Behind The Scenes: I Met with a Top VC Firm (Lightspeed Venture Partners) 

Hats off for posting these - this is unique content allowing viewers to listen in on conversations that typically aren’t accessible.

You are an incredibly bright guy. I think most people don't realize the amount of work that is required to build an investable startup, scale it, become profitable, etc. You are killing it. Wishing you all the best...

Behind the sweet smile and happy-go-lucky aura is an absolute killer that understands basic human psychology. You handled that extremely well.

As an Asian-American immigrant, your story is inspirational! Amazing content. Keep on going.

Founders, just a quick heads-up: Nice VCs and friendly investors are like unicorns in this game. Most of the time, you'll be stuck waiting for hours in their fancy lobbies, dealing with investors who love to tease, act all high and mighty, and basically make your life difficult. It's probably the most frustrating part of building a startup, and many founders can't stand it. But hey, if you do manage to pull through and succeed, you'll be ahead of the game compared to other founders. Just something to chew on. 😉🚀

Thank you so much for letting us see this. There are always some angles and edges in the real thing that you can learn to prepare for only when you go through the real thing (maybe a few stumbles were edited out...). Great stuff!

Great content man, kudos - running a fast growing start up and documenting the story! love it!

Jay, thank you for your educational/entertaining videos. Seeing "behind the curtains" on whats been said on VC pitch is super helpful. I also noticed the low energy especially in the "founders market fit" section. Super happy seeing your videos and waiting for the next one. Thank you once more and greetings from Greece!

Needed this so bad have definitely been missing something’s while pitching! Thanks so much!

Love seeing frequent updates about the business, keep the content coming!

Amazing & invaluable content! Learning so much as a new founder!!

Amazing! Watched every episode at once

You have a really good energy to you. Something about The way you articulate and talk just sounds very captivating and intelligent! I'm excited and am rooting for the success of your business!!

This was awesome. Love seeing what it's really like in the startup scene

literally first time I see behind the curtains VC content. keep it up!

This is the most unique content I’ve seen on RU-vid in a while, this channel might do better than the company if y’all keep it up!

Your videos are unique. Keep pushing, John! You’re doing an excellent job 💪🏻

Very dope content. Thanks for the transparency of your journey!

love you jay, wishing you more greatness

Never seen a content angle like this. Amazing!!

Awesome!!! More Client Acquisition video would be awesome!

You care... That's why you Rock John! Thanks for living your example, - james

Funniest thing is hearing this dude that was high energy in the entitre meeting, lament that his energy was low (it was only low in the debrief). Good video and insight.

amazing content! would love to understand how you structure and prioritize your "warm-ups" with investors. How you keep them engaged after such a meeting :)

Love to see such videos. Keep up the good work John!!

Really liked the video - just curious, what do you use for creating your slide deck? Yours looks a lot nicer than powerpoint

truly appreciate the quality content you post!

This shit is incredible, please keep posting more. Amazing content and big fan of you and your company!

Loving these vlogs John!

Ur absolutely killing it with these videos

Hey man - been following your journey, and these videos are excellent. Only questions I have with Stan (worked in VC before) is really as it pertains to the market and competitive dynamics. To note, these are thoughts, not trying to be mean or anything, so would love to get your take 1. Lead gen funnel seems more concentrated towards a specific market channel, in this case Social media marketing, specifically TikTok? Think one video you posted said ~80% is TikTok? If so, could see some concentration risk if there is any sort of trouble with TikTok. Also, I assume many of these creators find new customers through TikTok, so even demand side is concentrated. Creators are at the mercy of that platforms algorithms - so if things change & they can't generate traffic or go viral, means less customers for them, so less revenue over time. If I was VC, would be curious to see a regression analysis of creator earnings by each cohort over time vs. retention (e.g., if creators see earnings dip over time, do you see an uptick in cancellations?). It's kind of the story that played out with SEO - it was huge in the early days of Google and everyone wanted to do SEO marketing. Now, it's completely saturated, and if a business is skewed towards SEO, it's a bad business. 2. I could see retention potentially compress (and even new user sign-ups), particularly as consumer spending decreases. Creators effectively operate in getting money from consumers. However, consumer budgets are tight, and the portion of the consumer budget curve that creators target is extremley elastic and also the most competitive (its effectively money they spend on leisure activities which competes with people doing things like going out, paying for Netflix/Spotfiy, shopping etc,). So in good times, like COVID, it's great - people were flushed with cash. In recessionary times, consumers immediately stop leisure spending (would presume spending on creators is the first thing to go, unless its very niche areas like adult material), so creators make less money, so they stop paying for services themselves that help them make money (meaning less sign-ups or more cancellations). 3. The market is highly competitive with players who have raised a ton of money. Many link-in-bio tools have now added eCommerce features including beacons, linktree, Koji - and I think their price point is lower, so curious how you would take market share for them. And the biggest players in the creator space, like Patroen or Kajabi, have been around for over a decade - and none have gone public or been acquired. Which makes you wonder whether these businesses are not as defensible, operating in a highly elastic market that is at the mercy of social media algorithms and macro economic conditions effecting consumer spending, etc - so the actual market size / pie is much smaller than people think. 4. AI (this is more of a long-term trend). Many creators make money trying to sell high-value items (courses, ebooks, coaching, etc.). As AI agents become more prevalent and free, people would just AI agents how to do something vs. paying a creator (e.g., cost of digital products effectively becomes 0 as people can just ask a ChatGPT system to simply tell them to create a course on x). Now this would be counter-balanced by the fact that some people just want to support their favorite creators - which is fine but at most people support 1 (maybe 2 creators). So this puts pressure for creators to find new audiences vs. upselling to existing ones - which leads to the problem highlighted above in that how do they find distribution channels outside of social.

