Josh Machiz joins Lightspeed as CMO to build the next era of VC brand-building

is P stagnation. Anyway, I believe we have our first guest of the show in the reream waiting room Josh. Oh, look at this background. Wow, impressive production. How you doing? Long time listener, first time caller. Hey guys, great to great to have you on. Uh and congrats on the new gig. I'm thrilled to be at Lightseed.

It is a very exciting moment for for my career for for Lightseed. We're going to be doing a lot of fun things. You know, Lightseed's AI like we're anthropic, we're XAI, we're Glean, we're Pika AR diversified. You've got the AI hits. Love it. Got the hits. Okay. Uh talk about your journey. Uh what were you doing before?

Yeah. Uh I was at Redpoint for the last four years. Uh building the platform team. Wow. Poached. True deal. Oh Logan Bartlett and it's fantastic. Yes. All the content we've built there. That team is exceptional. They're going to continue to absolutely crush. Yep. Um but this was just an incredible opportunity.

I think when I was younger, I was chief digital officer at NASDAQ and I worked on you name the IPO, I worked on it. Uh, and Lightseed had just always been that kind of like aspirational venture firm for me. I got to work on the Nanics IPO. I did App Dynamics and then the night before App Dynamics was going to go public.

like they got acquired by Cisco and I had to take things made like this is the firm that I wanted to work at when I was that age and it's just such an honor to even have been considered for their CMO role and I'm just very very thankful to Ravi and Beasel and Romano and the whole Lightseed team for for giving the trust in me to to shepherd this incredible brand into the future.

Give us the master plan. Tell tell and we'll we'll tell we're not going to do exactly the same stuff we did at Redcoin because that wouldn't be any fun. Um, but look, I wouldn't be here on TBPN if it wasn't a new media landscape. You guys have changed the game.

like created a way for founders to tell their story in an authentic way without like shock journalism of being asked about like crazy news that doesn't apply to what they do and actually having deep questions of people that understand venturebacked businesses and how they grow.

I think we're in a new landscape of just finding ways for founders to tell their story in a compelling way. And that's the same kind of stuff we're going to be building at Lightseed. We'll obviously not be copycatting TBPN. Uh, but we've got a lot of stuff.

We'll be really, you know, forward on Tik Tok and Instagram as you could imagine. But, um, yeah, we'll we'll be everywhere. So, um, so Red Red Point uh, Redpoint, I mean, you guys must have been getting like millions of views on Instagram on your account there for like a long time.

Like, how valuable has that been as a channel? Because I feel like I feel like X is like especially noisy with like venture, right? You have Tech Twitter.

It's like, you know, every single day there's there's funds and companies piling in to try to get uh uh get the word out on on what they're doing and their strategy and thesis and all that stuff, but Instagram is like relatively it's not an area that we've focused a huge amount on.

Um but but how how important do you think that is as a platform for investors? Yeah, I mean Instagram was really the tip of our spear at at any point, right? Like when I joined, of course, they didn't have an Instagram and then had to get the keys to it from the Instagram team and start building.

Uh but I think, you know, when I started it, people thought I was kind of crazy and they're like, "This is is this is going to be good for the Redpoint brand.

" And then you know it very quickly changed when you go to a pitch meeting and the founder goes love your Tik Tok guy or that video is so relatable like it just creates a brand affinity that you just can't buy and I felt like a lot of firms were a little scared to dip their toe into Instagram but you know quite a few have followed us there and and very proud of what the team will continue to build there but it it really is an important channel and I think that the great news is that's where founders are in this decade, right?

Like today's founders are in Instagram and Tik Tok. Like yes, X is still the place to share the clips, but that's where people consume their content.

And so I felt like while it was an unlikely channel for success for a VC firm, I think it's actually really important because it's like the place that everybody actually goes to just have a good time.

Do you do you see venture funds eventually following the same path as as other financial institutions in terms of advertising in let's say like print media right you can imagine like black rockck will run you know a print advertisement in the Wall Street Journal right um do you ever see do you think that's an interesting way to potentially uh uh build the brand with uh I don't know that many founders that read the journal at least as religiously as us but certainly there has to be uh in the role of CMO, you have to be marketing to founders but also LPs, right?

Yeah. Well, actually, interestingly, in my gig at NASDAQ, when I was pitching IPOs for a living, that was something we would put in every single proposal. You get like a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal. So, I think today's founders that that resonates as much.

I think honestly they're better off buying a piece of your hat on TVPM than they are buying a page in the journal.

like spend that money on on Instagram advertising and Tik Tok ads and well I meant I meant more I meant more for for you at Lightseed like I think it would be iconic for Lightseed to have a page in the journal that says like look at all like we are in all the AI winners like that Lightseed is AI with just like the list of of companies that we're in.

