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This is Siqi Chen, CEO of Serious Business. We closed our series A with Lightspeed in April with Jeremy on our board.

There are legions of horror stories involving investors who don't understand your business coming in and micromanaging your company. Stories like those made it a scary prospect when we were considering raising some venture capital. We've been very pleasantly surprised by our ongoing relationship with Jeremy and Lightspeed.

Before closing, Jeremy was both decisive and transparent. There was no pussyfooting around some of the more sensitive terms and there were no surprises. We were able to reach agreement on terms in very short order.

As a board member, Jeremy is no-bullshit invaluable. His in depth knowledge and experience in consumer internet products led to non-obvious insights at nearly every board meeting. At the same time, Lightspeed seems to have almost gone out of its way to make sure that we feel like we are in control of our company. As an entrepreneur this level of trust is much appreciated.

In addition to product and strategy insights, Lightspeed has been very valuable in making all the right introductions through their network. We've been able to get connected to great advisors and top flight engineers.

I would highly recommend working with Jeremy in particular from Lightspeed, and if you were to get in touch with any of his portfolio companies as we have, the feedback is uniform. Jeremy is the rare VC who understands product, starting up, and has keen understanding and foresight within the consumer internet space.

LSVP and Jeremy are probably the most active investors in the social gaming space. He took our meeting on a reference, was very courteous and provided us with helpful feedback.

Was very impressed by Jeremy Liew's detailed knowledge of the social games / facebook apps sector. He put a lot of effort into getting the some key industry guys - including a bunch of stanford students - together around a very valuable LVP sponsored dinner (as far as I know only Rockyou was in his portfolio). Based on one meeting and one dinner, I would say LVP is one of the most insightful and plugged in VCs I've spoken to in social games / social apps.

Initial pitch went well. Andrew read our business plan, asked good questions for an industry that LVP is not currently invested in.

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After working with Ravi at two different companies, I can attest that he really cares for the companies he's involved with, and offers useful advice.

Do other VCs hear your ideas too, even when they're at advanced stage of due diligence with your competitor? :)

Talked to a partner in India about our company. He was very attentive & seemed to know all about the space, which is rare. Little did I know that he was just gathering all the competitive info from me, while closing a round with our competitor. The announcement came 10 days later that they funded our competition. He could have simply told us "No Meeting". But then that would be too ethical? :)

Background: I worked with Peter Nieh of Lightspeed Venture Partners to create MyBuys from the assets of another portfolio company in a very productive and creative manner in 2006.

Deal structure: Peter and his partners were very receptive to the idea of creating a new company with a new capital structure that would be attractive to management. In order for the new capital structure to come together, Lightspeed recapitalized their previous investment entirely and invested in our new venture with a new mindset (a difficult thing for many VCs to do as they often get caught in the emotion of the old deal's issues), new preferences, and a belief in the new team.

Future round assistance: Peter was very supportive in preparing me for our B round funding process. He helped tailor the message of the investor presentation to be well tuned for the VC audiences. He also assisted with many introductions to other VCs as well as providing strong support when discussing our team and prospects.

Funding result: We were able to receive many term sheets that were all significantly above our last round post-money. Lightspeed invested in the B round requiring only one presentation to update the partners on our progress since the previous round (in addition to Peter's reporting on us behind the scenes) and Lightspeed has also reserved for future rounds.

Board Member: As a board member, Peter lets me operate the company - and I appreciate that. He cares about aligning goals, the market, and customer traction. He also cares about the quality and the recruitment of the management team and will actively engage in recruiting team members, if asked. If I were an investor, these would be the things that I would also care about also.

Other Lightspeed assistance:
I have received multiple sales leads (Jeremy Liew's internet background and connections have been very helpful), several high quality employee candidates, and participated in several Lightspeed events as part of their ability to proactively assist their portfolio companies.

Overall: Lightspeed is a very professional and smart group of partners and I would highly recommend them to other CEOs. Please feel free to contact me direclty at rcell@mybuys.com with any questions.

