Recommendation media is the new standard for content distribution. Here’s why friend graphs can‘t compete in an algorithmic world. — Last week, Meta announced that the Facebook newsfeed would be shifting towards an algorithmic, recommendation-based model of content distribution. This announcement marked the most recent example of a major platform to formally make this shift, while other major platforms, including Meta’s Instagram, have been headed in this direction for a…

Standards, like RSS for podcasts, have enabled emerging technologies to spread far and wide in the information age by making it easy for them to plug into existing ecosystems. But the blessing of standardization eventually comes at a cost, and innovation suffers as a result. As an example, this is why the podcast format has remained mostly stagnant over its 20 year history. — Technical standards are awesome. Standards help teams save time and money by giving them a common language for how their products can interact with other products, eliminating the need to build each component within a market or re-define how systems communicate with each other. For example, a team building a…

If your AI product is going head to head with an incumbent, their distribution advantage will probably kill your startup…unless you fight back with a different game. — It is Summer 2023, and each day brings a new AI product demo that goes completely viral on Twitter/X or TikTok. Countless people are blown away by the product’s magic-like qualities, powered by GPT4, Stable Diffusion, or some other new language, video, or image model. And while it’s an incredibly…

Why Lightspeed is leading a $4.25M Seed in Granola — Today, Lightspeed is announcing that we’re leading a $4.25M seed investment in Granola, a new, London-based company with a bold vision to build the context-aware workspace of the future. Founded by Chris Pedregal and Sam Stephenson, Granola aims to change the way we all work through tools that deeply understand…

Today, Lightspeed is announcing a new meetup dedicated to bringing together everyone building the future of AI products in New York City — Right now, every startup founder, engineer, designer, and product manager is thinking about how they can leverage AI to take their product to new heights. And while there are plenty of places online for people to gather, learn, debate and share new ideas, we believe there’s a need for an…

Why Lightspeed is leading a $43M Series B in Tome — Today, Lightspeed is announcing that we’re leading a $43M Series B in Tome, the AI-powered storytelling format and the fastest-growing productivity company to reach 1M users. It’s been thrilling to watch just how fast Tome has ascended and become beloved by so many people, so quickly. But why is this…

But that doesn’t mean you’ve found product market fit. — I’m about 4 months into my job as a partner at Lightspeed after 15 years building products (including Anchor, which I co-founded and then sold to Spotify) and angel investing in 50+ startups. But while I’m still new to the job, I’ve already noticed a number of interesting trends throughout…

AI is letting us live out alternative realities on the digital platforms where we already spend our time — Much has been said of, written about, and invested in the “Metaverse.” For the uninitiated, the Metaverse is a conceptual version of the future in which we’re all interacting — for work, play, and everything in between — in an alternate version of reality that’s powered by VR, AR, BCI…

What Elon Musk might do next after last week’s messy subscription rollout, and why the reports of Twitter’s death are greatly exaggerated — If you’ve spent any time on Twitter lately, you may have the impression that the platform is experiencing a rapid demise. It feels like there have been a near infinite number of tweets, blog posts, and op-eds in major publications over the past week declaring the end of the social…