20VC: Lightspeed's Nicole Quinn on Why We Are Not In A Consumer Downturn, Why M&A Has Not Been This Exciting For A Long Time & Why Amazon Is Never Your Friend
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 25 October 2017
⏱️ 28 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Nicole Quinn is a Partner @ Lightspeed, one of the world's leading venture funds with a portfolio including the likes of Snapchat, Nest, StitchFix, AppDynamics and Max Levchin's Affirm, just to name a few from their incredible portfolio. At Lightspeed, Nicole focuses on the consumer market having made investments in the likes of Cheddar, Zola and Rothy's. Prior to Lightspeed, Nicole worked at Nutmeg, one of London's leading fintech players and before that spent 8 years covering consumer, eCommerce and brands at Morgan Stanley on the equity sales and research side. At Morgan Stanley, Nicole worked on the IPOs for Facebook, Groupon and Pandora. Fun fact: Nicole is also a star of the big screen featuring on Apple TV's Planet of The Apps.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Nicole made her way from Morgan Stanley to a leading London Fintech player to now, a partner a Lightspeed in San Francisco?
2.) How does Nicole define "digitally native brands"? What are the core benefits of owning the entire customer journey? Why does Nicole believe that brand is a key network effect today?
3.) Why does Nicole disagree that we are in a fallow period for consumer? How does Nicole analyze the incumbent heavy competitive landscape? Does Nicole believe that Amazon does more to make the market than destroy it?
4.) Why does Nicole believe we are in a consolidatory environment? What about the current ecosystem makes now the most exciting time for M&A in a long time? How does Nicole analyze M&A's ability to move the needle with transactions like Bonobos' acquisition?
5.) Being a star of Planet of The Apps, how important does Nicole think it is for investors to have public brands today? How does Nicole view VCs and digitally native brands in the same way? How does this mean that VCs should act in market?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Nicole’s Fave Book: The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton
Nicole’s Fave Blog: Lean Luxe
Nicole's Most Recent Investment:Â Rothy's
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Nicole on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You are listening to the 20-minute VC with the British tones of me, Harry Stebbings, |
| 0:03.7 | but today is a very special episode, as these British tones will not be accompanied by American |
| 0:08.1 | ones, as they usually are. And I'm thrilled to welcome a fellow Brit to the hot seat today in the |
| 0:12.3 | form of a very talented individual and friend, Nicole Quinn. Now, Nicole is a partner at |
| 0:16.9 | Lightspeed, one of the world's leading venture funds with a portfolio including the likes of Snapchat, Nest, Stitch Fix, App Dynamics, and Max Levchins are firm, just to name a few |
| 0:26.3 | from their incredible portfolio. At Lightspeed, Nicole focuses on the consumer market, |
| 0:30.4 | having made investments in the lights of cheddar, Zola and Rothies. And prior to Lightspeed, |
| 0:34.6 | Nicole worked at Nutmeg, one of London's leading fintech players, |
| 0:37.8 | and before that, spent eight years covering consumer, e-commerce and brands at Morgan Stanley |
| 0:42.5 | on the equity sales and research side. It was at Morgan Stanley that Nicole worked on the |
| 0:46.4 | IPOs for Facebook, Groupon, and Pandora, plus a very fun fact. Nicole's also a star of the big screen |
| 0:52.1 | featuring on Apple TV's Planet of the Apps. |
| 0:54.4 | That really is a must watch if you haven't seen that yet. |
| 0:56.7 | I'd also want to say a big thank you to another Brit, James Weiser, Balderton, for the intro to Nicole today, without which this episode would not have been possible. |
| 1:04.1 | But before we move into the show today, if you're a founder or operator, your most important job is people operations, whether that be hiring execs, developing managers, |
| 1:12.3 | or retaining top talent. And that's why you need lattice. Latis is the number one performance |
| 1:16.6 | management solution for growing companies. With lattice, it's easy to launch 360 performance review cycles |
| 1:22.1 | as often as you want. And you also get an incredible continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback and one-on-one meetings to ensure employees get feedback between reviews. |
| 1:32.6 | So find out why the lights of Coinbase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay, trust Latis as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. |
| 1:41.9 | That's lattice.com, the number one performance management |
| 1:44.5 | solution for growing companies. And speaking of number one there, you must check out Recurley, |
| 1:48.8 | the company powering subscription success, with Recurley's Enterprise Closs subscription management |
... |
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