Jeremy Liew

Who they are

Jeremy Liew is a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners — best known as Snapchat's first investor, he joined the firm in 2006 when it was a small, largely unknown tech shop and has since backed 112 unicorns including Affirm.

Person

Jeremy Liew joined Lightspeed in 2006 when the firm was a small, largely unknown player in Silicon Valley — and he has been there for the entirety of its rise to a multi-decade, multi-billion-dollar global franchise. Before VC, he ran a gauntlet of early internet-era operator roles: management consulting at McKinsey, then SVP of Corporate Development and Chief of Staff to the CEO at InterActiveCorp (USA Networks), then General Manager of Netscape and VP of Strategic Planning at CitySearch, after stints in sales, ops, and business development at AOL. The education arc is equally eclectic: a BA/BSc (Hons) in Linguistics and Pure Mathematics from the Australian National University, then an MBA from Stanford in 2000. His signature deal is Snapchat — he was Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy's first institutional investor. The through-line is consumer internet at its inflection points: each role, from AOL through Netscape to VC, was a front-row seat to a platform shift. He writes across Medium (jeremyliew.medium.com), the Lightspeed blog, Business Insider, Fast Company, and LinkedIn — covering consumer tech investing, fintech, founder patterns, and profitable startup growth — and has appeared on 20VC and the Innovation Bay podcast arguing it's more important to be right than contrarian.

Company

Lightspeed's biggest headline in the past year is its December 2025 close of over $9 billion in committed capital across six funds — including Fund XV-A ($980 million), Fund XV-B ($1.2 billion), Select VI ($1.8 billion), and Opportunity Fund III ($3.3 billion) — described as the largest capital raise in the firm's 25-year history, with a stated focus on AI-native companies. The firm has deployed over $5.5 billion across more than 165 AI-native startups and continues to write new checks: in 2026 alone it led an $85 million Seed and Series A for Modus (AI-native audit tech), a $96 million Series C for Profound (AI marketing platform) at a $1 billion valuation, and a $19.5 million Series A for Pie (AI for small businesses). On the talent side, Lightspeed hired Claire Zau in 2026 as a partner to lead seed investing and media strategy, including co-hosting a weekly AI podcast and running the Lightspeed Launch program. Portfolio exits have been strong: Rubrik, Netskope, and Navan all completed major IPOs in 2024 and 2025, with Lightspeed as the largest institutional investor at each debut, and Moveworks was acquired by ServiceNow.

Market

Lightspeed competes with firms including ARCH Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, and RRE Ventures for deals across enterprise, fintech, consumer, and healthcare. Managing over $40 billion in assets as of 2026, with 112 unicorns and 39 IPOs across its portfolio, Lightspeed sits at the upper tier of multi-stage global VC, with offices across Menlo Park, San Francisco, New York, London, Tel Aviv, Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, and Singapore. The firm sees geopolitical regionalization and AI as the two dominant structural forces reshaping where and how it deploys capital, and has partnered with the NYC Economic Development Corporation on an AI Launch Pad program to support international AI companies entering the US market.

Network

Jeremy's closest named collaborators from the claims are Mike Zimmerman and Danielle Haj-Moussa, with whom he works on investments and partnerships. His most prominent portfolio relationship is with Snapchat founders Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, where he was their first institutional backer. Board seats at Affirm, Rothy's, HungryRoot, Wintermute, and HoneyLove round out his active governance footprint.

Mike Zimmerman· Investment/partnership collaborator at Lightspeed
Danielle Haj-Moussa· Investment/partnership collaborator at Lightspeed
Evan Spiegel· Co-founder and CEO, Snapchat (SNAP)
Bobby Murphy· Co-founder and CTO, Snapchat (SNAP)
Claire Zau· Partner (seed investing and media strategy), Lightspeed

How they likely show up

Joined Lightspeed in 2006 and has stayed for the entirety of its growth → thinks in decade-long arcs; unlikely to be interested in anything without durable thesis.
Operator background spanning McKinsey, AOL, Netscape, InterActiveCorp, and CitySearch before turning investor → will stress-test business model mechanics, not just market size.
Snapchat first-investor story involves backing founders when the firm was 'largely unknown outside Silicon Valley' → comfortable with conviction-based, early, and contrarian bets.
Publishes across Medium, the Lightspeed blog, Business Insider, Fast Company, and LinkedIn on consumer tech, fintech, and founder patterns → comfortable being visible and opinionated; will notice if you've read his work.
Board seats span fintech (Affirm), consumer brands (Rothy's, HungryRoot), crypto market-making (Wintermute), and gaming (One More Game) → generalist appetite with a consumer and fintech center of gravity.
Board membership at Terner Labs and the San Francisco Housing Accelerator Fund alongside NVCA → civic engagement is a real, not performative, part of his identity.

Conversation tips

→ Reference a specific post or essay he's written — on 20VC he explicitly said it's more important to be right than contrarian, so engaging with that framing will land.
→ Come with a view on consumer behavior or a specific market dynamic, not a generic pitch — his public writing is analytical, and he responds to people who've done the work.
→ The Snapchat story is a point of pride but also well-worn; more interesting to him will be asking about what he missed early, or what patterns he now sees in generational founders.
→ His Linguistics and Pure Mathematics background from ANU is unusual for a VC — acknowledging that arc (not just the Stanford MBA) signals you actually read his profile.
→ Don't conflate Lightspeed's current $40B+ scale with where he operates: he's still writing seed and Series A checks personally, so speak to early-stage dynamics, not growth-stage concerns.

Toolbox

Openers

Open on the HungryRoot 2025 financial results post — he publicly shared portfolio performance data on LinkedIn, which is unusual for a VC; it signals he's proud of the company's profitability story and worth asking what drove the turnaround.
Lead with the Lightspeed $9B close and the firm's rename — he posted about it himself, framing it as a generational moment after almost a decade; there's a real story there about how the firm's identity has evolved since he joined in 2006.
Reference his Snapchat first-investor origin story and the specific detail that Lightspeed was 'largely unknown outside Silicon Valley' at the time — it's a sharp contrast with today's $40B+ AUM and opens a conversation about how conviction gets formed before consensus.

Discovery questions

You backed Snapchat when Lightspeed was still a small, unknown firm — how do you think about replicating that kind of early, pre-consensus conviction now that Lightspeed is one of the most recognized names in the market?
Lightspeed has deployed over $5.5 billion across more than 165 AI-native startups — at that volume, how do you distinguish between companies that are AI-enabled and ones that are genuinely AI-native in the way Snapchat was mobile-native?
You've written publicly about generational founder patterns — what's the earliest signal you look for that separates a founder who'll build through multiple cycles from one who gets stuck at the first inflection point?

Avoid

Don't pitch surface-level 'AI-first' positioning without specifics — he's reviewed hundreds of AI-native companies and will probe the mechanics immediately, so vague AI framing will cost you credibility fast.

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