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b"Miguel Armaza sits down with Alex Taussig, Partner at Lightspeed Ventures, a global multi-stage VC with over $10B in AUM, focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the Enterprise and Consumer sectors. They\\u2019ve backed some amazing companies, including Snap, Affirm, and GrubHub. \\n\\nAlex focuses on online marketplaces and co-leads Lightspeed\\u2019s investment efforts in Latin America. He is also the author of the popular weekly newsletter, DRINKING FROM THE FIREHOSE, in which he writes about recent trends in commerce, media, tech, climate, science, and popular culture. \\n\\nIn this episode, we discuss\\n\\n- Alex\\u2019s story and why he decided to stop pursuing a Phd and left academia to join the tech investing world\\n- The intersection of marketplaces and fintech and why the payment technology is the motor oil that makes transactions flow smoothly for marketplaces\\n- Why in Venture Capital it\\u2019s very important to ask the best possible questions and pay close attention to the answers that reveal an underlying truth\\n- Early investing mistakes and the importance of focus \\n- Lessons from several years of writing a successful newsletter\\u2026 and a lot more!\\n\\nAlex Taussig\\n\\nAlex joined Lightspeed in 2016 as a partner on the consumer investment team and has spent 12+ years in venture capital. He is passionate about partnering with founders who are reimagining major categories of commerce using technology.\\n\\nAt Lightspeed, Alex has led investments in startups disrupting massive industries like food (Daily Harvest, Frubana), retail (Faire), education (Outschool), and weddings (Zola). He also co-leads Lightspeed\\u2019s investment efforts in Latin America. Prior to joining Lightspeed, Alex was a partner at Highland Capital Partners, where he led investments in and supported over a dozen companies, including thredUP (IPO TDUP, 2021), Carbon Black (IPO CBLK, 2018), 2U (IPO 2014, TWOU), and RentJuice (acquired by Zillow, 2012).\\n\\nAlex is a trained research scientist and breaks down business problems with deductive logic and analytical rigor. He originally studied physics at Harvard College, where he graduated summa cum laude, and then went on to receive a Master\\u2019s degree in materials engineering from MIT, where he was part of a research group building the first fully optical computer chip. Alex also received an MBA from Harvard Business School, where he was a Baker Scholar, an honor given to the top 5% of the graduating class.\\n\\nAlex publishes a popular weekly(ish) newsletter called DRINKING FROM THE FIREHOSE, in which he writes about recent trends in commerce, media, tech, climate, science, and popular culture. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and two children and enjoys baking, anime, and heavy metal music.\\n\\nAbout Lightspeed Venture Partners\\n\\nLightspeed Venture Partners is a multi-stage venture capital firm focused on accelerating disruptive innovations and trends in the Enterprise and Consumer sectors. Over the past two decades, the Lightspeed team has backed hundreds of entrepreneurs and helped build more than 400 companies globally, including Snap, Nest, Nutanix, AppDynamics, MuleSoft, OYO, Guardant, Affirm, and GrubHub. Lightspeed and its affiliates currently manage $10.5B across the global Lightspeed platform, with investment professionals and advisors in Silicon Valley, Israel, India, China, Southeast Asia, and Europe.\\n\\nFor more FinTech insights, follow us below:\\n\\nMedium: medium.com/wharton-fintech\\n\\nWFT Twitter: twitter.com/whartonfintech\\n\\nMiguel's Twitter: twitter.com/MiguelArmaza\\n\\nMiguel's Newsletter: https://bit.ly/3jWIpqp"