You really inspire me as an entreprenuer keep it up man!

As a young person in the economic crisis in Turkey, what you did is my dream. I hope one day I will have the opportunity to show you my projects.

Great value in this video

Crushed it! The team at Lightspeed seems great!

this was a great video Jay!

Love these updates, excited to see more!

thank you for the content, amazing.

I've watched most of your videos and they're very useful for me as a future entrepreneur (hopefully). Thank you for this content because we don't have any here in France (at least as far as I can see)! I don't know if it's possible to make a video where you show how to get a first meeting with a VC (the research and all that)??

You're such a charismatic person, perfect founder-market fit, business hitting all the right metrics, everything looks effortlessly (although I'm sure there's a lot of work bts). Wish I could invest, J! Props to you really, great inspiration 👏

Keep the content coming! Spot on, the case studies would've helped but what about your roadmap? Instead of mentioning that you wouldn't know what to do with capital, if you instead gave general directions and asked for advice I think you could've continued the momentum you had from the great metrics. Especially if their suggestions reasonate with your story. Apologies if I misunderstood and/or you probably didn't post everything for conf. reasons. There's probably a data story around being a creator management platform/coach, particularly around using your customers' analytics to give advice to up-and-coming content creators. Particularly if you can filter it by subcategory (location, form of content, etc.) of content creators. Although, I'm sure you're already doing this.

The goat , love the vids !

Buddies mullet is insane 🔥

Faraz' hair on point. Mountain valley water ftw.

I’m always wondering how do you get your first client. If it’s about taking a subscription, buying a product or hiring yourself? I’m working in IT myself and always have the aspiration to at some time start my own business. But stop working and building something sounds like a major risk. So what advice would you give to build something on the side? At least to the first 1-5 clients/customers?

Great job in your meeting with Lightspeed Venture Partners! How do you plan to balance your near-profitability with the potential need for additional capital in the future, given your desire to avoid raising funds unnecessarily?

i want to be just like you one day jay

solid content man, love watching your journey. if you were a stock i’d buy you!

love u man love your videos

Been waiting for this!!

So nice!

Think you did a fantastic job, especially with Faraz. You maintained great composure and were an eloquent speaker even when nervous, which is not easy. Plus you had the added pressure of filming this meeting for your channel. Don't beat yourself up - you did really well! Thanks for sharing this content with everyone!!

love it

why is it a net negative for founders to graduate from stanford MBA?

can you turn on the subtitles please because I prefer to watch it with it

banger vid

you'e a beast

I need them to invest on me and my idea

Thats a big ass camera under the TV

Say hi to Barry for me ;) (if he's not in Hawaii)

I wonder what the full meeting was like? Lightspeed didn't seem to ask/probe any of the metrics that you brought up. They just repeated what you said or stated the obvious (i.e. the comment about the super users is pretty self explanatory). I've never been to a Tier 1 VC meeting where my metrics were not probed. I always tell people that if investors don't ask questions or clarifications about your metrics, either they're not interested or they don't know enough about the space. As an early stage founder, the latter should always be a red flag. When you're profitable or nearing IPO, the less expertise on the VC side matters because by that point, you and your team are most probably the experts in the domain anyway. If you're just starting out, the more expertise is important. A lot of new associates/principals/partners in old VCs bank on the firm's brand without really knowing anything. So, for founders that are reading this just be wary of this :)

Jay, study your intro. The first clip isn't it. The second clip is. The guy in the first shot is playing a character. They guy is the second is the character.

How does a vc firm have 30 year old partners that seems kinda crazy lol

why is it a net negative for founders to graduate from stanford MBA?