Welcome to the Newcomer podcast. I'm Eric Newcomer.
I had an awesome conversation with Bajol Somaya at Lightspeed
Venture Partners talked about two huge topics in the world of
venture capital India. Bajol spent many years investing
for Lightspeed in India and for the ups and downs of the venture
market. And then in the latter half hour
of our conversation, we looked at how venture capital is
becoming more like the private equity business, What happens to
venture capital in a world of rising interest rates And how
does he think about the future of a venture capital firm that
has more than $7 billion in funds raised to invest?
It's great conversation deep in the world of venture capital.
Give it a list, Bejil. Welcome to the podcast.
Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks, Eric.
It's great to be on. There's a lot here.
You've sort of taken the journey with Lightspeed and growing up
with what's become a huge firm. I thought part of the episode,
we just get to sort of look at what's going on outside the US,
especially since you spent a bunch of time in India, spent
some time thinking about Europe, and then get to the US but sort
of trying to make sense of the global venture landscape.
How did you get to Lightspeed India or get us to that moment
in time sort of working with Lightspeed India?
Yeah. And just before I do, you know,
something felt jarring to me, which is that, you know, this
idea of a huge firm and the reason it felt jarring to me is
because we don't think of ourselves that way and I don't
think we ever want to show up in the market in that way.
I think there's such an art to our business and there's such a
sort of relationship aspect to the business and a sense of just
a very high degree of personalization and often being
large can conflict with that. And that's actually, you know,
I'm sure we'll talk about later what's the total fund size?
So I lost set of funds that we raised early last year, Eric,
were just under 7 billion. Yeah, across early and growth
vehicles that we've raised over time and the growth vehicles are
global vehicles, you know, but it's just sort of more one of
the things we think about a lot, right, is how we continue to
operate in a very nimble, agile way.
Right. And that's while having what is
objectively a huge amount of money, yes.
That's fair. That's fair.
But anyway, we'll come to that. I know.
I get it, you know.
So like my journey has been really, you know, as a
entrepreneur and operator, you know, and an investor or across
sort of different parts of my career in the US and in India.
I was in the US until I moved to India to start up Lightspeed
business in 2008. And out of Business School, you
know, was a participant in the.com craziness.
As an early member of a startup during that time, and I think I
still sort of have that, you know, etched into my memo was
the startup. It's a company called edu.com
that was creating a sort of a protected channel for brands to
sell to students at differential pricing and so integrated with
colleges to create a protected channel where brands could.
And that was in the Bay Area. That was actually on the East
Coast okbutduring.com. Yeah, yeah.
And I was an early member of the team there.
And that company was acquired, you know, really in an asset
sale in early 2001 by a then public company called Student
Advantage. And that's where I met the
General Catalyst team because they were one of the, you know,
early investors in that business.
And after I served out my six months of the transition, Joel,
over a General Catalyst, who I think understands entrepreneurs
very well, called me and said, hey, you must be pretty fed up
of doing that. Why don't you come over and join
us. And this is just when General
Catalyst was getting going. You know, as an institutional
fund and yeah, I loved it because it was my first exposure
to venture, but in a very entrepreneurial environment.
And that continues again to shape a lot of, you know, how I
practiced the Business Today and how we think about the business.
And then in 2003, I just was so envious of all of these
incredibly passionate founders building things and I stepped
out and I started a company focused on local search and
context specific search. This was before it was.
You know, it was as widely known as it is today.
And the idea being that, gosh, there's all of this information
out there, but yet I just bought a home and I was rifling through
the Yellow Pages and calling service providers who had bought
the biggest ads. This is crazy, You know, that
this cannot possibly be how I'm going to make a decision.
And so that kind of led me to think about how do we bring
technology to really understand the information that's out there
in a context specific way. And started that company with
actually the former CTO of edu.com who I got to know, and
then subsequently someone that's become a dear friend of mine,
Brad Gerstner at Altimeter. And Brad and I had cross pots
originally. He was an ambassador or a
cofounder. No.
So he joined as a cofounder and yeah, And we first met, Yeah,
when he was running. National Leisure Group which was
a general catalyst funded business and so you know we got
going and eventually we didn't raise any outside capital but
ended up selling the business to a public company called March X
at the time. And and that was kind of really
when I thought about my life and career in a slightly different
way And and I was really drawn to what was happening in India.
You know, the country was going through a very significant
period of economic growth, lot of innovation happening and I
moved out there and actually for the first few years I was
running a. You know what would typically be
described as a more traditional growth equity business, you know
a manufacturing business that you know here would be a GDP
growth business, but there was growing at about 3035% a year,
but was very myopic, very inward facing.
And I thought there was so much more that we could do with that
business and it was a wonderful way to learn that country and
that market and actually learn a lot about how applying a US lens
or a developed market lens is not only.
