Claire Zau
@clairejyz • 7,375 subscribers
partner @lightspeedvp, prev @gsvventures @stanford @penngse 📚👩🏻💻🚀 (sometimes zauey on the interwebs)
Shorts
Videos
I'm beyond excited to announce that I’m joining Lightspeed as a Partner on the early-stage investing team and helping to build everything they're doing in new media. I've spent the last six years investing in early-stage companies, and the last year building a media platform in parallel. What started as a side quest has reached 350,000+ followers and millions of viewers a month. For me, investing and storytelling have always been two halves of the same job. This work has put me in rooms with incredible founders, researchers, and operators - many of whom have become close friends, collaborators, and early stage bets. There's so much happening at the frontier right now, and the media platform has given me a way to be in those conversations early (and to bring the people I admire most into a wider audience). When Lightspeed reached out, we saw the same opportunity. Venture and media are converging, and the next generation of great firms will need to show up differently: reaching founders and builders before they've even started a company, and being the place where people first get excited about what's happening in tech. With more than $50 billion in AUM, Lightspeed has been building alongside founders at the frontier of technology for decades. It's a firm I've admired for years since I started investing - for its intellectual rigor, its long-term conviction, and the way it approaches company building. I’m excited to join a team that brings real depth and substance to its work, and I hope to bring that same ethos to everything I put out. Thank you to Ravi Mhatre, Bejul Somaia , and Josh Machiz for believing in this vision and trusting me to help build it. I’m so excited to see what we do together. If you're an early-stage founder, building or thinking about starting something, or just curious about this ecosystem - please reach out. My DMs are open and I’d love to chat!
Claire Zau381,018 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
BREAKING: INSIDE TEMPORAL'S $550M SERIES E AT A $12.55B VALUATION Samar Abbas (co-founder and CEO of Temporal) joined Anoushka Vaswani and me to break down the infrastructure layer that keeps agents running through failures. 🔄 A company founded in 2019 - years before "agent" was a category 📈 $250M+ ARR growing 200%+ YoY, and net dollar retention above 200% since February. ⚡ Why agent demos die in the real world 🧱 Durable execution in four lines of code 🔌 Temporal Nexus, and where agent-to-agent might go next Samar Abbas Temporal Lightspeed
Claire Zau17,671 Aufrufe • vor 12 Tagen
PROFOUND’S $180M SERIES D AT A $1.8B VALUATION James Cadwallader (Co-Founder and CEO of Profound) unpacks the raise and where Profound could go from here. 📊 The fastest-growing AI marketing platform, used by one third of the Fortune 100 and more than 16% of the Fortune 500 🤖 What AEO means now that agents are consuming more content 🛠️ The rise of the "marketing engineer" 🚫 Why James thinks dashboards could be dead in five years FULL SEGMENT BELOW James Cadwallader Sachin Patel Lightspeed
Claire Zau13,350 Aufrufe • vor 11 Tagen
What actually goes into a data center? Guru Chahal🇺🇸 whiteboards the entire stack - across land, power, cooling, storage, networking, compute - and shares where we're seeing the most interesting innovation + startup opportunities → Base Power: virtual power plants from residential batteries → Periodic Labs: using AI to discover new materials - ones that run cooler, conduct better, and waste less power → Nexthop AI: network switches that are 10–15% more power efficient than what's on the market → Unconventional AI: AI chips modeled after how the human brain works, targeting 100–1,000x better power efficiency → Ricursive Intelligence: AI to design chips. Today a first chip costs $100M and takes 2–3 years. They want to build in months, at a fraction of the cost → better materials → cheaper experiments → more chip designs → more efficient chips → less power → and what happens when you package all of this into a satellite and put it in orbit 🚀 As trillions of dollars of infrastructure flow into building the "AI factory", every layer of the intelligence economy is being rebuilt at once. Who are we missing? We'd love to meet if you are building somewhere on this stack.