Lightspeed (Peter Nieh) was a solid, supportive investor over an 8+ year path to a successful exit at our company. Peter was always available and did real work on behalf of the company when it came to recruiting/hiring, strategic introductions, providing credibility to early-stage customers, etc. He was a very active member of an excellent board that worked well together and provided insightful, probing questions and asked for the right kinds of analysis and data, but always in the spirit of building a successful business. All this through a very difficult experience of building the company once during the go-go time of '98 to '00, the painful nuclear winter in telecom and capital markets in '01/early '02 (big layoffs and a questionable future), and then rebuilding to a very successful exit. I can't comment on pitching Lightspeed (I joined an existing company less than a year after they led the Series A), but they were true gentlemen and very supportive & cooperatie through 3 subsequent outside rounds. No investor relationship is 100% rosy, and Peter & I certainly had our disagreements at times... but net-net, the experience was very positive in the broad scheme of things. I'm not sure where some of the other comments are coming from; they don't align with my experience.

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Had Peter on my board, and he was worse than useless: he actually made things worse through ineptitude, stupidity, and sheepishness.

If a VC takes an active role in your company, he/she can either be a help or a hinderance. You may havbe taken $$ from a VC Fund, but you end up having to deal - over and over again - with one Partner.

It would be greater if the Partner had extensive realworld experience. It would be even better if the Partner had a sense of humility, grace, decency and humor.

Peter has none of these.

So, take $$ from Lightspeed. Just don't take it from Peter

We had an introduction to Jeremy Liew and remotely pitched our deal. Response to introduction was lightning quick as was initial deal review. They didn't to proceed further as it was marginally outside their focus. However process was fast, clear and decisive so would recommend an approach.

We really value Jeremy's understanding of our space. He is someone who actively tries things out for himself and translates the best of Web 2.0 into suggestions for our own business.

For example, we were able to acquire a highly successful Facebook application before it even got listed in the Facebook directory. This was directly due to Jeremy having installed the app through his friend network and then recommending it to us. It is great when your VC gives you an inside scoop on acquiring 5M users.

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Nice offices.

Nabeel writes - "But showing up twenty minutes late and then joking to each other about how they always make entrepreneurs wait should be corrected behavior. We've all got busy schedules."

Very much enjoyed the meeting. Ravi was peppering with questions and Jeremy is very strong, so that was all good.

But Jeremy & Ravi showed up at least twenty minutes late. They apologized but later were commenting to each other about how they are always late. That should be corrected behavior, we've all got busy schedules.

I have worked with Lightspeed guys for 10+ years, in particular Peter Nieh and Ravi Mhatre. Good, hardworking guys and a good fund that understand enterprise software and how to nurture companies. They were beyond patient with some deals that went shitty after the dotcom bust.

On some of the comments here, note that if you do not know how to pitch to VCs they are not going to be so pleasant, so get a short elevator pitch down that communicates your value prop, don't expect meetings to start on time, and don't have more than 15 slides.

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Jeremy is a good guy: he is always generous with his time, provides valuable feedback and he has a ton of real world operational experience- unlike some others you meet around the Valley.

Setting up a meeting with Ajit was a good experience since he took pains to have his staff co-ordinate the meeting (especially since I was flying in from Asia for a limited time).

When we pitched to Ravi, he was very engaged and efficiently came up to speed with our technology. Our technology and market is not obvious, but by the second meeting I clearly feel he understands our space by way of his follow-on intense and engaging questions. I know people have different opinions of people, but I have to honestly say that working with Ravi has been a very positive experience for me and one of the best I have had.

Ajit Deora at Lightspeed is a genuinely nice person. He will go out of his way to help entrepreneurs as he has built companies and understands what you are going through. He is extremely sharp and gives great feedback. I highly recommend him and if you are doing something releated to wireless or web servies, do contact him.

More heat than light

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