The wrong answer, but can actually, you know, be
problematic. And that was really valuable and
ultimately sort of brought that to bear And in what we ended up
building at Lightspeed, how long were you investing in India and
how much was deployed? So look, I you know today Eric,
we have now we think of the region as India, Southeast Asia
because there's actually a lot of talent movement between those
regions, founder movement. And companies from India, when
they're thinking about getting out of India, often Southeast
Asia is the next frontier. So I think about that region,
you know, we have today 19 investment professionals in the
and then an operating team or a platform team that supports our
portfolio of about 10, So quite sizable across 4 offices, Delhi,
Bangalore, Mumbai and Singapore. And you know, since we started
investing in India, we've invested approximately 1 1/2
billion dollars in the market. So it's, you know, it's
meaningful, but kind of always I think timed to how the market
was developing. So actually up until 2015, we
continued to invest out of our global funds at a very measured
pace. And you know, again, many of our
peers had raised dedicated fund vehicles and there were a set of
local homegrown funds as well. You know, we knew this was a
market we wanted to be in, but we didn't think it warranted A
dedicated strategy up until sort of I'd say in 1314.
We began to see changes on the ground, founder quality, more
risk capital and sort of really now the beginning of significant
Internet adoption, right, which is really the trend line that
we're investing behind. And so in 2015, we raised our
first dedicated early stage fund for the market, but it was still
a very. I think a very disciplined size
at 135 million. You know, fund two was 175, fund
three was 275 and the idea was really to keep the bar high, you
know, to focus on the highest impact opportunities, you know
and then over time as we've raised our growth funds if we do
miss things at early, which obviously we do.
Then we do have the ability now to hopefully still be able to
partner with those entrepreneurs later in their journey.
What were the key companies or like?
What successful investments did you see?
So early on an early investment in a company called Tudor Vista,
which was essentially one of the first companies that was
connecting in that case tutors in that market with students
globally. So a very early incarceration of
Ed tech. That company was acquired in a
trade sale by Pearson. What was one of the early exits
in the market And then an investment that I led in 2010 in
a company called the Indian Energy Exchange, which was
building an electronic market for power.
You know, and this is an example actually of where, you know,
when we talked about it in the partnership and the natural
thing to do is to seek analogs, Where else has this been built?
And the answer was nowhere. And then it can be very well.
If there's no examples of success, we shouldn't do it.
It obviously can't be successful.
But we should have got into being very first principles
about what's happening in the power market in India and why
does something like this need to exist.
And I won't bore you with the details, but there was a set of
reasons why something like this needed to exist and it was a
classic example of how we could think about getting venture type
exposure to a sector like energy or power, right.
That was going through a massive investment cycle.
And so we Co led the company's Series A and actually the only
round of external capital that they ended up raising in late 20
and and that company we took public in 2017 and the local
Stock Exchange and then over time fully exited over the
subsequent few years. So that was one of our sort of
early investments and it helps right when you go to a new
market to to know that you can, you know, invest but also take
money out and get a company public and see the full life
cycle. Is this strategy generally like
looking for companies that can be global players or do you
invest in startups that could just sort of dominate the Indian
tech market and would that be sort of large enough?
It's all of the above, right? Typically on the consumer side
and on some B to BI wouldn't say B to B software.
I don't think the Indian market for software is large enough to
support a high impact company. But those are those companies
tend to get outside India. For example, we have a company
called Innovasor which is focused on the healthcare
segment in software that got outside India very early or
Darwin Box and HR SAS you know that you know built in India now
has gone to Southeast Asia. But in I would say in consumer
that tends to be almost exclusively focused on the
domestic economy and you know, B to B networks or B to B
commerce. You know will typically be
focused or B to B fintech. You know on the local economy
what we're now seeing more recently as the founder universe
has sort of become more confident I think bolder
building better products is we're seeing more of them today.
Start off with A we want to build for the world kind of you
know mindset which is really energizing and one area that
we're specifically seeing a lot of that and if invested behind
is. Are sort of B to B marketplaces
that are connecting supply in India and other markets with
demand globally, you know, primarily starting out with the
US and the idea being that you have, you know, with the
disruption from COVID of supply chains, right.
And then the geopolitical issues with China, there's a very
strong movement towards China plus one sourcing, right?
And a lot of the supply base is actually in the Southeast Asia
region and India region, India, Vietnam, Thailand, so on.
And so how do you now connect that supply right with buyers
anywhere in the world? And so we're beginning to see
ideas like that emerge and investing actively behind that.
Again, it's one of the reasons that we're so excited about
continuing to build a global firm because we see ideas like
this. I feel like a lot of the like
India's story that trickles back to Silicon Valley has been know
the Flipkart Wars and like Amazon diving in and all the
investment around that space. What was the impact of that
enthusiasm on sort of the Indian like startup ecosystem and how
did you guys sort of navigate? That, yeah, you know, I think
the first, I mean this is sort of an observation now with
hindsight across various different markets is the first
generation of companies often tends to be copycats, right, for
better or for worse. And that's okay.
You know, we saw in India it would be the online travel
agents in e-commerce, Flipkart, Amazon ride sharing and.
Online booking for shows and movies and so on.
There were the deal a day businesses at one point until
folks realize that it is a different market that doesn't
work there, right? And it's really interesting
because I think investors are equally culpable, right?
