About Jeremy Liew
Jeremy Liew, a general partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners and a nine-time member of the Forbes Midas List, has been discussing his investment philosophy and approach to venture capital in a series of recent appearances. Liew emphasized the importance of pattern recognition in deal sourcing, stating that to identify a "one in a thousand company," an investor must have met thousands of companies, as "there is no substitute" for direct experience. He described the process of winning competitive deals as understanding one's "home ground advantage," which he defined as a specific domain expertise, network, or geography that gives an investor a unique edge over competitors. Liew noted that for him, this advantage was initially a deep understanding of consumer internet, a specialization that was rare when he joined Lightspeed in 2006.
Liew also spoke about the role of trust in investor-founder relationships, arguing that it is "built in difficult situations" rather than before an investment is made. He cited his experience with The Honest Company, where a prior failed investment with co-founder Brian Lee led to a strong reference because Lightspeed remained supportive even when the company was struggling. Liew advised entrepreneurs to conduct reference checks on potential investors by speaking with founders of companies that did not succeed, as "not everybody is supportive and helpful and kind when things don't go well." He added that he has made approximately 75 investments over his career, noting that while he was enthusiastic about all of them, more than half lost money, but that Snapchat and Affirm each returned over a billion dollars.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Jeremy Liew's recent appearances.
Browse all interviews →
Transcript (1 segments)
J
Jeremy Liew0:00
Then the third piece is winning competitive deals. You've got to figure out what's your way to win. It's not that you're going to win every single time—no one wins every single time—but you've got to believe that you're going to win some of the time, and you've got to win some of the time against the best. Because if your taste is good, then you are competing against other good firms to win that deal. So I kind of like to think about it as: do you know what your home ground advantage is? Your home ground advantage means that some of the time you will win there, and maybe on the road you lose more. So you want to play at home or on the road, but as long as you know what your home ground advantage is, you can make sure that you play more at home than you do on the road. If you don't know what that is, then you're probably losing more deals than you should. That advantage can be anything. It could be like Coinbase—maybe people who work at Coinbase know you, trust you, even if some amazing venture capitalist shows up with a great track record, they don't know them, but they know you and they trust you, so you win. So it could be in-network deals. It could be domain expertise. For me, that was what it was in the beginning: I could demonstrate that I understood consumer deals better than these generalists, and people would say, 'I'd like to have someone who really stands about business on my board.' As mentors become more specialized, you have to become more specialized too. If you want to be a domain expert, it can't be on consumer; it needs to be much more narrow, at least to start off with, and over time you can grow it out, but you've got to start with something more narrow. It could be geography—you really understand the dynamics of Latin America better than a generalist VC flying in from the US. It could be that you speak Spanish, so you can speak to the entrepreneur in their native language, making it easier to communicate instead of them having to think and translate before they talk to their investor. But there has to be something that would cause someone to say, 'I would rather have you as my investor than all these other really impressive options that I have.' Once you understand what that is, then you want to spend all your time there, and that home ground advantage will eventually grow.
