Venture Unlocked: The playbook for venture capital managers

Platform Shifts, AI, and the Future of Consumer Investing

13 snips
Sep 24, 2025
Mercedes Bent, a Venture Partner at Lightspeed and co-founder of Premise, shares her insights on AI's transformative power in consumer tech. She discusses the importance of originality in investing and the need for intuition in identifying standout founders. Mercedes reveals her approach to sourcing non-consensus deals and contrasts strategies for mega-firms versus early-stage ventures. With AI heralding a new wave in consumer markets, she emphasizes the necessity for founders to adapt their products and distribution methods to stay ahead.
Ask episode
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
ANECDOTE

Tech Upbringing Shaped Her Path

  • Mercedes grew up in a tech family and learned coding from her father, which seeded her startup orientation.
  • She moved from the Fed and Goldman to startups, then scaled a product to $100M before joining VC in 2019.
INSIGHT

Redefining Consumer Technology

  • Premise targets technical consumer founders who pair deep engineering with behavioral insight.
  • Mercedes argues consumer tech is defined by low-touch, product-pull distribution rather than categories like apparel.
ADVICE

Treat Fund Building Like A Startup

  • Productize your sourcing and turn events into compounding, branded funnels with repeatable priority access.
  • Track metrics like founder cost of acquisition and LTV for your sourcing engine.
Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode
Get the app