Yeah. Get ready. We're uh we will be on every media platform. Legacy Media still has a very special place in my heart. It's like, you know, I I spent a decade on the floor of that exchange working with every media outlet to help get companies as much noise as we could make them around an IPO.

How is how h how do you think um like how is the the how is like IPO marketing changed over the last decade since you were at NASDAQ? I mean, we have so much activity this week.

We were at we were at the CLA IPO yesterday, which honestly felt incredibly quiet in comparison to Figma, which which was actually we figured out was intentional. The founder was like really celebrating back in Sweden, right? So he he just came in, he didn't even bring his family.

He just handled business and got out of there. Uh and then you had Figma, which very much was like a celebration of of of They have an office in New York. They have an office in New York, but it was a celebration of like the entire community. Like it was really like an event. And it felt like festival just in Manhattan.

There's probably tons of fig. But uh but yeah, like broadly Yeah. How do you think that that landscape has shifted? Well, that was the fun thing about that gig. I got to work with every great CEO, CFO, and CMO.

And you kind of get to see them almost in like what is their Super Bowl like for their company and how they perform at the top of their game.

Sometimes people are looking for that more muted response that I think you saw with CLA, which I just think is like stylistically that company, but I think if you're looking for IPO excellence, what Figma did and what they pulled off, what you know, some of the VC firms that helped them behind the scenes on their comms, like it was a massive win for noise making and I think it was like kind of the gold standard for what you expect from an IPO.

Um, I think the thing is is a lot of companies don't realize that like this is your one day to make the noise because you got the quiet period before and you got it afterwards. And so really you have to squeeze as much juice out of the fruit that you can.

And what I would always advise companies to do is spend every dollar you can across the, you know, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, uh, promoting the fact that you went public because this is your opportunity to tell those enterprise customers who weren't necessarily ready to sign on to you when you were a private company, no matter the size.

Yeah. Um, that you're ready for them. It's the best branding ever to be like, "Yeah, we're we're a public company. We're public. " It's it's it's on par with a great. com. Yeah, truly. Probably more significant. A great ticker works well. Um uh how are you thinking about positioning Lightseed in the venture ecosystem?

like um I feel like there's a couple funds that have carved out like kind of just a very clear definitions of like okay we're we're a crossover hedge fund uh we have a Publix and then we have a growth fund but like we're we we're not even trying to be known for early stage maybe we write some C and and like just getting that clear message of like when to call what fund I feel like is the first job to do of a VC marketing arm maybe Um, how are you thinking about uh either narrowing or expanding or like defining the definition of like what is light speeded?

How does it fit in? How is it different? That's a great question. Look, I think actually it was one of the things that drew me to Lightseed. Yeah. Right. When I was on the floor of the exchange as a young guy, like companies were going public in like seven years. Yeah.

And then while I was working there, it became 10 years and I'm chasing companies for, you know, from series B for like seven years before they would go public with us. And now it's 15.

And I think honestly, Lightseed Strategy is what attracted Disney to it because literally we support companies from seed through IPO and beyond.

And I think that focus of saying we are going to be great early stage investors and then we're going to take the ones that are really winning apply our full muscle to giving them all the tools that we can give them for an unfair advantage as they you know go up against the Goliaths in their industry and then bring them through IPO and provide them that that added lift that they need in those later growth rounds.

pounds. I think it's a really unique offer that is quite differentiated in the venture space and actually that that multi-stage thing is is why I'm here, right? Like I get to give early stage companies the noise making. I get to help the latest stage companies with their IPO prep.

It's truly like a dream job to go and and take this into the future. and we're going to be doing a lot of branding about why that model is so different than everybody else. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for taking the time to hop on. This is great. Congrats on the new on the new gig.

I'm looking forward to my TBPN uh traded card. Can I get that? Oh, yeah, for sure. We'll we'll work on it. We'll work on it. Logan. Logan, we might I don't know if we want to upset Jeff Brody. I mean, he did go to my high school, so yeah, I got to keep things friendly over there. got next.

I know you've got some other Lightseed people coming up, too. Yeah. Yeah. Get buddies with Bucky. We'll have them on soon. Awesome. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers everyone. Congrats. Thanks, guys. Bye. See you. Quickly, let me tell you about numeral sales tax on autopilot. It's super intelligence for sales tax.

They said if if they build it, what are if they build it, everyone will spend less than five minutes per month on sales tax compliance. Um, anyway, I think we have our next guest already in the reream waiting room. Nico Rosberg. Uh, we will bring this one studio. Um, Nico, how you doing? Welcome to the show.

