E60: How Lightspeed Invests in AI and Beyond with Arif Janmohamed

**Erik Torenberg** (0:05)
Welcome back to Turpentine VC, the podcast where we discuss the art and science of building successful venture firms, VC to VC. Today's episode is with Arif Janmohamed, partner at Lightspeed Ventures, who joins me to discuss Lightspeed's ambitious scope and scale, as well as their frameworks for investing in AI. We cover the evolution of foundation models to the future of cybersecurity, and discuss identifying challenges and opportunities for company building. Please enjoy the episode.

**Erik Torenberg** (0:36)
Arif, welcome to Turpentine VC. Excited to have you on the podcast.

**Arif Janmohamed** (0:39)
Yeah, thank you.

**Erik Torenberg** (0:40)
So this is the first time I've had a Lightspeed partner on the show. And so I'm excited to talk about the firm. And we've had Sequoia, we've had A6Z, we had Thrive, we had Founders Fund. A lot of the major firms in the Valley and Lightspeed is in that conversation. And so I'm curious how you think about where Lightspeed fits into the ecosystem, where it fits into the market, how should we think about Lightspeed the firm and where it plays?

**Arif Janmohamed** (1:06)
Yeah, maybe I'll start with a little bit of history on the firm and that'll give you sort of the arc of how we've come. We were founded about 25 years ago with the insight that enterprise investing was at that point in time, generally underserved market at that point in time. It was the height of the.com and not a lot of people were really investing in the picks and shovels of the primitives of enterprise. And what I mean by enterprise, it's everything from semiconductors to primitives like compute storage, networking, security, today would be foundation models, infrastructure software, what people used to call middleware, and then all the way up through applications. We started out with a strong focus on enterprise early stage investing. Our, at the point, at that point in time, the founders recognized that if you knew what you were doing in terms of how to build a company, and I will talk a little bit about that, how to be opinionated with founders and how to support founders through their journey that you could actually consistently build companies worth multi-billion dollars. The firm was really built around that insight, and over the last 25 years, we've expanded our scope. While we started out very much focused on enterprise and some consumer, since then, we've evolved the firm into a multi-sector, multi-stage, truly global firm. I'll touch on each of those. So we started out by focusing on enterprise, as I mentioned, and over the last 20 years, we've been really fortunate to have partnered with some amazing founders at the earliest stages, Seed Series A, Series B. These could be the founders of AppDynamics, of MuleSoft, of Nutanix, of Rubrik, which just went public, and a number of others. We've partnered with those firms at the earliest stages and then supported them through their journeys. In many cases, these are 10, 12-year journeys with those founders as they go from building the infrastructure and the product, to building out the management team, to really finding their first few customers, to finding product market fit, and then needing more capital over time. What we've really leaned into is having that early stage ethos and partnering with those founders and then building companies side by side. As I mentioned, we're multi-stage, and we're multi-sector and multi-geo. Today, the snapshot of the firm is we can support a founder and really get into business with a founder at any stage of their journey. But we bring that early stage ethos of really understanding what it takes to build a company and partner with a founder as not just a capital partner, but also as a thought partner to help them really scale their companies. We have $7 billion of capital out of our latest set of funds that was raised a few years ago. And that is really split up across early stage, what we call early inflecting companies and then pre-IPO companies. So we can partner at Series Seed all the way through to pre-IPO. We partner with companies and we invest in enterprise, consumer, fintech, healthcare, crypto sectors. And then from a geographic perspective, even when the founders started the firm 25 years ago, they recognized that entrepreneurship is global, innovation can happen anywhere. And so going back over 20 years, we've been investing in Israel, in India, in China, and more recently in Europe as well as Southeast Asia, and Latin America. So when we partner with a founder, we look for those founders that really want to go long, that want to build a global brand and want to build an enduring company.