Investors will oh, that's an idea that's working in market X.
So I will invest in market Y, except market Y may not support
that particular idea. And then if founders sense that
investors want to invest there, well, guess what, they'll start
a company and they'll go raise money.
And so that's invariably the first set of companies.
And then we started to see, and I EX was an example, another
company that we've invested in and you know very early and has
grown a significant scale is a company called Oyo, which is a
virtual hospitality network. You start seeing founders build
companies with a lot more nuance and understanding of how those
models need to be adapted for the local market.
And I would actually go so far as to say that in most
businesses where there is sort of a real world component or
linkage including ecommerce or ride sharing, the Indian
startups have competed very strongly with what are the best
companies out of the US. So whether it is Flipkart and
Amazon or Ola and Uber or Makemytrip and Expedia.
The Ornokri, which is the job site and early on Monster,
actually what you see is that the Indian companies are winning
or are certainly very strong competitors on the food side,
Swiggy and Zamato, right. And so I think that's been very
energizing for the startup ecosystem where the products
tend to be more fully virtual and catering to, let's say the
80 to 100 million English speaking population.
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, there it will typically be and
is the global products that dominate because there isn't
this real world nuance and component.
Although once you get beyond that English speaking population
again there's probably a need. And you know, we're investors in
a company called Share Chat, which is a social network for
actually none of the English speaking audience.
You know and so I think then what you start seeing is these
businesses that are being built actually that are very unique to
the market and that's really exciting to us because those
businesses will typically also have higher defensibility and
stronger capital efficiency. And so today what is the level
of enthusiasm for like India with the firm.
So you just for context for listener when get into this, you
know you come back eventually to the US to sort of focus on the
firm and investments here, but yeah, you're still very involved
in sort of the strategy. Absolutely.
So what is the sort of approach at the moment or what's your
sense of the market and how much capital you're putting behind
it? I think this is true about
technology. Investing in general, which is
the long arc, is really a one way street right?
This is something that is chatting with one of my
colleagues about earlier In 2000, the digital economy in the
US represented about 6% share of GDP.
You know, today that's at 10.2% and obviously absolute GDP has
grown. This is in the US, right.
So there's just significant growth and it will be no
different in the other markets that we invest behind.
And so you know in India when we think about just overall GDP
growth, population growth, but adoption of the Internet and
digital technologies, it is a one way St. and so kind of over
the right horizon. You know, I think that our level
of excitement remains very high. Although not rose colored for
lots of reasons that we can talk about right and it sort of
reflects why we've paced the way that we have.
That said you know I think anytime you over index on a
point in time and that could have been 2022 or 2021 in
technology you know or 2022 in global technology you know or a
point in time like you know 2223 in India.
You know clearly activity is lower.
I would argue that's really healthy.
You know, 2021. We know was out of control
everywhere, but in shallow markets, Eric, out of control is
even more damaging, right, because the asset price
inflation is even more significant in shallow markets,
right. And sort of the movements are
more jarring. And so I think it's healthy,
it's necessary, it's painful, But again, if I draw from my
experienceinthe.com, boom, you know, in the US and then the
subsequent. You know, bust in 2001, I
remember looking at these numbers.
So the peak of US venture capital in 2000 was about 180
billion. In 2002 that number was 20
billion. Brutal, brutal, right.
And I remember it because it was like, Oh my gosh, I mean this is
when I was at GC kind of early and it's like, do we need to
exist, You know, it just wasn't clear what was investable and
what was going to come next and. You know, and what we know today
is during those periods of capital scarcity, you know, true
innovation happened and true builders were still drawn to
solving problems using technology.
But in that moment in time, I remember it was entirely
possible to think that nothing was happening, right.
And so again, I tend to sort of want to be able to see what's
happening today clearly so that I can be and we can be
intellectually honest. But I think equally importantly,
to be able to pull up and say okay, what is the trend line
here? You know, what's happening?
Where is that going? And to consistently question
whether there's a challenge to that thesis, whether it's
technology more broadly or the development of India's digital
economy and SE Asia's digital economy, do you have a dedicated
amount of capital? On the early stage side, we just
raised Lightspeed India for that, we started investing out
of early this year, which is a $500 million vehicle.
And that reflects our view of how the opportunity has
continued to grow, but we still want to be measured, right.
And then on on the growth side, there's no allocation.
You know, we tend to focus on the best opportunities.
And so, yeah, if you think about the dedicated pool, it's that
500 million, you're probably more of a scholar of this than I
am. But you know US venture has sort
of a history of diving into regions and then sort of pulling
back with you know like Europe like a benchmark I think used to
have a presence in Europe and you know they're all sort you
know in and out like China, India have sort of been hot and
then not. And I totally hear what you're
saying about overtime like technology continues to eat more
markets but then you you need like or at least the traditional
venture ecosystem depends on follow on rounds and other firms
playing and you know obviously you and me but to put it out for
the listener like at this moment in time, you know Sequoia has
just sort of spun off its China and India fund sort of moving
away from a global firm like focusing on those regions.
