Jeremy Liew

Liew has been named to the Midas List, recognizing the best deal makers in V.C., multiple times. In August 2021, just shy of his 50th birthday, Liew announced he would step back from investing, though he would remain a partner at Lightspeed.

After the 2021 Atlanta murder of six Asian women, Liew joined with other tech investors to fund causes to fight anti-Asian hate.

The initial investment was $485,000, but in following rounds of investments, Lightspeed invested a total of $8.1 million into the app. This increased 250-fold in value to just under $2 billion at the time of Snapchat's IPO in 2017. Relations between Spiegel and Liew quickly deteriorated, as Spiegel felt he was taken advantage of with an onerous agreement for the initial seeding. This was later modified giving Lightspeed further shares at a discount.

Liew was also involved in investments that turned out to be disappointing, including Zest AI (formerly ZestFinance), which started out as an online platform to consumers for point-of-sale subprime financing, using Artificial Intelligence to screen for suitable borrowers, now selling software. He invested in Living Social, which was a daily deals firm that enjoyed a meteoric rise, but ultimately failed. In 2016, it was acquired by Groupon for $0. Liew had invested in the first ridesharing company, named Sidecar. The startup lost out to Uber and Lyft, folding in 2015. Finally, another investment of his, Mic, a media and internet company catering to millennials, saw its value dwindle from hundreds of millions of dollars in 2017 to $5 million in November 2018, the value at which it was sold to Bustle. Liew ascribed the collapse to a change in Facebook algorithms.

Liew rejects grievance politics from the Right or Left. He rejects the idea that America can go back to the good old days, either nationally or locally. After holding out on becoming a citizen for over a decade, he felt compelled to vote in 2016 and became a citizen. Although not a staunch Democrat, he has supported Democrats on a national level and voted for moderates in local elections.

In 2015, he noted that most of the boards he was on at the time were outside of Silicon Valley. This "follow the woman" thesis eventually led him to Snapchat, when in 2012 a partner told him that his daughter and her friends were obsessed with a new app he should look into. This led to a meeting with co-founder Evan Spiegel. He subsequently became the first investor in Snapchat.

In 2006, he joined venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners as its first consumer specialist partner. At that time, Lightspeed it was a small firm specializing in tech startups that were largely unknown outside of Silicon Valley. He noticed that startups that were used predominantly by young women were the most successful. He concluded that young women were the most likely carriers of the next popular cultural trend. To better understand this demographic, he looked outside of Silicon Valley to Los Angeles and New York to observe their consumer preferences, and develop a data driven approach to it.

Liew was the first and last investor to get special terms from the company. The success Liew brought Lightspeed with this investment and its IPO put the firm, having become a megafund, into the elite of the competitive V.C. world. The return on the IPO was greater than what the firm had raised in 2006. Liew was described as a major winner in all of this.

In 1998, Liew went back to school, receiving an MBA from Stanford University in 2000. After graduation, he became vice president of strategic planning for USA Networks. He was involved in the transition to IAC, when it added companies such as Ticketmaster, Expedia and Hotel.com to its portfolio. He spent three years at AOL/Netscape as a corporate strategy executive and then entered the world of venture capital.

Jeremy Liew (born 21 September 1971) is a venture capitalist, best known for making the initial seed investment in Snapchat.