Start Spreading the News: Lightspeed has a new home in New York City

A year and a half ago, I joined Lightspeed to build out our fintech practice and to plant the Lightspeed flag in New York City. Today, I am thrilled to announce Lightspeed’s first ever Manhattan office. While our space at 799 Broadway signifies an increased investment in the local ecosystem, the truth is that our partners have been investing in New York City for over two decades and this is just another step in our commitment to the fast-growing tech ecosystem in New York.

More importantly, the other big news is that the team here is growing. In addition to our New York City office news, I am incredibly excited to announce that I will be joined in New York by our newest Partner joining the consumer team, Michael Mignano.

Michael joins us from Spotify, where he was previously Head of Talk, helping turn its music service into the world’s leading platform for audio streaming. He joined Spotify via the acquisition of Anchor, a startup he co-founded in 2015 which democratized the creation, distribution, and monetization of podcasts. Michael is renowned as a consummate product thinker and has gone through the journey himself of founding, building, exiting, and scaling a dominant creator platform. As an early stage investor and advisor, he’s also helped consumer companies like Cameo, Sandbox VR, and Stir come into their own. We know founders will love working closely with Michael.

“We first met Mike many years ago when he was building Anchor. At the time, his intellectual rigor, strong product intuition, and contagious passion for building stood out to us. We were delighted to watch him grow as a CEO and eventually an executive at Spotify through its acquisition of Anchor. Mike has lived the entire entrepreneurial journey, including all the requisite ups and downs, and is broadly respected as one of the world’s preeminent experts on products for creators and consumers. After years of courtship, we are delighted to finally call Mike our Partner and have him join the consumer team at Lightspeed.”

– Alex Taussig, Partner at Lightspeed

In addition to Michael joining Lightspeed, we’ll also have other Lightspeed team members, including James Ephrati and Adrian Radu from the Lightspeed Growth team who are transitioning to New York City as their base in the coming months, and Mark Xu who is focused on Lightspeed’s growing blockchain investment practice.

While the new office represents our first foray into commercial real estate in the Big Apple, we’re no strangers to New York. In 1997, Lightspeed’s predecessor firm was among the earliest investors in New York City-based Doubleclick, one of the New York City tech ecosystem’s first IPOs and biggest acquisitions. It was acquired by a private equity firm for $1.1 billion in 2005, and a few years later by Google for $3.1 billion.

After more than two decades of investing in east coast startups, we are privileged to play a pivotal role in the development of nearly 60 other companies based in New York City, including Alloy, Daily Harvest, Grafana, Giphy (acquired by Meta), Offchain Labs, and Zola. In aggregate, we estimate these companies have created over 5,000 jobs locally and have raised over $3.5 billion of capital.

We’ve also enjoyed collaborating with many of the city’s most visionary venture firms that have put their mark on the New York City tech community from its earliest days, including Bain Capital Ventures, Bessemer, Box Group, Firstmark, First Round, Primary, and USV.

Why New York? Why now?

The New York City tech ecosystem is accelerating into overdrive and we’re excited to be part of it.

A bit of history…the Global Financial Crisis was a paradigm shift moment in the New York tech ecosystem. In the years following the GFC, technologists in New York that had previously spent years building products for Wall Street and Financial Institutions rotated their attention and efforts to e-Commerce (Etsy), Social (Tumblr, Foursquare), and AdTech (Admeld). The early 2010s saw New York City tech further crescendo towards becoming a marquee startup hub with the launch of TechStars New York City, large public internet companies (Google, Facebook, Apple) launched or further built out their New York City presence.

In the last 5–6 years, along with the emergence of fintech in New York City, IPOs (Datadog, Oscar, DigitalOcean, UiPath, MongoDB) and M&A (Jet.com, Flatiron Health) put more marquee exits on the New York City map, which further solidified Manhattan as a keystone of the global technology economy.

From 2020 to 2021, New York City startups enjoyed a more than 300 percent increase in venture funding, driven largely by Fintech. Last year, investments soared to $55 billion across 1000+ deals, putting the city second only to San Francisco in dollar volume, according to CB Insights.

Combine this momentum with the COVID induced talent migration from SF to New York City, further cementing New York’s strong talent pool — it is no wonder so many founders and investors are spending more time in New York City and why Lightspeed is excited to be here.

As a global venture firm, we’ve been operating across multiple continents and office locations for over a decade. During the pandemic, we experimented with new ways of working and collaborating across borders. Over time, we incorporated the best practices of remote work into our internal operations, allowing us to operate with more efficiency as a distributed company. Yet, somehow our physical office strategy was still organized around a single office in Silicon Valley on Sand Hill Road. We knew we could be more effective if we aligned our physical presence with our global investment footprint.

We’re now increasing our density in a handful of global cities that are leading the market in different niches — from London to Singapore and beyond — similar to the way New York has traditionally driven innovation in finance. Adding a physical presence in New York City will not only increase the depth of our local relationships, but also directly connect us to nearly every major city in Asia, Europe, and Latin America with direct flights from JFK or Newark.

We view New York City as the bridge that connects our domestic operations to the rest of the world. When international entrepreneurs visit the US, they’re most likely landing in New York — and we’ll be there to greet them.

Despite the amazing communications technology we use every day, relationships are built in person. Having a physical presence in places that matter is an essential part of how we do business. We need to meet people where they are. That’s another important lesson the pandemic has taught us: the irreplaceable value of human-to-human connections.

New York is the city that never sleeps and fortuitous run-ins across the five boroughs is one of the things that makes New York so special. You can’t experience those moments without setting down proper roots. New York is a living city. There is no place else like it…and being here in person matters.

If you can make it there…

While Michael is the second partner in our new New York City office, he certainly won’t be the last. We are also actively hiring a Fintech Investor, New York City and will be looking to add more teammates here in the very near future as we build out our new office, in the areas of Fintech, Crypto, and Growth among others. It’s an exciting new chapter in Lightspeed’s global expansion, and we’re really only just getting started.

Stay tuned for more big news coming shortly…