Yeah. So I guess where are we in this
sort of venture mood in India right now?
Or do you see sort of other investors sort of as dedicated
at this move? Yeah, I can't comment on Sequoia
and I'm not Privy to, you know, sort of the thinking behind
their decisions, but I can sort of comment on how we think about
this. It's really hard to build a
global firm, you know, and it's really hard to attract the right
kind of talent to inculcate again that shared vocabulary and
sense of of mission and values and culture.
And do you see what I see and trust which is so foundational
to our business, It's difficult and I think that's one of the
main reasons I would suspect that firms that have gone
internationally, you know, may subsequently have sort of
retrenched and anytime something is, is really difficult, really
hard. Naturally the right question to
ask yourself is it worth it? You know, and I think that's a
very personal question. In many cases, it's personal at
the individual level, right. Because for a firm to go to
another market does require, you know, someone that has political
capital within the firm at that point in time to put their hand
up and say, I'm going to invest my time and energy, you know, to
do this right. And so that individual will ask
them whether it's worth it, will ask themselves whether it's
worth it. The firm will ask themselves
whether it's worth it. And you know, that argument can
be made well if within a 30 minute drive from Sand Hill Rd.
as was the case not so long ago. If I can, you know, find a set
of companies that are great, why do I need to go beyond that?
Right. And I would argue then that that
thinking would apply to why go to New York, why go to LA,
right. Why go to Europe?
Why go to Lat Am? I mean, why go beyond 30 minutes
of Sandhill Road? And that's what Venture used to
be. Why go to Boston, right?
There was this long period where, you know, it was like
totally cool to just say like, we love San Francisco, Silicon
Valley, like startups and everything else is sort of like
a distraction. And that was something you would
hear pretty regularly, I think, the pandemic.
Blew a lot of that up. You know, all of a sudden people
were excited about Europe. It was easier to do deals
abroad. I mean, obviously there have
been other moments where people were, but I think the pandemic
in particular was like there was a brief period where it was like
everything's global. Everybody can invest everywhere.
Like there's an arbitrage. Like people started, you know,
sending partners out to Europe and now like, I mean.
Some of the, you know, Hoppin is sort of more challenged UI path
didn't sustain like some of the actual companies that were
fueling the narrative didn't sort of live up.
And then at the same time now we're seeing that so much
adventure is in AI and AI is really centralized, you know, in
Silicon Valley and San Francisco.
I don't, yeah. So what do you make of?
Sort of the return to, sort of? Silicon Valley exceptionalism in
in sort of the adventure world at the moment.
Yeah, I don't think there's a right or a wrong answer right.
I think different firms, different people, different
personalities, different strategies, different ambitions,
different levels of hunger and kind of fire to go build
something. Remember again, part of what you
need to even consider in a sense, you know going and doing
something and building something larger and expanding the
cannabis is the same way with a founder, right?
They'll be founders who will build a company that they want
to own 100% of and they're fine if that company grows 15% of a
year and throws off a certain amount of cash.
And then there are some founders who want to change the world and
we're not judging, you know one is better than the other.
We know that for venture Capital One is more of the type that we
would back than the other. And so I think it's the same in
venture which is it's a function of what the firms and the
individuals aspiration is, right.
And if you don't have people that are willing to say, geez, I
have a burning desire to go do this because I see this
opportunity, well then you know that will be as big a part of
the discussion as where a I is or where the opportunity is.
You know what I would tell you is the way we think about it,
Lightspeed is what are we optimizing for, right, because
we've got to have that clarity and that then drives our
decisions. So it's three things.
We want to see access and compete for the very best
opportunities wherever they are, because to generate the best
returns, we think we need to be in the best companies.
And if a significant proportion of those companies are now
outside the US or outside Silicon Valley, then we need to
be able to see them in order to perform right.
Again, part of this is also a choice about scale.
Sure. If you raise $200 million, you
don't need to, but it's also because of learning.
I mean, a lot of what we bring to our companies is because of
the journeys that we've been on, you know, and the different
models that we've seen and how our conceptual models get
challenged because you've seen something somewhere else.
I would argue that actually, you know, markets like India where
there's UPI and Latdam where there's pigs are a little bit,
you know, showing us what the future of fintech could be, you
know, with these very low cost or 0 cost payment rails, right.
I think, you know, we saw virtual goods models and kind
of, you know, monetization models that came out of China,
right, that innovated around kind of how social media
companies could monetize and generate revenue.
So for the learning and the experience, we think that's
important. So we want to see access and
compete for the very best opportunities wherever they are.
The second thing is we want to serve founders and companies in
the most impactful way, right, in a way that moves the needle
for them. So that's sort of another design
principle. And the third is that we want to
attract the best talent to Lightspeed and enable them to do
their best work. Those are the three things we
want to do. Now for any other firm, those
things may be different and that's okay, but this is what
we're building towards. And then the question becomes,
you know, well, do you get distracted, right?
And I think in my mind, anytime I'm presented with this idea of
a trade off, you can either do X or Y.
