The photo app Snapchat was almost at the verge of oblivion with as few as 100,000 installations, when Jeremy Liew (a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners) ‘found’ it.
Despite the miserable performance, Liew was able to ‘see’ the vision of Evan Spiegel – that of creating a safe platform for people to share their feelings via photos and short fleeting messages, with whomever they chose to share. Liew believed in Snapchat given the high engagement metrics, despite the low download numbers, leading him to invest $485,000 in May 2012. This was the first investment of the seed round.
Jeremy continued to invest in Snapchat through Lightspeed, taking his total investments to $8.1million. When Snapchat issued its IPO on March 2, 2017, Jeremy’s Lightspeed Venture owned almost 82 million shares in Snapchat worth approximately $2billion. This translated to around 250 times the investment made by Lightspeed. Truly the Speed of Light!
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