Congratulations to The Honest Company on its Initial Public Offering — Startups rarely have a straightforward path. We often talk about funding missionaries, not mercenaries. In order to find success, it’s crucial to have a belief in a better future, not just for the company, but for customers and the world. The Honest Company is the embodiment of a mission-driven company…

Income inequality is at all-time highs in the US, and it is increasingly tough to be on the wrong end of that spectrum. About half of Americans are living paycheck-to-paycheck, and are one lost paycheck away from financial hardship. …

Today Affirm is going public. It’s the next step in the company’s journey, and the culmination of many years of hard work. It’s also an exciting day for us at Lightspeed, having co-led their first institutional round of financing back in 2013. From the beginning, Max has been clear in…

Americans love to watch football. The TV show with the highest ratings of the season is Sunday night football. Second highest is Thursday night football. Third highest is … you guessed it, Monday night football.

Lightspeed has been investing in the crypto ecosystem since 2014, when we led the first venture round in Blockchain.com. Crypto opportunities since then have largely fallen into two buckets: Crypto money (trading, speculating, remittance, store of value, medium of exchange, payments) and Crypto tech (applications of distributed ledgers). …

Who can forget the “Rent Is Too Damn High” memes of the 2010s? What started as a political party became part of pop culture through SNL and TMZ when the straightforward message struck a national chord. Unfortunately, the affordable housing crisis has only gotten worse since then: A renter working…

Announcing Lightspeed’s Investment in Solve. — Three of the ten most downloaded podcasts are true crime; Serial, Dr. Death and S-town. Four of the ten longest running scripted TV shows are too; Law and Order, Law and Order: SVU, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and NCIS. The second most popular genre of books is Mystery/Crime. …

When we’re not investing, we’re obsessing over hiring. — At Lightspeed, we know our ability to help founders build enduring businesses is directly related to the strength of our team. As we grow the scope of our investments across geography, sector and stage, we need to also grow our team. In order to better serve entrepreneurs, we’ve welcomed new…

Most new brands today will choose to launch online. Online, it’s easier to test and iterate to find the sweet spot in each of the 5 Ps: product, pricing, positioning, place and promotion. In the past when new, scaleable customer acquisition channels emerged (whether the portal deals of the mid…