The first thing at least I want to do is I want to challenge
that trade off. I don't want to just accept it,
right, because then we go deeper and understanding why there is a
trade off. Is there a trade off, you know,
we say to companies, well either you grow fast or you have
compelling unit economics really.
Is that really the choice, You know to build value you have to
do both and the best companies will figure out a way to do both
and some will not. And so for us, I think it is,
you know, it is well, how do we, our enterprise team is we think
one of the best in the business. Well, they are deeply focused on
enterprise, right. They're not getting distracted
by necessarily what the India team is doing, but then
organizationally, how do you create points of intersection so
that we're exchanging ideas, right, and experiences.
So to me that comes to firm design and being very mindful of
the risks and obviously we're still building this, but you
know we. People, is it right now
globally? Yeah, Total headcount will be
north of 200 and I think we have about 70 investors you know
globally across the US, Israel, Europe, India, Southeast Asia,
you know in the China is an affiliate.
So in a sense separate business and so that would be the size
and we've been at it since I think Israel was a first in the
national market in the early 2000s.
So this isn't a new thing for us.
It's not something we've done quickly.
You know, we've not tried to do things overnight.
Are you still gung ho about the China affiliate?
I mean, the tensions there have. You know become more
complicated. Yes, certainly and we have to be
you know mindful of that. I think you know it is a in a
sense of benefit that is an independent entity and I think
sort of their investment strategy primarily centers right
now around sustainability, climate and the EV ecosystem.
And so there's some learning there.
But you know, I would say that it's a good relationship that we
have and you know we are very sensitive to kind of everything
that's happening globally. And you know it'll be something
that we continue to think about what the right answer is.
But you know, as of now it is run separately, but you know
they're friends of ours, just like you know any other firm
would be. And you can collaborate and
share notes you know and learnings about things.
But you know in essence it is a separate business.
Just before I totally move off India and start talking about
like firm construction all that. What do you think are the most
promising areas in terms of India like startup investments
right now or where are you guys deploying sort of the most money
or what sort of the promise? So you know one area that I
mentioned earlier is a lot of these cross-border businesses
beyond software, so cross-border marketplaces, cross-border
payments and in payment infrastructure.
And so if if five years ago, if we talked about what businesses
were getting outside of India, those were primarily SAS
companies. You know, today I would say
there's a lot more in these other categories and I think
that's a very compelling theme. The other is we're beginning to
see a fair amount of activity around the EV ecosystem there
and we've made an initial set of investments.
Like manufacturers or no. Again, we'll think about a
little bit like our India Energy exchange, you know, kind of lens
which is gosh, there's this very compelling trend line, but you
know the bulk of it is not really a venture play, right.
But how do we think about getting venture like exposure.
And so for example, we've invested in a company called
Exponent Energy which is building fast charging batteries
and intellectual property and then a fast charging network in
a sense that's tied to their batteries.
And so think about Intel inside, you know the Exponent battery is
now being adopted by OE M's you know so that their customers
don't have to think. This is primarily in commercial
applications where downtime can be very expensive.
And so you know OEMs are adopting their batteries with an
Exponent battery inside makes it more marketable.
You know those batteries then work at the Exponent franchised
fast charging network. So that's an example, it's
really an IP business you know within the you know the network
being franchised. So that would be an example of
the venture play on that sector. We are looking at financial
technology in particular in Southeast Asia.
We've invested fairly actively in India there as well.
But you know there's a lot to be built in Southeast Asia and
that's an example of you know, kind of global themes, right.
The CFO suite or you know, these financial products for small
businesses, right, with different insertion points.
It could be a credit insertion point or a banking insertion
point. That's an area that we've
invested across geographies in the US and Europe and India and
in Southeast Asia. And wealth management, digital
wealth management is an area that we're looking at too.
What do you think is sort of the biggest strength of the Indian
market right now, the opportunity and the biggest sort
of like blocker or like barrier to making sort of investments at
the moment? It's really interesting
question. I think the biggest strength is
the raw material for our business which is the founders.
You know, it's really interesting.
When we started investing in India, I would have
characterized the typical Indian founder as a somewhat defensive,
risk averse control oriented founder archetype, right, which
is not great for venture capital.
And I would characterize today, you know, the founder archetype
is no different than what we would talk about here, which is,
you know, wanting to change the world really can lean into not
everyone but leans into risk and they've sort of seen this first
wave of venture scale companies get built, right.
And so there's a repeat flywheel and founders really are and
talent is the raw material of our business, right.
And so you know, for me that's the most exciting change instead
of the, if you will, the superpower of the market.
And I will say the work ethic. I mean you've got to realize
that many of these folks or almost all of these folks are
from Indian middle class families.
Now when I say Indian middle class, I do not mean US middle
class, right. I mean, you know, families with
income levels of of $3000 to $15,000, like they're from those
families, insanely driven, you know, and what they've had to
accomplish to get to this point. You know, is it self evidence of
really what's under the hood and the work ethic, you know, the
intensity, the hunger, it's sort of you know, like gives me
whatever, you know, shivers up my spine because there is this
sense of this is their moment, right.
