K2 Space started with a simple idea: what if we stopped trying to shrink satellites and built the ones we actually need?
On this episode of The Investment Memo, Lightspeed Partner Connor Love sits down with K2 Space Co-Founder and CEO @devkunjur to unpack how that idea became a new class of high-power satellites, $500M in signed contracts, an upcoming GRAVITAS launch, and now a $250M Series C.
Congrats to the entire K2 Space team.
Watch the full story at the #linkinbio
Very few leaders understand company-building end-to-end. Bipul Sinha has built, backed, and scaled foundational technology across multiple generations of enterprise infrastructure.
Today, as Chairman, Co-Founder, and CEO of @RubrikInc , Bipul is leading the company from backup and recovery into cyber resilience, and helping enterprises operationalize AI on secure, governed data with recovery at the core.
This week on Cyber 60 Podcast, Lightspeed Partner Guru Chahal and Bipul discuss non-consensus bets, enduring company culture, and how Rubrik is enabling generative AI through governed data, agentic rewind, and built-in recovery.
Watch the full episode at the #linkinbio
On May 6 at the Lightspeed SF office, Ravi Mhatre sat down with author Sebastian Mallaby to discuss The Infinity Machine, his new book that explores the brilliance of Demis, his time at DeepMind, and the quest for superintelligence.
Here were some of the topics Sebastian and Ravi explored last week:
1. After rejecting a million-dollar offer to skip his education at Cambridge, Demis Hassabis decided his life would be devoted to building general intelligence.
2. Demis stood out because of his insatiable curiosity and range, drawing from a vast career in neuroscience, gaming, philosophy, and physics. Sebastian made a compelling case for why Demis is one of the defining figures of modern AI.
3. Demis developed a “fluidity test” - leaders knowing the difference between ideas with potential to grow (those ideas being “fluid” to longevity) vs. those that lead to dead ends.
4. Through trial and error, it became clear that the best labs aren’t operating in one constant mode. They just know how to balance patient, open-ended research and disciplined, tightly focused execution.
5. Build for the AI that exists in 6-12 months, not today. Ravi referenced a recent Dario Amodei quote about AI overtaking software engineering in 6-12 months, and asserted that it remains the most important mental model for founders building on top of AI.
6. Through his travels and research, Sebastian concluded that the real competition isn't who has the smartest model. Instead, those founders who embed AI most deeply into the real world may have the lasting edge. Deployment is the moat.
7. A bold idea that Demis has believed for years: information - not matter, not energy, not quantum states - may be the most fundamental primitive of the universe. Intelligence may ultimately come down to information processing. If so, the gap between biological and artificial minds may be smaller than we think.
This was a fascinating discussion about where AI is actually headed. We are so grateful for Sebastian’s profound insights, Ravi’s discourse, and every person who joined us last week.
James Cadwallader, CEO and Co-Founder of Profound, talks about the founder experience with Lightspeed Partner Sachin Patel on The Investment Memo podcast:
“It’s a constant feeling of ‘I’ve not worked hard enough’ or ‘could I push harder?’”
“You could call it an anxiety or a pain, that quite often, the only remedy is to work.”
Check out the rest of the episode at the link in bio.
James Cadwallader is the CEO and Co-Founder of Profound, which leverages AI as a full-stack tool for marketers. He recently sat down with Sachin Patel on The Investment Memo to discuss how Profound works to exceed modern marketing needs.
He said that when it comes to agents specifically: “Every company on the planet is going to need to think about not just being discovered by AI, but actually seeing these user agents that are crawling on behalf of the end user as the customer.”
He continues, explaining that companies should ensure their “ecosystem can be understood, navigated, and transacted by an agent.”
Check out the rest of the episode at the link in bio.
“Market is the river. The product is the boat. And the team are the rowers,” said Profound CEO and Co-Founder James Cadwallader when he sat down with Sachin Patel on The Investment Memo.
“You can have Olympian rowers in a beautiful boat, but if you’re trying to paddle up the rapids, you’re not going to go very far or very fast.”
“Focus on the market.”
Check out the rest of the episode at the link in bio.
We asked founders at our Ideas Move at Lightspeed Retreat: “Was there anything you did that did not scale?”
Here’s what they had to say…
Arthur Leopold, Co-Founder and CEO of Agentio: “It’s tough to scale leaders at times… I wish I could have my pulse on everything that’s happening in the org. But you need to give your bench, your team trust and autonomy and enable them to execute and they will flourish.”
Jon Wang, Founder and Co-CEO of Assort Health: “There were a lot of things we did that did not scale.”
Jeremy Fraenkel, Co-Founder and CEO of Fundamental: “Trying to control every aspect of the company doesn’t work at scale.”
Here’s what the Unconventional AI CEO and Co-Founder @naveenraoracing has to say about the physics behind neural networks:
“If you look at a brain, it doesn’t have these abstractions. It doesn’t have a neural network layer that’s written in software and then running on a substrate. It’s literally using the physics to do the neural network implementation. And by doing so, you actually get a lot richer dynamics as part of the physics of the neuron.”
Check out the rest of this episode of The Investment Memo at the link in bio.
When asked why Unconventional AI raised a $475M seed, CEO and Co-Founder @naveenraoracing said:
“Because we need to iterate. We need to build prototypes, and we need to fail.”
“Speedrunning is exactly the right way to look at it. These things have been going on in academia for a while, but it’s shoestring budgets… Let’s do this with professional people who are deep experts and just give them what they need to try things.”
Check out the rest of this episode of The Investment Memo at the link in bio.
Believe it or not, The Silicon Valley Racing Mafia is real, and @naveenraoracing , CEO and Co-Founder of Unconventional AI, is in it. He recently told Lightspeed Partner Guru Chahal about his experience on The Investment Memo and how it connects back to what he’s building.
“It comes back to being an engineer… how do you make something go fast? How do you make it have more power?”
Check out the rest of the episode at the link in bio.
“Is there anything you regret, or wish you’d done sooner?”
At our Ideas Move at Lightspeed Retreat, innovative founders came together to have these kinds of conversations.
Arthur Leopold from Agentio: “I wish we had done all hands earlier. Bring the team together… highlight wins, highlight learnings, highlight the values on a consistent basis…”
David Paffenholz, Co-Founder and CEO of Juicebox: “I enjoy staying really close to the customer… over time I got further and further away.”
Jeremy Fraenkel, Co-Founder and CEO of Fundamental, had “no real regrets.”
