Claire Zau is a pre-seed and seed investor at Lightspeed. She helps shape the new media strategy and co-hosts Lightwork, Lightspeed’s weekly AI podcast.

To Claire, investing and storytelling are two halves of the same job. She’s drawn to the earliest moments of company formation, and equally drawn to bringing frontier conversations to people who don’t usually have access to them. “Understanding how people react to new technologies makes me a better investor,” she says. “And being close to the frontier makes the content more substantive.”

Before Lightspeed, Claire spent six years investing at GSV Ventures, building her own media platform in parallel and developing an instinct for what resonates with both founders and mass audiences. When Lightspeed reached out, both sides saw the same opportunity: investing and media were converging, and someone sitting at the intersection could do something neither side had quite done before. “I recognized the same ethos at Lightspeed that I hold for everything I put out, depth and substance,” she says. “It’s a firm I’d admired from afar for years.”

Claire’s comfort with ambiguity was built young. She grew up across multiple countries and attended nine schools, constantly learning to read new environments and build trust fast. She also fenced competitively through university, a sport she describes as physical chess. The lesson she carried into her career: don’t let a bad point become a bad match.

Her two longest-running interests, history and science fiction, had always felt like opposites until venture capital turned out to be both. (Her father collects sci-fi props; there’s a Terminator head in the basement.) The work, in the end, is half pattern recognition from how previous cycles played out, half conviction about something that doesn’t exist yet.

Outside of work: dinner parties, voracious reading across history, fantasy, and long-form journalism, and — per the app — a top 1% CitiBike rider in New York City.