Claire Zau
@clairejyz • 7,843 subscribers
partner @lightspeedvp, prev @gsvventures @stanford @penngse 📚👩🏻💻🚀 (accidentally "zauey" on the interwebs - 400k)
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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 Zau381,617 Aufrufe • vor 6 Monaten
"what is bending spoons" in 2 minutes (from a few weeks ago)
Claire Zau85,227 Aufrufe • vor 3 Monaten
got early access to the VR glasses, my unfiltered thoughts: - first few min is a learning curve (swipe vs click, eye tracking as navigation). after that, navigation is surprisingly intuitive - ergonomics better than expected: nose bridge and eye position are adjustable, a lot more comfortable than vision pro. Big step up on price and weight too - definitely a lot less like a helmet and more like glasses - eye and gesture tracking is surprisingly accurate. you look at a target and pinch to select, no controllers - was skeptical of the surface keyboard (any table becomes a keyboard and trackpad) but it worked and was able to write an instagram comment directly from the glasses! - I'd personally still default to voice for most navigation (same way I do on a smart TV vs typing) - games were genuinely fun! Also watched a full Avengers scene and James Cameron Billie Eilish piece in full immersion - courtside sports is an interesting wedge - watched highlights from a Knicks game from floor seats. Wonder if "courtside for everyone" becomes new revenue line for leagues. Live sports is further push into entertainment instead of pure gaming (quest) - passthrough to mixed reality is smooth - could seamlessly talk to people in the room while looking at screens - natural handoff to go from coding on a laptop, then switching to coding on multiple screens in VR - didn't get to try the hologram video calls still have questions around: - is this an entertainment, productivity, or work device? Meta is pitching all three (cinema, workspace, console) - the cord and battery puck are still present, though the puck is light and fits in a pocket. Neither is that disruptive, but it's hard to picture people walking around and being active in these - my personal read is entertainment first, probably light work on the side. there's still slight app latency and 3-hour battery so probably movies, sports, and games vs deep work. I can see myself buying this as a hobbyist for entertainment, but not as my core work device yet all and all an awesome engineering feat and the best case of AR/VR I've ever tried so far - huge credit to the team! I'm still not convinced we'll all be walking around with computers on our eyes just yet, but the first time I can see the path + a real leap forward launching spring 2027 🕶️🚀
Claire Zau27,800 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
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 Zau53,476 Aufrufe • vor 3 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 Zau17,946 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
NEW EPISODE: Snap Launches Specs, Bezos’s $41B AI Startup & The SpaceX Cursor Deal 🚀 Lightspeed Partner James Ephrati also joined us to walk through how he thinks the VC playbook has changed as giant companies compound faster (not slower!) 🕶️ Are Snapchat specs the future of wearable computing? 🤖 Jeff Bezos bets on physical AI (and why it might be the next industrial revolution) 🚀 SpaceX goes public + acquires Cursor - what does it mean when the biggest companies just keep getting bigger? 💰 How founders should think about venture in a world dominated by mega companies We’ll be back next Monday with more - full YT and Spotify link below Josh Machiz
Claire Zau35,655 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
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 Zau23,666 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
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 Zau16,100 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
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 2 Monaten
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 3 Monaten
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 2 Monaten
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 2 Monaten
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 Zau14,093 Aufrufe • vor 5 Monaten
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