Jeremy Liew (born 21 September 1971) is an Australian and American venture capitalist. As a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, he is best known for making the initial investments in Snapchat and Affirm Holdings, Inc. His investment thesis, which he calls "follow the woman," has guided his career in identifying consumer technology trends, and he has become a notable investor in Artificial intelligence startups.
Early life and education
Liew was born in Singapore and raised in Perth, Western Australia. In his senior year of high school, he represented Australia at the International Math Olympiad, where his teammate was future Fields Medalist Terry Tao. He graduated from the Australian National University with majors in linguistics and mathematics. After graduation, he joined McKinsey as a business analyst, working in Sydney and Johannesburg. When one of his bosses started CitySearch, a mid-1990s Internet pioneer, he moved to Los Angeles to join the company, working in sales and as manager of strategic planning.
In 1998, Liew returned to school, receiving an MBA from Stanford University in 2000. After graduation, he became vice president of strategic planning for USA Networks, involved in the transition to IAC when it added companies such as Ticketmaster, Expedia, and Hotel.com. He spent three years at AOL/Netscape as a corporate strategy executive before entering venture capital.
Venture capital career
In 2006, Liew joined Lightspeed Venture Partners as its first consumer specialist partner. At that time, Lightspeed was a small firm specializing in tech startups largely unknown outside Silicon Valley. Liew noticed that startups used predominantly by young women were the most successful, concluding that young women were the most likely carriers of the next popular cultural trend. To understand this demographic, he looked outside Silicon Valley to Los Angeles and New York, developing a data-driven approach.
This "follow the woman" thesis led him to Snapchat in 2012, when a partner mentioned that his daughter and her friends were obsessed with a new app. After meeting co-founder Evan Spiegel, Liew became the first investor in Snapchat. The initial investment was $485,000, with Lightspeed investing a total of $8.1 million in subsequent rounds. This increased 250-fold in value to just under $2 billion at Snapchat's IPO in 2017. Relations between Spiegel and Liew deteriorated, as Spiegel felt taken advantage of with an onerous agreement, later modified to give Lightspeed further shares at a discount. The IPO return was greater than what the firm had raised in 2006, putting Lightspeed into the elite of the competitive VC world.
Notable investments
Liew was the first institutional investor and early board member of Bonobos, an e-commerce apparel company now a subsidiary of Walmart. He was also a first investor and board member of Jessica Alba's The Honest Company. He became a board member of Affirm, a financial lender for consumer installment loans, after being co-first institutional investor.
Liew has invested in gaming companies including Playdom (acquired by Disney), Serious Business (bought by Zynga), Kixeye, and Fan Controlled Football. He has been called a "social game visionary" and emphasizes user engagement over design. In 2023, Lightspeed hired Moritz Baier-Lentz as partner and head of gaming.
His media and entertainment investments include Giphy (sold to Facebook), HQ, Cheddar Inc., and Beme (acquired by CNN). Successful exits include Flixster (acquired by Warner Brothers), Kongregate (acquired by GameStop), and Slice (acquired by Rakuten). He also made a $7 million investment in Rothy's, a company making shoes from recycled plastic bottles.
Some investments were disappointing, including Zest AI (formerly ZestFinance), which started as an online subprime financing platform using Artificial intelligence to screen borrowers, now selling software. He invested in Living Social, a daily deals firm acquired by Groupon for $0 in 2016. He invested in Sidecar, the first ridesharing company, which folded in 2015. Another investment, Mic, a media company for millennials, saw its value dwindle from hundreds of millions in 2017 to $5 million in November 2018, when sold to Bustle; Liew ascribed the collapse to changes in Facebook algorithms.
Digital currency and AI focus
Liew is a proponent of cryptocurrency, seeing its value in times of political instability. He co-led the first venture round for Blockchain.com and favors bitcoin as the most traded. He has predicted bitcoin's price to be $500,000 by 2030.
In the realm of Artificial intelligence, Liew has been an active investor, recognizing the transformative potential of Machine learning and Generative AI. His investments span companies like AI21 Labs, Inflection AI, and Essential AI, focusing on Large language model applications. He has spoken on how AI will reshape consumer tech, drawing parallels to his earlier social media investments.
Liew has been named to the Midas List multiple times. In August 2021, just shy of his 50th birthday, he announced he would step back from investing, though he would remain a partner at Lightspeed.
Philanthropy and personal life
Liew is a founding trustee of the Presidio Knolls School, a Mandarin immersion PreK-8 school in San Francisco. After the 2021 Atlanta murder of six Asian women, he joined other tech investors to fund causes fighting anti-Asian hate. He and his wife Ranee Lan were instrumental in raising money for a playground at Sue Bierman Park in San Francisco's Embarcadero. They have also supported affordable housing construction in San Francisco.
Liew is married with two children. He has lived in the U.S. for twenty years and is a dual citizen of Australia and the U.S., but still considers himself an Aussie. He has been a student of the saxophone and enjoys jazz music.