program helping female founders navigate the world of venture capital.

The Nudge is the “Type A Planner Friend” that we all know and love (or in some cases are guilty of being — that’s me!). This is the friend who researches and plans everything, gathers a group of friends and is the CEO of FUN. The Nudge makes text message based plans that are fresh, innovative, novel and easy to follow.

Whether it is helping you plan the perfect weekend getaway, hike the secret trail or discover a silent beach disco yoga party, The Nudge is your guide to your city. The Nudge also helps you manage relationships in your life by suggesting ideas for Mother’s Day or the perfect date night. The Nudge is the go-to pocket companion of GenZ and Millennials in SF, Austin, Seattle and NYC. The Nudge audience values experiences over material goods. Sharing these experiences on social media is their social currency. The camera is their keyboard. The Nudge takes the friction out of planning and translates into “in real life experiences.”

In the time of COVID, The Nudge has also served as that friendly companion to help you discover new things to do while sheltering in place. They’ve launched location agnostic programs such as a “Healthy-ish” Cooking Program and a Camping Program, as well as The Ally Nudge, a program aimed to help you channel your support of #BlackLivesMatter to be an ally to the Black community.

The content is creative, the voice of The Nudge is authentic, and the delivery mechanism via text message replicates the behavior of friends that we have in real life. Here at Lightspeed, we are lucky to have The Nudge as our friend.

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Jana Messerschmidt
Lightspeed Venture Partners

#ANGELS cofounder. Former builder of @Netflix and @Twitter. Proud alum of @eceUIUC.