Successful media is entertaining. It has to be to get you to keep coming back day after day, many times a day. Getting this right requires a mix of serendipity and high value content. Not enough high value content and …

Joe Lonsdale (co-founder of Palantir, Addepar and Formation8) ?kicked off a meaningful conversation with us on building ?multi-billion dollar businesses in big data at one of our recent Lightspeed Dinner Series events this week.   Drawing on examples from Palantir, …

In the early days of a startup, every business component, from what to pay employees to new product features seems critical.? But what are the most important measures of success for a startup? This week, I shared an article on …

Only occasionally do you meet people who can look past what everyone else is doing and see through to an essential truth. Something that is obvious once they say it, but completely unclear beforehand. The founders of Snapchat, Evan Spiegel …

Numerify announces $8 million in Series A financing to revolutionize business analytics in the cloud. Founded by the pioneers of the business intelligence industry from MicroStrategy, Hyperion and Oracle, the company aims to arm every decision maker with meaningful numbers …

Last year I recapped a few episodes of season 4 of Sharktank from a VC's point of view.?A few people have asked me to do the same, at least for the Season 5 premier. So here goes! (You …

There?s nothing better as a Venture Capitalist than to meet an exceptional entrepreneur; one who is driven to impact the world for the better and often, at the same time, build a solution to a personal problem.? What I?ve realized …

Last week, I wrote an article for AllthingD that talked about the shift if the ways that people are "sharing" online, mainly that niche social networks are giving people very targets, often private ways to share more freely.?? This shift …

Using Bitcoin for sending money between countries seems like a no brainer; because the costs are so low, there is the potential for huge savings for immigrants sending money home. ?But, as I wrote about in GigaOm this past weekend, …

In March 2013 we led the Series A of Whisper, an extraordinarily engaging smartphone app. The app allows users to anonymously share secrets, their text over arresting images. Other users can then read, heart and reply. Here is one …

In our last post we noted that at least half of all Bitcoin transactions in June 2013 were for online gambling on the gambling site Satoshi Dice.? We were interested to see what has happened since Satoshi Dice was acquired …

Recently I noted that illegal drug purchases are around half a percent of Bitcoin transactions, which is far from the existential threat that it has been made out to be. Instead, the most common usecase for Bitcoin is online …

With the backdrop of both Congress?and the NY Department of Financial Services?launching investigations into Bitcoin, regulation is top of mind for everyone in the Bitcoin ecosystem. So far the only definitive statement about how Bitcoin will be regulated …

Although many have shown a lot of angst about Bitcoin use on Silk Road, buying drugs is far from a major use of Bitcoin. As the recent Forbes Article about Dread Pirate Roberts, the man behind Silk Road, …

Growth without retention leads to the dreaded sharksfin curve. If you're not retaining your users, then it doesn't matter how quickly you add new users to your product. You have a leaky bucket. ?Sooner or later, when you …

PernixData announced the general availability of the Flash Virtualization Platform (FVP) today. ?Congratulation to Poojan Kumar, Satyam Vaghani and the entire PernixData team for an amazing execution! It?s hard to believe how far the company has come along in …

It?s hard to believe that it has been 4 ? years since the founding of Bloomreach.? At that time I was working at Bain Capital Ventures, having just moved from Boston to spearhead the launch of their West Coast …

We met Evan and Bobby, the founders of Snapchat, in March 2012. We were mesmerized. They had a vision for how disappearing photo messages would make people more authentic, more silly, more real in their communications with their friends. They …

Over the years, I?ve had the great honor of supporting some truly inspiring entrepreneurs as they have strived to not only disrupt markets, but also improve the world we live in.? Today, I am thrilled to see that one of …

Earlier this week the Federal Government shut down Liberty Reserve, a digital currency exchange, alleging that it ran "what amounted to an online, underworld bank that handled $6 billion for drug dealers, child pornographers, identity thieves and other criminals …

Well it looks like the Department of Homeland Security is investigating Mt. Gox and the primary complaint is operating an unlicensed money transmittal business. Things do not look good for Mt. Gox. Its US accounts are being seized. This …

Congratulations to Poojan Kumar, Satyam Vaghani and the rest of the PernixData team for raising a great Series B round led by Kleiner Perkins. At Lightspeed, we are very proud of what the team has achieved in short 15 months…

  It?s no secret that that I see the opportunity for Bitcoin to disrupt multi-billion-dollar markets and dramatically cut transaction costs for people around the world.? We are in the early stages of innovation in this ecosystem, and Lightspeed wants …

