Nikita Bier is joining Lightspeed
Every consumer founder can agree: finding distribution for your product may be the single greatest challenge startups face. And so today, we at Lightspeed are thrilled to welcome Nikita Bier to our partnership as a Product Growth Partner. In this newly created role, Nikita will help Lightspeed founders across all categories fine tune their products for maximum virality and breakout distribution. Known as one of the world’s experts on consumer, social, and growth, Nikita joins Lightspeed’s global consumer practice to help portfolio companies grow their businesses just as he has for his own startups and countless others he’s advised or backed himself as an angel investor.
Lightspeed first met Nikita during his founder journey, when he was building and growing his own consumer apps, something he began perfecting more than a decade ago. Eventually Nikita achieved breakout success with his two companies: first TBH, a social product company he co-founded, grew, and eventually sold to Meta in 2018. Then, Nikita repeated this success with another company, Gas, which he also co-founded and sold to Discord. Throughout both of these experiences, Nikita perfected the arts of viral product growth, consumer product development, and driving maximum attention to his products through his loyal legion of followers on X, currently in the hundreds of thousands and climbing.
More recently, Nikita realized other founders could also benefit from the lessons he learned through growing his own products, and he began consulting, advising, and angel investing in startups of all kinds (all of which he will continue to do independent of his new role with Lightspeed). In fact, Nikita has helped or invested in virtually every startup that reached the top of the App Store charts over the last 5 years, such as BeReal and Locket.
Now, Nikita will bring that same level of expertise to Lightspeed. In his own words: “I got to know Michael Mignano and the Lightspeed team over the last couple years, when I started building Gas. We shared a similar background as consumer builders. Lightspeed has also built an incredible brand among founders—and their portfolio has produced many generational consumer products. So when Michael suggested we all all work together at Lightspeed, I jumped at the opportunity.”
At Lightspeed, Nikita will be leveraging his expertise on growing consumer social apps and directly working hands-on with portfolio companies across all sectors, including Consumer, Enterprise, Healthcare, Fintech, Growth, and more. We can’t wait to see the next level of growth that Lightspeed portfolio companies are able to achieve through the brilliance of Nikita’s support.
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