We are back with PART 2 of our conversation with Matthew Hartman, a managing partner at the venture firm, Factorial Capital. Factorial partners with angel operators, with a focus on startups in the AI space. Host and Lightspeed Partner Michael Mignano talks with Matt about the value of premium content, software on demand, and the shifting economics of the Internet. Plus, is this actually the moment for product managers? 00:00 Introduction 00:38 AI in B2B SaaS...

This week, we are sharing PART ONE with Matthew Hartman, a managing partner at the venture firm Factorial Capital. Factorial partners with angel operators, with a focus on startups in the AI space. Host and Lightspeed Partner Michael Mignano sits down with Matt to discuss how Factorial partners with technical founders to explore opportunities. They discuss OpenAI, Apple Intelligence, WebGPU, Suno, and much more. Join us next week for PART TWO of this conversation.  Episode...

Lulu Cheng Meservey puts founders in control of their narrative using one simple principle: Go Direct. Lulu is the Founder and CEO of Rostra, the go-to communications expert for Silicon Valley founders of places like Ramp, SSI, Scale, Andruil, Suno, and The Free Press. Lulu joins Lightspeed Partner and Host Michael Mignano on the podcast to talk about her ​​modern communications playbook for founders and why a comms strategy is just as important as a product strategy. Plus, Lulu shares...

Toshit Panigrahi, CEO and co-founder of TollBit, joins Lightspeed Partner and host Michael Mignano for this week’s episode of Generative Now. TollBit is a platform that enables publishers and content creators to extract revenue from AI companies that use their data. Toshit and Michael discuss how advancements in AI are already reshaping the economics of the internet, TollBit’s innovative “bot paywall” for publishers, and how to incentivize content creation in this constantly evolving...

Descript CEO and founder Andrew Mason joins Lightspeed Partner and Host Michael Mignano on the podcast to talk about the future of content creation with AI tools. Michael and Andrew talk about the evolution of Descript as an AI product designed for podcast and video creators, navigating a world of synthetic content, and Descript’s new features including Descript Rooms and Underlord. Andrew talks about raising a $50 Million Series C led by OpenAI Startup Fund and how seeing an early version of...

This week, we are back with part two of Generative Quarterly with Semil Shah and Lightspeed Partner and host Michael Mignano. Semil is a founding General Partner of Haystack and a Venture Partner at Lightspeed. Semil and Mike pick up their conversation on consumer AI technology, starting with innovative consumer tech like Friend AI by Avi Schiffmann. Mike and Semil consider the impact of Artificial Super Intelligence on the future of work, debate the future evolution of software on demand,...

Semil Shah is back for another episode of Generative Quarterly with Michael Mignano, Lightspeed Partner and host of Generative Now. Semil is a founding General Partner of Haystack and a Venture Partner at Lightspeed. Semil and Mike discuss the seed investing landscape, challenges and opportunities in building consumer tech, and competition between Apple and Google. Episode Chapters (00:00) Welcome and Introduction (00:37) Shohei Ohtani and Baseball (03:25) State of Seed...

Johnny Ho, co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Perplexity, joins Lightspeed Partner and host Michael Mignano for this week’s episode of Generative Now. Perplexity is the AI powered search engine that is rapidly growing and challenging the industry status quo. Johnny and Michael talk about his background as a competitive programmer, the business model of search, and Perplexity’s Publisher Program, where publishers earn a share of advertising revenue. Johnny has been ranked number one...

Generative AI is making it possible to not only remove the human from the driver seat, but, in the world of trucking and freight, from the vehicle entirely.  This week on Generative Now, Lightspeed Partner and host Michael Mignano speaks with Chris Urmson, CEO and co-founder of Aurora Innovation, a company that makes software for autonomous vehicles with a focus on the trucking industry. Chris shares his journey from participating in the self-driving vehicle DARPA Grand Challenge early in...

Spotify’s personalized recommendations have set it apart from the pack of music streaming platforms for years. Those curated recommendations have only gotten stronger with the onset of AI, with the ability to power things like your own personal AI DJ. This week on the podcast, we’re revisiting a conversation with Spotify’s Co-President, CPO & CTO, Gustav Söderström. Gustav joins host and Lightspeed Partner Michael Mignano to talk about building UX that can power more efficient AI, the...

Captions.AI is taking the world of video creation by storm. With features like AI-corrected eye contact and automatic captions in 28 languages, more creators than ever can bring their ideas to life. This week, we’re revisiting a conversation with Captions.AI Co-Founder and CEO Gaurav Misra. Guarav joined Lightspeed Partner and Host Michael Mignano for a conversation spanning from his days as a design engineer at Snap to finding a surprise $500k in his Apple account.  Episode...

Most of the hype around AI has revolved around its text capabilities, and the powers of LLMs like ChatGPT. But Suno is focusing on the unsung hero of AI - music. Suno is building a future where anyone can make good music - all you need to do is type in a prompt, and out will come a song that’s never existed before. This week, we’re revisiting a conversation with Mikey Shulman, CEO and Co-Founder of Suno. He joined Lightspeed Partner and host Michael Mignano earlier this year to talk through...