For decades the leading network companies have been tightly coupling their software to complex, custom-built chips. Besides leaving IT buyers with a staggering array of appliances, the reliance on custom silicon has chilled industry startup activity. But with software defined …

FinCEN, the department of the Treasury responsible for fighting financial crimes has already issued guidance on how it views Bitcoin. Now it looks like the Commodities Future Trading Commission may also seek to regulate Bitcoin. More regulation is …

Right now, more than 80% of Bitcoin volume is in the USD market. And many of the pundits commenting on Bitcoin, both positively and negatively, are in the US. So it is natural to assume that Bitcoin adoption will …

The LA Times and Chicago Tribune are for sale. BarryDiller recently announced that buying Newsweek was a mistake. They are not alone in their distress. Newspapers and print magazine across the country are under increasing pressure as they …

What does ?big data? mean to you? When most of us hear the term, we immediately think about mainstream use cases that leverage smarter data sets to assist companies in making better decisions that optimize business operations, improve enterprise application …

For there to be a deep and liquid exchange marketplace in Bitcoin, the primary Bitcoin exchange needs to be robust and performant, with millisecond trade execution timeframes under heavy volume. Right now, Mt. Gox, the primary place where people can …

Supercell raised $130M at a $770M valuation and got a lot of press for it recently. It is well on its way to being a billion dollar game company. Also on that track are companies like Kixeye (a Lightspeed portfolio …

This week, the price of Bitcoin hit an all-time high of $266 and then a "flash crash" brought the price tumbling down to $105. ?What happened? ?The largest exchange Mt. Gox reported that it had seen dramatic increases in new …

I've been fascinated by the potential disruption that Bitcoin represents. Disruptions like this could create both massive value destruction for incuments and massive value creation for startups, which is exactly where entrepreneurs and VCs should be playing. I recently did …

Over the past several years, MuleSoft has quietly emerged as one of the leaders in providing platforms for powering the New Enterprise. Lightspeed was an early investor in MuleSoft, and we're excited to be partnered with a company that has …

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Last week, Lightspeed Venture Partners and the Amazon Web Services team brought together top technologists, startups, students, former Lightspeed Summer Fellows and venture capitalists to discuss how big data trends are impacting companies today. Companies like Boundary, DataStax, …

PernixData introduces a software-defined ?Flash Virtualization Platform? that aggregates and virtualizes flash storage distributed across servers into a scale-out data tier for enterprise data centers to provide low cost, deterministic high performance to any out-of-box application.     The enterprise …

Almost a year ago, my partner Barry Eggers and I met with Craig Elliott and Scott Hankins to talk about their vision for a new company, Pertino. Over a coffee in a small office in Cupertino (yes, their name is …

When we invested in Snapchat a year ago it had a few hundred thousand installs, but incredible retention and frequency of usage. Evan and Bobby painted a compelling story of how ephemeral messaging created a more real and authentic mode …

Last week we announced our company Pushpins was acquired by Performance Marketing Brands (parent to Ebates/Fatwallet).? It has been a wild ride since we started the company in our dorm at Harvard Business School just over three years ago? My …

Lightspeed is excited to announce that we are now accepting applications for our Summer Fellowship Program. The program is designed to be a unique opportunity for student led teams to spend the summer experiencing what it is like to …

Lots of coverage about Facebook Poke, which many have pointed out is a feature for feature clone of Snapchat. Some have pointed out that Poke was written in 12 days?as evidence of the lightweight nature of Snapchat, and …

Over the last 12 months, there have been a handful of acquisitions of mobile start-ups like RapSphere* (by Appsense), Nukona (by Symantec) and most recently Zenprise (by Citirix) that help enterprises better manage mobile devices. In the consumer world, …

Whether on Facebook or mobile, when a potential user first comes across your app, they typically see name, logo and rating. There is only so much you can do to change name and logo. But rating is definitely something that …

There has been a lot of conversation recently on the future of the media industry, specifically drawing comparisons between TV and film and the shrinking music industry.? It?s been over 10 years since Napster came on the scene to disrupt …

Although Sharktank has been running reruns on Fridays the last few weeks, the show ran a?Sharktank 2012 Holiday special?on Tuesday night. The most interesting company to present was?The Coop, a modern, design-focused, indoor-outdoor children's playspace in …

In the past few years, the opportunities for game developers have exploded. With more places than ever to play — from proliferating smartphones to Facebook — games are the most popular category of applications. I'm often asked what I look …

We seed funded Snapchat, a terrific mobile photo sharing app, back in April when it had less than 200,000 installs. My partner Barry Eggers came across the app when his daughter told him it was one of the three …