And then obviously the rapid digitization of this country and
the government's commitment to that, you know, rides along with
the development of talent. You know what are maybe some of
the biggest challenges. I think it is the time it takes
to build these companies and the just the challenges in the
economics and and these are related.
So here's a really interesting thing, which is because GDP per
capita is so much lower in a market like India than in the
West, to build a billion dollar revenue or scale company in
India means that operationally you are building an 8 to $10
billion scale company in the US, right?
Because the terms of like people you touch, right, whatever in
terms of the volume of transactions, the number of
people you acquire touch, the number of shipments, the supply
chain scale, just think about that, right.
So the complexity of that, you know it's really high and what
it means is it will take longer and we can't force it beyond a
certain point. Capital forcing capital into
these companies is not necessarily the answer and I
think we've learned that time and again.
So that's one. And then because you know
typically GDP per capita is lower, that translates into a
smaller absolute profit pool, right.
And so you know in terms of the unit economics, it can be tough
and so profitability actually takes longer for many of these
companies especially if you're trying to scale and build
leadership. So I think those are important
challenges that we have to be mindful of as we're company
building. And then as it relates to
investing, look liquidity, this is not a market that is as
developed as the US or China. And so you know we've been very
mindful of this. We've distributed you know, over
a billion dollars of liquidity from the market, you know, but
it's tough to come by. You have to be very switched on
to it. And so I'd say as a venture
investor, you know that's another challenge that we think
a lot about. As a global firm, how much do
you force sort of consistent multiples or you know, you're
just sort of saying the challenge like if you looked at
sort of users, you might think one thing if you tried to model
out, you know. Profitability or whatever, you
would come to a different assessment, but how much is
there an effort to say, oh, we want not think about like, oh,
what this sort of game on the field is in any particular
market. We want to think about what a
company is worth on some global metric or do you end up having
to look at it region by region? So substitute region for sector,
Eric. OK, right.
Would we apply consistent multiples to AI companies?
Mature enterprise software spaces?
Ecommerce, Social media? Right.
The answer is no. You can make some argument that
on a fundamental level, like their ability to eventually
produce cash flow, they should root out.
But I understand sort of in the early stage that becomes like
very difficult and so you have to, yeah, it's sort of I think
there always is nuance. Now should we be aware of that?
Yes. If we see a significant
difference in multiple, should we question why?
Yes. Should we understand why?
Yes. You know, should we apply our
own judgment? Absolutely right.
But you know, one of the things you'll notice is that scaled
companies that become market leaders and have high quality
teams with strong governance in India trade at significant
premiums to their peers almost anywhere in the world.
Interesting. All right.
Now early on, we as a global firm, we just couldn't reconcile
that. We're like, no, it seems too
expensive, seems too expensive. Well, 15 years in, it hasn't
changed, Okay. So then you sort of say why?
Well, there's several reasons. One is that those companies are
so difficult to replicate because of the friction required
to build them and the time that it takes, right, that there's a
certain kind of gravity that those businesses have and
there's a scarcity of those kinds of businesses, right?
And so now when you think about capital allocators in the world
that want to have exposure to those kinds of companies,
there's a limited set, right? And so this is what I mean by we
don't just want to accept it and we'll never just say, well, it's
sort of like in 2021 when we were investing, we weren't
assuming 2021 multiples on exit. You're still questioning it.
You're saying what are normalized multiples.
And OK, let's be eyes wide open that we may be overpaying on the
way in, but let's not think this is normal, right?
Right. Part of what you're saying is
the multiples that are rational to pay to win the deal and the
multiples that you're sort of giving it to assess sort of the
payoff in the long term and you sort of need both.
That's right. And as a result there is a lot
of companies that we will pass on because ultimately it doesn't
make sense you know based on the entry multiple.
But my point was more that, yeah, I think each market, each
sector you know has its own dynamics, right.
Life sciences different, Fintech different, you know enterprise
software different and the same for geographies.
And it's actually that thinking for us Eric that every time sort
of these questions, it's often like we think of geos as these
you can think of, oh geez, it's very different things.
But literally if you if you start substituting sector for
Geo, right, because as venture firms we've had to reinvent
ourselves, we've had to go to new sectors, we've had to
understand new opportunities and often they look different and
we've got to challenge ourselves and adapt our mental models and
then either embrace or reject that's OK.
But we can't say well it's different.
So let's not, you know, at least that's how we think about it.
What motivated you to come back to the US and what is sort of
your focus at the moment? Lightspeed is a special place
and the ability to play a bigger role at the firm is really
exciting. I mean, you know, I think we're
all very lucky to be doing what we do, you know, but to have the
opportunity to kind of continue to help build on the growth of
the firm, you know, the platform that is built so far by the
founders and the team, that's hugely energizing.
