Lightspeed
- Lightspeed Venture Partners hired its first partner who's also a social media creator.
- Claire Zau has more than 350,000 social media followers who come for her takes on AI and tech.
- Venture and tech firms are looking to the creator economy to boost AI and get an edge with founders.
Lightspeed Venture Partners' newest partner wasn't just attractive because of her experience investing in AI, the Silicon Valley firm's big focus.
She also brings more than 350,000 social media followers who seek out her takes on hot startups and product launches.
In a first for the firm, Zau will play a dual role of helping shape Lightspeed's media strategy alongside seed investing. Specifically, she'll cohost "Lightwork," a forthcoming weekly podcast on AI, and help lead the firm's Lightspeed Launch program that provides support to new founders. She'll report to both the investment and marketing sides of the firm.
"I understand founder-speak and investor-speak," said Zau, who will continue to run her personal social media independent of the firm. "But at the same time, I've built this massive distribution to 350,000-plus people. So I understand what resonates with those audiences."
In-house creators are increasingly common among companies as a way to humanize themselves. Consumer companies, including Walmart, Starbucks, and Ulta, have launched initiatives to turn employees into company evangelists.
Venture and tech are running a similar playbook. OpenAI just acquired the livestream talk show TBPN. Andreessen Horowitz bought the tech podcast network Turpentine and backed an X livestream show called Monitoring the Situation, or MTS. Josh Machiz, Lightspeed's chief marketing officer, hired a TikTok comedian and helped create a podcast around an investor at his last firm, Redpoint Partners.
Having in-house creators can help venture companies ensure their portfolio companies get publicity. It can also work to counter negative coverage of their industry.
Lightspeed saw Zau as a way to get an edge with future founders as venture firms seek to invest at earlier funding stages, lest they miss out on the next unicorn.
Zau says her social media has paid dividends
Zau started posting last year while working at GSV Ventures, another VC firm.
She said that while Silicon Valley insiders were well served by creators like podcasters Dwarkesh Patel and Lex Fridman, she saw an opportunity to make tech news more accessible to others. She said she spends up to two hours per video, from research to editing, and posts as often as six times a week.
"I've always viewed Silicon Valley, especially venture funds, as developing very transactional relationships with founders," Zau said. "I felt there was an opportunity to basically establish a presence and credibility and build trust with this audience, even when they're a couple years out from founding, even when they're in college."
While she uses her accounts as a way to talk about tech broadly, she said it's benefited her day job. Once, a GSV portfolio company needed to fill an engineering role, and she shared the job listing on social media.
"That drove north of 15,000 views and 700 complete applications," she said.
Where traditional media fits in
Having an investor play a social media role can pose risks.
There's no guarantee Zau's popular Instagram content will translate to Lightspeed's podcast. Her peers might see her as a creator rather than a serious investor.
"There's been a stigma attached to influencers as long as there's been influencers," Machiz said.
Silicon Valley has a history of seeing traditional media as unfairly scrutinizing tech and turning to using its own executives to shape its narrative. Using in-house creators is part of that shift, but it's unclear if it'll work because it's still content marketing, which invites audience skepticism, said Chris Harihar, a veteran tech PR professional.
Zau, for her part, said she has "immense respect" for the role traditional media plays in producing journalism and that she sees her efforts as supplementing, rather than supplanting it. As a tech investor who's an AI optimist by nature, she also wants to make sure people hear her worldview.
"I think what I fear is that the mainstream audience is only hearing about very extreme headlines in both directions," she said. "I would like to just help people understand the tech and help understand where things are going."