Marni Blake
1.1K posts
@marniblake
VP of Production at Lightspeed. From TV to VC.
talked with @BusinessInsider about making documentaries in Silicon Valley
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_lsvp, @bsomaia , and @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!
Eric Weinstein: Tsunami of disruption is coming for the average person
this is pretty cool some MIT students turned a building into a giant playable game of Tetris on Saturday at midnight rigged each window with LEDs MIT students are on a diff level
“Most people don’t know how to reach out and touch the healthcare system when they have a problem” - @doctronic Co-Founder Dr. Adam Oskowitz Adam and Co-Founder @mattpavelle joined Lightspeed Partners @f_fatemi21 and Brenton Fargnoli, M.D. on The Investment Memo this week to discuss the AI health platform they’re building. Doctronic was created to bridge the accessibility gap in healthcare with a free-to-use platform that uses peer-reviewed medical sources to provide personalized health information. Check out the video below to hear more about Doctronic. 0:00 – The Healthcare Access Crisis 1:00 – Introducing Doctronic’s Co-Founders 2:07 – How Adam and Matt Met 4:17 – The “Front Door” to Healthcare 5:59 – Early Days and Product-Market Fit 8:27 – Tackling the Three Barriers of Consumer Health 10:59 – Technology Under the Hood 16:55 – The Regulatory Breakthrough 22:21 – Early Results and Human Doctor Infrastructure 28:36 – Hypergrowth from Series A to Series B 32:45 – Why Patients Keep Coming Back 37:59 – The Co-CEO Dynamic and Founder Fit 45:39 – The Future of AI Native Care
we've reached peak journalism: Vanity Fair wanted to write a feature story about Dario but never got an interview so just asked Claude to make it up
Naboo Founder & CEO on scaling internationally: “Honestly, it’s good that we didn’t know about this… otherwise we would probably have not done it.” “We started with the UK. Everybody was telling us not the UK.” “For the first six months we were just growing and not seeing any problem.” “Then suddenly you realize that you're managing bookings in a different currency… you're not hedging this currency… you need to be compliant with all the regulation.” “Every single time we have opened a country… Spain, Germany, the Benelux, the US, Canada… it has become more and more easy for us as we learn from the past experience.” —Maxime Eduardo on The Investment Memo with @antoine_moyroud
The best ideas move fast. The right environments help them move even faster. Last week, we welcomed founders and leaders to reconnect with nature in beautiful Park City, Utah, for the Ideas Move at Lightspeed Retreat: two days of conversations, connection, and reflection. One highlight of the weekend came from a very special guest, legendary Duke Basketball Coach Mike "Coach K" Krzyzewski, who shared powerful insights about leadership and teamwork. Thanks to everyone who joined us for an inspiring few days of collaboration!
"Knowledge is power." —@MichaelOvitz
“Every marketer on the planet is going to care about how AI talks about their brand.” Discovery, as we know it, is beginning to shift. This week on The Investment Memo, @tryprofound Co-Founder & CEO @thejamescad joins Lightspeed partner @sach_pat to discuss this new era of marketing. Led by Co-Founders James Cadwallader and @dbabbs, Profound sits at the forefront of empowering teams by leveraging AI agents and organic traditional search. 0:00 Introduction: The Future of Brand Visibility 1:49 The Gold Business: James's First Entrepreneurial Lesson 7:14 Meeting Dylan and the South Park Commons Origin 13:43 The "Big Short" Moment: Spotting the AI Search Shift 18:03 Profound's Analytics Wedge and the Fortune 500 23:10 Building Agentic Workflows and Content Creation 27:14 Culture, High Agency, and Hiring Young Talent 30:52 Defining a Category and the Jensen Huang Philosophy 32:53 Advice to Young Founders and Final Thoughts
“Every marketer on the planet is going to care about how AI talks about their brand.” Discovery, as we know it, is beginning to shift. This week on The Investment Memo, @tryprofound Co-Founder & CEO @thejamescad joins Lightspeed partner @sach_pat to discuss this new era of marketing. Led by Co-Founders James Cadwallader and @dbabbs, Profound sits at the forefront of empowering teams by leveraging AI agents and organic traditional search. 0:00 Introduction: The Future of Brand Visibility 1:49 The Gold Business: James's First Entrepreneurial Lesson 7:14 Meeting Dylan and the South Park Commons Origin 13:43 The "Big Short" Moment: Spotting the AI Search Shift 18:03 Profound's Analytics Wedge and the Fortune 500 23:10 Building Agentic Workflows and Content Creation 27:14 Culture, High Agency, and Hiring Young Talent 30:52 Defining a Category and the Jensen Huang Philosophy 32:53 Advice to Young Founders and Final Thoughts