And as you're probably hearing, I think there's a lot of kind of
learnings and observations from, you know, my journey and our
firm's journey outside of the US that are abstracted away from
India or a geography. They're really just about
learnings. Having invested, you know and to
think about how do we now bring some of those learnings to the
firm and along with the learnings of everyone else here
and to now build the next phase, you know, in a sense of the firm
and the firm has grown a lot incredible talent.
And so, yeah, just the opportunity to to do more.
How much time are you sort of internally focused versus trying
to do deals? Yeah, I mean if sort of
internally focused is I'll exclude from that let's say kind
of you know serving on investment committees, right,
where obviously that's part of the investment business probably
say it's, you know it's 25 to 30%.
So it's still mostly doing the deals, yeah, you know, serving
on deal teams and partnering with other investors.
But it's yeah, I'd say it's still predominantly, you know,
we are in the investment business and it predominantly is
still investing. But you know 25 to 30% really on
thinking about our business, our firm, our strategy, our people,
our systems, you know and what it takes to operate a firm of
this scale. But we've got to be more
deliberate about it. It won't just happen.
So you know, I think there's been this question percolating
now for a couple years, which is like.
Is venture capital going to follow some of the lessons of
like private equity, You know, it's going to become a more sort
of grown up asset class like maybe a venture capital firm
will like go public someday. They will get much larger.
You know, they're a lot, you know, you could organize
differently there. You know, the way the firms sort
of survive generational transition could change.
Like what do you think is sort of appropriate to take from
private equity and what do you think?
You know, venture capital is just like so different.
It's not the right comparison. One of the things that I'm
thinking about, so one is that, look, you know what you just
said has happened, right? So just look at the data, which
is 2022 venture capital, a UM was roughly 2/3 of total global
private market a UMA decade ago. Just think about that, just
venture capital, a UM in 2022, right.
And by total global private market, a UM, infrastructure
growth, all of that stuff, equity and credit, right.
So that's happened. I don't think, you know, I like
why are we debating it? It's happened now.
Will it shrink 80%? We should debate that.
We don't think it will, but that happened 2000 to 2002, right.
So there's precedent for that. I think technology, and this is
the second point I'd make, the technology in terms of its
importance and emergence as a sector, if you will, in the
mainstream economy has changed relative to 2000.
And that was a sort of share of GDPI mentioned.
It's not this little cottage industry anymore, right.
And so then this brings me to something we talk about here.
Is venture capital the right way to think about our business,
right. So when our business started,
venture capital was synonymous with technology investing,
right, because that was the innovation economy.
There was very small number of these companies.
You know the balance sheets are all intellectual property and
people, so they couldn't raise capital from anywhere else.
And so this type of capital called venture capital, risk
capital emerged to serve that part of the economy, right.
But today that part of the economy is changed radically.
And so then we think about, well, if we're serving our
customers, which are technology companies, should that not be
the lens through which we think about our business and what is
the business? The same way we would want our
founders to be thinking about how their industries are
changing, how their customers are changing and how they can
keep serving those customers better than anyone else can.
How can we keep serving our founders and our customers
better than anyone else can? And I think that if you just
assume that it's only venture capital, well, that's a fine
business, right? But I don't know this is sort
of. Just.
Yeah. No, this is this is more a
technology investor than sort of venture capital or I mean we saw
you know general Catalyst your Old Firm is.
Trying to figure out as third of their own type of debt for fund.
I mean I think there's a lot of talk of you know bigger firms
going out and raising and saying we don't need to invest to you
know a seed fund level returns. We need to prove that we can
consistently outperform, you know the stock market.
And if we can do that, it'll make sense for large investors
to come to us and we're doing a sort of.
Big enough fund size, is that the way you think about it or
what do you mean by saying not venture capital, It's about
different types of investments in different virtual profiles.
So I want to be clear, this is not about, well, let's just
scale to scale. It's working back from what are
the needs of the companies and founders that we serve and
recognizing that the core for Lightspeed still is an early
entry point, right. So, so we invest early even 2/3
of our capital, of the growth capital that we've raised
historically has gone into companies that we were earlier
investors in, right. And so that is, it's back to
that serves those companies and those founders, right.
And then a third is, gosh, you know, unfortunately, we do miss,
you know, companies early. But if we can catch them at the
Series B or the Series C, there's still, you know, the
prices have gotten bigger than they used to be and we still,
you know, want to be a part of those journeys.
So it really is just coming back to none of this means moving
away from early, I would argue. In fact, in our last fun cycle,
Eric, we doubled our commitment to seed through B, right.
And we've increased our early stage investment team and we're
doing more there because we think the opportunity has grown.
But it's just to say well over time, what do those founders
need and those companies need and that's where even as we
think about our platform teams, it's not, you know, we haven't
built an army. We're being very surgical about
what are we hearing from our customers, what is most needle
moving to them. And so it's defining back from
that. And when we do that, I would
just suggest that if you just apply a venture capital lens,
then arguably you will operate the same type of firm that you
would have 20 years ago. But in an industry that is
unrecognizable from 20 years ago now you can do that.
I'm not suggesting you can't. But what we think about is the
industry has shifted, our customers have shifted.
What is it that they want today and how can we provide that?
