Barry Eggers on How Lightspeed Uses Learning Investments to Find the Next Big Thing

October 24, 2025

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About the Guest

Barry Eggers

Founding Partner of Lightspeed Venture Partners

Barry Eggers is a Founding Partner of Lightspeed Venture Partners, a global venture capital firm with over $25 billion in assets under management and more than 500 portfolio companies. He co-founded the firm in 2005 alongside Ravi Mhatre, Peter Nieh, and Chris Schaepe, building Lightspeed into one of the most respected names in enterprise, consumer, health, and fintech investing. Barry’s focus spans information technology infrastructure, analytics, networking, and emerging cloud platforms. Before Lightspeed, he worked in the M&A group at Cisco Systems and started his venture career at Weiss, Peck & Greer. He holds a B.A. in Economics from UCLA and an MBA from Stanford.

Episode Overview

How can venture investors consistently identify the next breakout market?

Barry Eggers, Founding Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, reveals the firm’s thesis-driven approach to venture capital of using early “learning investments” to test conviction, then scaling fast into emerging markets before the crowd arrives.

In this episode, Barry shares insights from Lightspeed’s foundational bets in enterprise tech, Snap’s billion-dollar rise, and how the firm built multi-company portfolios around early themes like flash storage and analytics.

Key highlights include: