Last week I sat down with Caroline Fairchild, LinkedIn’s New Economy Editor, at the Shoptalk Conference in Las Vegas.
We covered a lot of ground — from the future of retail and e-commerce to trends in startup investing. I wanted to share portions of our conversation here, starting with what I’ve learned from working with a once in a decade company — Snapchat.
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Caroline: You were the first investor in Snapchat. What do you think you saw that others didn’t?
Jeremy: To some extent I was lucky, as I met the company at a point when they were hitting very rapid growth and showing strong engagement and retention, yet were still small. The founders told a compelling story about why the growth was happening and they convinced us that there was a real sea change in the way that millennials wanted to communicate with each other. And they couldn’t pay their server bills. So we offered to help. In addition to investing, we also provided them with their first office space, introduced them to their law firm, and helped with the hiring of their first two engineers who were alumni of our Summer Fellowship program. But the credit for the growth in the company belongs to Evan [Spiegel] and Bobby [Murphy], not to any of the investors.
Caroline: What about that success do you feel can or cannot be replicated in future investments?
Jeremy: Snapchat is a special company, and its founders, Evan Spiegel and Bobby Murphy, are special people. Companies like that come along once a decade or so. Most venture capitalists would be lucky to see one company like that in their portfolio, so hoping to replicate it in a future investment might be too much to ask! But one thing that I always look for that I saw in Snapchat is the high proportion of young women in the initial user base. Young women are the group that shape and predict popular culture. What they do today, many will do in the future.
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