Claire Zau49,873 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
INSIDE MISTRAL'S $3.5B SERIES D - LARGEST EQUITY ROUND IN EUROPEAN TECH HISTORY Antoine Moyroud 🇫🇷 has been part of the journey since the seed check and James Ephrati currently sits on the board. Lightspeed has invested in every round since day one. They joined us for our first ever Lightwork spotlight to break down the journey. 🤝 How a math conference led to the seed check 🧭 What "sovereign AI" means 🌍 The gap between China's open models and America's closed ones ⚡ The gigawatt-by-2030 compute buildout 🔮 What's next for Mistral AI
Claire Zau15,425 Aufrufe • vor 15 Tagen
THIS WEEK IN TECH: Tim Cook hands over the keys to John Ternus after adding $4T in market cap to Apple, Meta pays $18B in the biggest child-safety settlement ever brought against a tech company, and 21 banks huddle to launch a dollar stablecoin. So fun to cohost with our Fintech Partner Sam Eisler and to hear her takes on all of it + a very useful primer on stablecoins and why they matter. What we covered this week: 1:45 Tim Cook's Legacy: $350B To $4.6T In 15 Years 4:00 John Ternus: Apple's 8th CEO 10:33 Meta's $18 Billion Teen Safety Settlement 13:10 Meta's Open Letter to TikTok and YouTube 17:52 21 Banks Explore A Joint Stablecoin 18:28 What Is A Stablecoin? FULL EPISODE LINK BELOW Lightspeed
Claire Zau16,137 Aufrufe • vor 22 Tagen
For 30 years, nobody really cared about backup. It was IT plumbing - a compliance checkbox, something you set up and never touched again. The last place you'd expect a founder to go in 2024, at the peak of the AI boom. Which is exactly when Ofir Ehrlich - who sold CloudEndure to Amazon - decided to start @Eon_io_inc. Because it turns out backup is one of the most important surfaces in enterprise AI. Every version of every record a company has ever created sits there, and it's locked in the archive nobody wanted to own. He joined us on Lightwork to explain what Eon is building: 🚀 His path as a 4x founder and why he’s building with his best friends (including a co-founder of 26 years he avoided working with until the co-founder's mom overruled them both) 🖥️ Why "the cloud is just someone else's computer" - and who's actually on the hook when things go wrong 💸 The 10-30% of billion-dollar cloud bills that nobody inside the enterprise is even accountable for 🗄️ Why retrieving one 5 year old record can take a 30 person SWAT team - and why some enterprises have teams of hundreds doing only this 🤖 How Eon built a backup product and kept getting forwarded to the AI team 🔒 The real blocker on enterprise AI: owners scared of what a model might surface once it can query their data Full episode on your favorite podcast platform 🎧 Lightspeed
Claire Zau23,465 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Six health insurance brokers are retiring for every one entering the field. Just as the biggest wave of Americans in history ages into Medicare. Will Johnson, CEO and Co-founder of Gyde, shares how the company is using AI to modernize insurance agencies. Over its first seven months, the company rapidly acquired seven other companies. He joined us on Lightwork to discuss: 🚪 Every agency owner has traditionally had two options: run it alone until you retire, or sell and watch it get absorbed. Will is building a third. 📞 Why brokers often burn all of Q4 dialing thousands of clients by hand, and why only a fraction of those calls ever needed a person. 🔁 The playbook - what he looks for in an agency, and what he changes in the first 90 days after buying one. 🤖 Gia, their AI agent, takes the first call, so the broker walks in already knowing what the client needs. 📉 Why the AI jobs debate is aimed at the wrong problem. In most of the real economy, the constraint is too few workers, not too many. Thank you so much for coming on the show! Lightspeed Josh Machiz Brenton Fargnoli
Claire Zau11,178 Aufrufe • vor 25 Tagen
AI NEWS THIS WEEK: Robots beat human world records at the Humanoid Olympics, Unitree rings the bell in Shanghai, and Google bids $10M for Spirit Airlines' data in bankruptcy court. Plus we break down Skild AI's S1 model: their new robotics foundation model that can learn from one example. 0:57 Robots Break Three World Records In Beijing 4:30 Why Grabbing Beans Is Harder Than Beating Usain Bolt 9:14 Unitree Goes Public — And Why The Supply Chain Sits In China 12:29 Skild AI's S1: Learns Tasks With Only 1 Video 16:20 The ChatGPT Moment For Robotics 21:04 Google Bids $10M For Spirit Airlines' Data 23:35 What's Valuable Inside A Digital Estate FULL EPISODE LINK BELOW Lightspeed Josh Machiz
Claire Zau10,254 Aufrufe • vor 29 Tagen
NEW EPISODE: More than 1,000 researchers want to pace the frontier, the financing structure behind OpenAI and Meta’s new data centers, and the debate around AI wearables. Joe Diamond (CEO of Axonius) breaks down the growing trend of “Shadow AI”: why nobody can account for how many AI agents are actually running inside the company and the risks at scale. 0:00 Pacing The Frontier 9:15 The $500B Nvidia OpenAI Superintelligence Land Grab 14:00 Compute As A New Asset Class 18:30 Nvidia x SSI 22:00 Granola Comes To The Apple Watch 26:45 Session-Based vs Ambient Recording 31:30 Axonius CEO: What Is Asset Intelligence? 45:00 Joe Diamond from CMO To CEO In Two Years 51:00 What Securing An Org Could Look Like In 5-10 Years 59:00 Three New Deals: Andera, CuspAI, Harmony FULL EPISODE BELOW Josh Machiz Lightspeed
Claire Zau16,478 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
Beyond excited to announce that Lightwork is officially live! 🚀 Every week, Josh Machiz and I are sitting with guests and experts across the ecosystem to make sense of all the noise. This is our place to think out loud together, learn, and externalize all of the incredible things happening in this space right now. We couldn't think of a better person to kick things off with than Ravi Mhatre New episode every week - we hope you enjoy and can't wait to hear what you think! Full YT link below
Claire Zau13,948 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
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