

“Ride the wave, don’t try to pick a surfboard,” says cofounder Barry Eggers of their mindset.

With so many companies starting globally and in new categories like social media, Lightspeed felt it couldn’t afford to miss out. 21 on the Midas List, in China, or Somaia in India, Lightspeed waited for Liew to build a foothold, even across several funds of relative under-performance. Getty ImagesĪ veteran of Netscape, AOL and Barry Diller’s IAC, Liew had joined Lightspeed in 2006 as its first consumer tech-focused partner but had yet to fully make his mark. When Snap went public on March 02, 2017, Lightspeed held a stake valued at just under $2 billion. 34 Jeremy Liew, that established Lightspeed as a consumer startup force. That changed with Snapchat, a career-making win for Midas List No. But a decade into its existence, before those companies had gone public, Lightspeed was better known among IT circles than it was among aspiring entrepreneurs. The firm built a reputation through investments like flash storage business Nimble Storage (IPO 2013), infrastructure company Nutanix (IPO 2016), MuleSoft (IPO 2017) and AppDynamics (acquired by Cisco in 2017), all billion-dollar-plus exits.
#LIGHTSPEED VC ANALYST SOFTWARE#
Receiving permission from Cisco to take back the name for a startup they’d previously sold to the tech giant, they set up shop as Lightspeed with a $1 billion fund for early stage investments.įor the next decade, Lightspeed remained an enterprise software and infrastructure specialist. Some firms had closed up shop others were looking to play it safe, investing in established businesses that were already well-funded and had meaningful sales figures to point to. Lightspeed got its start in 2000 when six investors from a then 30-year-old firm called Weiss Peck & Greer decided they wanted to split off in the wake of the dotcom bubble bust. Steve Jennings/Getty Images for TechCrunch Ravi Mhatre, seen here at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2017, was one of Lightspeed's founders who brought.