Can you hear us? Sorry for keeping you waiting. We got a bit of lag. Oh, we got some backgrounds. Can you hear us? Can you hear us? Hello. Testing. Testing. One, two, three. Hear us. Can you hear us? Let's try and get him on the uh on the call. Uh in the meantime, let me tell you about Finn.

AI, the number one AI agent for customer service, number one in performance benchmarks, number one in competitive, number one ranked on G2. Uh also uh people are having fun memeing the uh the AirPods 3 live translation. It immediately became a meme format.

I was disappointed that I couldn't workshop one in time to get a banger up, but people were having a lot of fun with it. just like this this picture this picture of being like ola and it just says hello. What is what what does hola mean? Yeah, I knew you were going to ask this. So hola is a Spanish word for hello. Okay.

Yeah. So I So if I pay $300, put in my headphones that do that. Yeah. Uh it is it is incredible technology.

Yeah, I mean it the the whole um you know I have no idea how to how to kind of judge Dolingo as as a as a as a public company and what what what the fair market value of Duolingo is but I do think there is like like studying language has never been about um I mean I shouldn't say it never but has like for 90% of people is not about the like practicality.

It's about stimulating your mind and and doing new things and and um even if this existed, I still would have done years of Wikipedia exists and like Founders Podcast exists and they're very different products. Like they they can both tell me what what was Larry Ellison up to in the 90s. Yeah.

And when and when the Oracle news broke, I actually went to both. I looked at the Oracle wiki and I also listened to uh the founders podcast on Larry Ellison and they're very different and I feel like Duolingo plays this like fun game thing. Uh Tyler, what's your take on Dolingo versus the AirPods 3?

Uh well so so about the AirPods like unless both parties have them then it's like not that useful, right? Because if if you only speak Spanish, I only speak English. You're talking to me. I can't I can't reply. Uh there are a variety of ways to use it with one person. So, if I'm going around, you you speak to me.

Uh, and then when I speak, it can go into an app on my phone and I can just hit play and it will play the audio on from my phone or it will show you uh words. So, if you're speaking Spanish, I'm hearing English and my phone as I'm talking is displaying Spanish text.

And so, I can actually hand you my phone and you can read what I'm saying in English in Spanish. So, they've thought of some of the stuff. It still does seem like there's a little bit of a technological handshake going on where I need to say, "Hola, like, would you like to use AirPods Pro 3?

" See if you can translate this. Let's put See if you can translate this Mandarin PJ. Of course. I would like a beer, please. Close. I really enjoy beer. I really enjoy beer generally. Of course. Um, yes. This will be huge uh for ordering another bruswki. Uh Noah Smith called it the universal translator from Star Trek.

Yeah, it's very cool. Vitalik said it can't arbitrary can't translate arbitrary alien languages it hears for the first time with any with only a tiny sample though.

Although maybe what happened in Star Trek is that every species realize that it's a good idea to expose a clean API that blurts out like one terabyte of all your historical cultural works and that is enough to generate the embeddings for their language.

I've seen AI work before that suggests that if you have the embeddings for two languages, you only need a very small amount of translated word pairs to find the mapping between the two. Not sure if this holds for languages that evolved in totally separate worlds.

But maybe it still does for convergent evolution reg reasons and that gets you a translator and so it ships uh and so ships just always scan for give me a terabyte of your culture API and always end up finding it. Uh that's very funny.

Uh, speaking of uh, alien languages, Tyler, you were mentioning that we discovered alien life on Mars or it was fake. What What was your take on that? Uh, you were saying that the moon landing is fake and you don't believe in the moon landing, right? You don't believe in space.

You said that off mic and you didn't want me to talk about space is fake. Yeah, space is fake. Going up high is fake. Planes, when you get in a plane, why do they always have the windows down? It's because they're changing out the set decoration around you. That's right.

You just get on the plane, you sit there for six hours while they rebuild the city around you. You get off and then you're in the New York Oh, I'm in New York City. Oh, really? You didn't just move the building. I moved thousands of miles. Put the boards up. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I'll believe it when I see it. Yeah. Right.

Uh anyway, uh what was the news? NASA got a photo. I How is there a new photo on Mars? The rover's just going around. Yeah. Okay. So, the rover's going around looking for stuff. Wait, can we pull up the Can we pull up the picture? It's in the deck. It's later in the deck. 20 pages. Who took the photo? The rover.

The rover of itself like kind of like selfie stick. Yeah, the rover has like a 360 cam on the end of an arm and there's someone who gives instructions I think like once a day because there's such a delay to get the message there that they say the rover is kind of semi-autonomous.

Then they say, "Hey, go look around over here. " The chat just just to defend uh Tyler's