20VC: Lightspeed Partner, Merci Victoria Grace on The Future of Collaboration Tools, Bundling vs Unbundling, Synchronous vs Asynchronous & What It Means To Productise The S*** Out of Venture
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 8 June 2020
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Merci Victoria Grace is a Partner @ Lightspeed Venture Partners, one of the valley's leading venture firms of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Snapchat, Mulesoft, Affirm, AppDynamics and more. As for Merci, prior to entering the world of venture, Merci spent 3 years at Slack including as Head of Growth where she grew the growth team to over 50 people and drove DAU's from 500K to 5M in under 2 years. Merci is also the Founder of Women In Product a global community of incredible women in product management.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Merci made her way into the world of venture having led the growth team at Slack for close to 3 years?
2.) Merci has been working to productise venture, so what core elements of venture need productising? What systems and tools has Merci put in place to create a product around these processes and methods? What have been the biggest challenge in the attempt to productise VC?
3.) How does the decision-making process look like at Lightspeed? How does Merci use post mortems to help her improve post having lost a deal? How does she structure those post-mortems? What have been some of the core takeaways? What internal tech stack does LSVP run itself on?
4.) How does Merci see the future of the collaboration tools market? Are we entering a period of bundling or unbundling? How does Merci feel about the debate between synchronous and asynchronous? How does Merci determine between those who have grown sustainably vs unsustainably in the time of COVID?
5.) Why do the majority of collaboration tool startups fail? What do they get so wrong in their go-to-market? For those that succeed, what are the commonalities in those that succeed? Why is being good at Twitter a competitive advantage? How does Merci feel about the Superhuman, high touch onboarding style?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Merci’s Fave Book: Never Split The Difference: Negotiate As If Your Life Depended on It
As always you can follow Harry and The Twenty Minute VC on Twitter here!
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | We are back for another week in the world of venture capital here on the 20 minute VC with me, |
| 0:03.7 | Harry Stebbings, and if you'd like to see more behind the scenes you can on Instagram at H. Stebbing's |
| 0:07.9 | 1996 with two B's. But to our episode today, and I had heard so many great things about this guest |
| 0:13.0 | from many different people in the industry, and so I'm delighted to welcome Mercy Victoria |
| 0:16.7 | Grace, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, one of the Valley's leading venture firms the last decade, with a portfolio including the lights of Snapchat, Mulesoft, Affirm, App Dynamics, |
| 0:26.4 | and more. As for Mercy, prior to entering the world of venture, Mercy spent three years at Slack, |
| 0:30.8 | including as head of growth, where she grew the team to over 50 people and drove DAUs from |
| 0:35.3 | 500K to 5 million people in under two years. |
| 0:38.8 | Mercy's also the founder of Women in Product, a global community of incredible women in product |
| 0:42.9 | management. I'd also want to say a huge thank you. This schedule really was a team effort, |
| 0:46.6 | so a huge hand to Jeremy Liu, Jana Messerschmitt, and Nicole Quinn for some fantastic |
| 0:51.0 | questions suggestions today. But before we move into the show today, I wanted to take a moment to mention HelloSign, |
| 0:56.6 | a great example of a company that found success in building a product focused on user experience. |
| 1:01.4 | HelloSign is an effortless e-signature solution used by millions to securely send and request |
| 1:06.6 | legally valid digital signatures and agreements, and they've raised a total of $16 million in funding |
| 1:11.7 | and then recently got acquired by Dropbox for an impressive $230 million. |
| 1:16.5 | Check out hello sign.com forward slash 20VC to join the thousands of companies and founders |
| 1:22.1 | who value fast, secure and simple e-signatures. |
| 1:25.6 | And speaking of signatures and getting deals done there, you really |
| 1:28.3 | need to build that relationship and there's nothing like meeting face to face and there's nothing |
| 1:32.5 | like Zoom to make that happen. Zoom lets you connect and do business across town or around the world. |
| 1:38.2 | Zoom ties together all of your communication needs into one easy platform for video conferencing, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Twenty Minute VC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Twenty Minute VC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.