For many of us, meetings take up a disproportionate amount of our time at work. But with the advent of AI-powered tools, meetings may become more manageable and even productive, all without the sacrifice of control.  This week on Generative Now, Lightspeed Partner and host Michael Mignano speaks with Chris Pedregal, CEO and co-founder of Granola, an AI-powered notepad and meeting assistant. Chris discusses the unique features that set Granola apart from other AI meeting bots, as well as...

This week on Generative Now, Lightspeed Partner and host Michael Mignano talks to Mati Staniszewski (co-founder of Eleven Labs) and Demi Guo (co-founder and CEO of Pika). This conversation was part of a special Summer Edition of Generative NYC, a monthly meetup for AI builders hosted by Lightspeed. Demi and Mati discuss the landscape of AI generated content creation, AI foundation models, and perspectives on the future of the industry. Episode Chapters(00:00) Introduction (02:52) The impact...

This week on Generative Now, Lightspeed Partner and host Michael Mignano talks to Naveen Rao about big bets in his career, hardware to develop AI, and open source as the key to safety. Naveen Rao is the founder of Nervana Systems and MosaicML, which was acquired by Databricks in 2023. He is currently the VP Generative AI at Databricks and is the former vice president and general manager of the Artificial Intelligence Products Group at Intel. Episode Chapters (00:00) Naveen Rao's...

Browsers have been with us for nearly as long as the internet, and not too much about them has changed. But with this new wave of products enhanced by generative AI, that may be about to shift. This week on Generative Now, Lightspeed Partner and host Michael Mignano speaks with Josh Miller, the co-founder and CEO of The Browser Company, about their innovative web browser, Arc, which seeks to transform our experience on the internet. Josh discusses the impact of AI on browsers, as well as...

Lightspeed Partner and host Michael Mignano speaks with Madhumita Murgia, AI editor of the Financial Times, about her new book ‘Code Dependent’. They discuss the rapid evolution of AI, the balance between technological advancements and human consequences, and the real-life stories from various countries that highlight both the benefits and the harms of AI. Madhu outlines guiding principles for ethical AI development and touches on regulation challenges, the role of big tech, and the positive...

We’ve all experienced writer’s block at some point in our lives. But thanks to emerging AI-powered tools, writer’s block may soon become a thing of the past. In this week’s episode of Generative Now, Lightspeed Partner and host Michael Mignano speaks with Nathan Baschez, Founder and CEO of Lex, an AI-assisted writing tool. Nathan discusses Lex's development from a simple alternative to Google Docs to a sophisticated collaboration tool with AI features, as well as  the challenges of...

At some point, we’ve all asked ourselves the core questions to the meanings of life and the universe. It should come as no surprise that tech’s most dynamic players have too, and see generative AI-powered technologies as a way to start answering those questions. This week on Generative Now, Lightspeed Partner and host Michael Mignano speaks with Guillaume Verdon, the founder of Extropic, about the fascinating intersections of physics, AI, and computing. Guillaume discusses how his interest in...

This week on Generative Now, Lightspeed Partner and host Michael Mignano talks to Soumith Chintala at Generative NYC, a monthly meetup for AI builders hosted by Lightspeed. Soumith is a Vice President and Fellow at Meta and he co-created PyTorch, one of the world’s most beloved ML libraries. He’s had a front row seat to the rise of AI over the past few years at Meta and previously as a researcher at New York University. Michael and Soumith discuss Meta's open-source strategy, and the role of...

Semil Shah sits down with Lightspeed Partner and host Michael Mignano for a quarterly conversation about AI and its evolving impact on startups, VCs, and incumbents. They also discuss Chris Paik’s essay “The End of Software,” tech cleanses, Apple’s WWDC, and the difference in thinking between LCs, GPs, and VCs in the landscape of AI.  Semil Shah is the Founding General Partner of Haystack and a General Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. Episode Chapters (00:00) Intro to...

The explosion of generative AI-powered technologies has forever changed the tech landscape. But the path to the current AI revolution was paved by many breakthroughs. Bill Dally had a hand in quite a few of them. In this week’s episode of Generative Now, Lightspeed Partner and host Michael Mignano speaks with Bill Dally, NVIDIA's Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President for Research, whose nearly four-decade long career spans from experiments with neural networks in the 1980s to leading...

What makes AI truly useful and impactful for users? That’s the question that drives Matthieu Rouif, CEO and co-founder of Photoroom, the AI-first photo editing app for mobile. This week on Generative Now, Lightspeed Partner and host Michael Mignano talks to Matthieu Rouif about what he learned from his previous ventures in app development, how Photoroom found product market fit early, and how Photoroom went from a feature to a product with more than 150 million downloads and 30 million...

AI has been powering Grammarly before the current wave of AI adoption. So what can we learn from this beloved AI tool? This week on Generative Now, Lightspeed Partner and host Michael Mignano talks with the CEO of Grammarly, Rahul Roy-Chowdhury. Michael asks Rahul about privacy and safety when it comes to AI products, the future of AI agents and tools, and why he sees Gen AI as a tool for co-creation. Before becoming Grammarly’s CEO, Rahul was Grammarly's Global Head of Product. Prior to...