And then let's not label it like yes, a part of that is venture
capital, but why do we provide talent, capability, You know,
why do we use data and have a, why do we have a data science
group at our firm, You know, why would we build an in house
corporate development group? Well, it's it's because we've
got to think about what's the right business to build in 2023
and looking forward to the next decade.
But would you look at like rather than?
Buying out or I guess it poses so many questions about If it's
not just VC, what are the other things that you would seriously
sort of consider? Yeah, it does.
And I think the key is really to have a true north, right and to
you know anything that we do sort of be leveraging our
capability and we think we're good at okay.
So you know it's interesting you ask about buyouts.
Well, I think there's going to be a way of a venture recaps
that are going to be coming, right.
Those are companies we understand.
Those are domains that we understand, right.
But there's going to be a slightly different kind of
mindset, right, to the work that's going to need to be done
there. Should we be thinking about
that? I think we should, right?
But are we gonna go and next year, are we gonna start doing,
you know, buyouts control deals in IT services companies?
No. There are people that that do
that far better than we ever will.
It's not what we're good at. It's not who we are.
You are thinking about products around sort of the downturn of
unicorns and that what's it, I mean that's like convertible
debt type deals or well not necessarily.
I mean again I think there are structured finance specialists
that we'll do that better than we can.
I mean playing straight, you know converts are fine, but you
know as you get into more structured products there are
folks that it's a different skill set.
You know, we'll still come at it from understanding the domain,
understanding the trend lines at depth, the technical shifts, the
founders, the people, the products.
That's still going to be at the heart of any investing that we
do as opposed to is this more of a, did you make your money
because you've figured out a structure that gives you a
kicker in the event of X, right? Like, that's not what we're
really good at. And so we'll leave that to the
experts to do that. You've sort of alluded, well,
first of all you're not gonna, you haven't announced something
so you're not telling me specifically what you're exactly
you have in mind in terms of the new structure, right?
I just wanna make sure I'm not missing.
Oh no, I'm riffing with you. But you have, is there a
particular like fund or something that you're raising?
No, there's nothing. I mean we our most recent set of
funds are what they are, which is kind of early through, you
know, through late stage. No, I'm riffing with you about
really under this sort of, hey, I think we are a firm that looks
to embrace where the opportunity is going.
And so we think about that and we work back from our customers
and the opportunity. But yeah, this, no, there's
nothing there's. Not one that I have to like go
figure out after this call. No, no, no, no, no.
Philosophical like we're open to yes.
You've sort of talked about how large the retrenchment was
after.com that sort of framed the beginning of the
conversation. You know, to put it another way,
just interest rates have gone up significantly.
You know, we were in a 0 interest rate environment and
now? We're not and nobody knows for
sure what that means for the venture capital asset class.
Like I'm asking you to compare venture capital to private
equity. But like nobody, private equity
is not loved right now because of the interest rate problem.
Yeah. So to put it directly to you, I
mean how do you think venture capital changes in this world of
like you know higher interest rates and can it sustain if
interest rates go up. So, so you know the reason I
would I'd separate this from again in 2000 is that part of
the challenge with the inventory of the set companies that were
built during that boom was a lot of them simply didn't work
right. So the retrenchment was that
there was just a bunch of stuff that was upside down okay.
I think you know today there's certainly some of those, but the
vast majority is there a real companies there arguably they
can't sustain the rates of growth they were operating at if
they have to drive more free cash flow And the change in the
interest rate environment will impact what those companies are
worth, right, as opposed to you know just they're going to go
away, right. And so I think that the set of
companies that obviously you know will have to go through
those value adjustments, those valuation adjustments that will
happen, that has started to happen.
More will happen through the rest of this year and likely
2024 is more of those companies come to market.
As it relates to going forward, you know the opportunity to buy
10 to 25% of companies that are potentially disruptive to very
large markets and over time we'll build companies worth
billions of dollars remains as true now as it did five years
ago as it did 10 years ago and certainly more true than 20
years ago, more true, right. And so then the question is
really about you know, entry discipline on the way in and
doing the building and all the things that we have to do.
You know, arguably you have again a more educated season
talent base, technology is a broader part of the economy.
So I would say that we remain optimistic, you know about the
opportunities for venture capital and it's sort of why I
would say it's different than 2000.
That is not to say that the adjustment will not be painful
for the companies that you know that were funded in a different
environment and in a sense tuned their businesses right, far more
tilted towards growth and the capital efficiency was not great
as a result. And that will need to happen and
that will be a painful adjustment.
Great. Thank you so much for coming on
the show. This was a lot of fun.
Thank you, Eric. Yeah, I enjoyed it too.
Time Flu. That's our episode.
I'm Eric Newcomer. Thanks so much for listening.
Thank you to Bejol Somaya Lightspeed for coming on.
Shout out to Tommy Herron, our Audio Editor, Riley Catsella, my
Chief of staff, anyone, our intern who's been booking a
bunch of guests helping with the podcast and young Chomsky for
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See you next week. Goodbye.
Goodbye.