From Tel Aviv to the Bay — scaling the Lightspeed enterprise team

— By Arif Janmohamed, Ravi Mhatre, and Tal Morgenstern

Lightspeed has a long history of investing in category leading enterprise startups. Over the past two decades, we have backed entrepreneurs globally and have been fortunate to have partnered with the founders of many iconic companies, including Appdynamics, Zscaler, Nutanix, and Mulesoft. As investors who can support founders from the very earliest stages of inception through their growth and hyper growth stages, we take a hands-on approach to partnering with founders to help scale their companies.

Underlying the Lightspeed platform is our unmatched talent–our investors, our founder success team, our community of past and present founders, as well as our advisors and venture partners. Over the past 20 years, we’ve cultivated a team of partners who have mastered both the art and science of helping founders from various verticals build time-tested companies. And just as every founder is unique, so is each one of our partners.

Today we are pleased to announce we’ve added three new members to our team who we are confident will extend our ability to partner with the strongest and most ambitious enterprise founders.

We are very excited to announce that Mike Carpenter will be joining us as a Venture Advisor. Mike is one of the most legendary go-to-market leaders in enterprise security. It’s a sector where Lightspeed has deep roots and expertise, having partnered with over 30 companies and investing over $1Billion to date.

An entrepreneur at heart, Mike has built and led some of the strongest and most successful enterprise go-to-market teams to success over the past 20 years. Most recently, Mike was President of Global Sales and Field Operations at Crowdstrike, which is now one of the world’s largest and most valuable enterprise security companies.

At Crowdstrike, he scaled the organization and revenues from startup scale to over $1B. He crafted the playbooks, analytics, and processes that led to rapid, scalable growth and repeatable consistency in forecasts and achievement. He built a winning, analytical culture, in which go-to-market teams collaborate to understand how, when and where to invest, in order to capture market share. Prior to Crowdstrike, Mike honed his craft at Tanium and also at Mcafee, where he led North America Sales.

He’s a seasoned executive who understands the motions for enterprise selling across all sectors. As a Venture Advisor, Mike is committed to helping our scaling enterprise portfolio company teams learn, understand and implement best practices around process, playbooks and analytics to scale their organizations repeatedly. He brings an incredible wealth of knowledge, experience and network to the table. In addition to working with us and our portfolio companies at Lightspeed, Mike is also launching a new company that will introduce a unique go-to-market platform that will flip annual operating plans on their head. Look for more updates on this new venture soon!

We are thrilled to have Mike join our other Venture Partners and Advisors, John W. Thompson, former CEO of Symantec and lead independent board director at Microsoft, as well as Mark Anderson, CEO of Alteryx and former President at Palo Alto Networks, in supporting our companies in their journeys to scale.

Expanding the enterprise team

In addition to Mike, we are excited to welcome two new full time investment partners to the enterprise team.

* Yonit Wiseman is the newest partner in our Tel-Aviv office. A former commander in the elite Israeli Army Unit 8200, Yonit brings experience as both an operator and an investor. As an associate at YL Ventures, she worked closely with founders in the cybersecurity community. Her background as a senior solutions engineer at an early stage startup gives her a deep foundation for understanding the technical challenges facing startups across the enterprise stack. Enterprise software and cybersecurity specifically remains a core investment focus of our activity in Israel, where entrepreneurs coming out of technical units of the Israeli Defense Forces emerge with insights about the threat landscape, developing potential solutions that are often years ahead of the commercial market.

* Lisa Han is a 2019 graduate of our Lightspeed Scouts program who will be focusing on early stage enterprise investments. Lisa was most recently an investor at Gradient Ventures, where she invested in early stage SaaS, AI, and fintech startups. She was previously the first business hire at Ramp where she started and led business development and partnerships and helped ink their early channel, accounting and product partnerships. She helped build their business from pre-launch to $100mm in transaction volume. Earlier in her career, while head of business development at Atrium, Lisa helped scale the company from 10 employees and $0 revenues to a team of more than 250 and $20 million+ in revenues. An active angel investor, Lisa’s supported early stage companies such as Secureframe, Rutter, Pave, and Hightouch. She has a keen interest in emerging trends, such as enterprise applications for AI and infrastructure.

Enterprise investments on a global scale

Lightspeed has always looked to partner with strong founders taking on very large markets. We seek out startups hoping to build enduring companies that serve the needs of industries on a global scale. We’ve historically invested in both early and growth-stage companies that eventually become acquired or go public–and our track record speaks to this–they include such iconic companies as Exabeam, Netskope, Rubrik, and ThoughtSpot.

Our new additions continue Lightspeed’s momentum in maintaining a best-in-class enterprise practice. Please join us in welcoming Mike, Yonit and Lisa to the team.