Barry Eggers on How Lightspeed Uses Learning Investments to Find the Next Big Thing

Technovation with Peter High (CIO, CTO, CDO, CXO Interviews)

How can venture investors consistently identify the next breakout market?

Barry Eggers, Founding Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, reveals the firm’s thesis-driven approach to venture capital of using early “learning investments” to test conviction, then scaling fast into emerging markets before the crowd arrives.

In this episode, Barry shares insights from Lightspeed’s foundational bets in enterprise tech, Snap’s billion-dollar rise, and how the firm built multi-company portfolios around early themes like flash storage and analytics.

Key highlights include:

• Lightspeed’s strategy for placing early bets to gain market insight
• The story behind the firm’s $500K Snap investment and $1B+ return
• Why EQ matters more than technical depth in founder partnerships
• How globalization and secondaries have reshaped venture economics
• What it takes to defend against competition in the AI era