Ex-a16z partner Michele Griffin joins Lightning Capital to spearhead $100M ‘AI ripple effects’ fund with hands-on approach  — TFN

• Former Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z, accomplice Michele Griffin has joined Lightning Capital.
• She is going to spearhead a brand new $100 million ‘AI ripple results’ fund, which the agency has simply launched.
• Lightning has a multi-fund construction to supply short- to long-term liquidity to restricted companions, or LPs, and a hands-on method to managing its portfolio.

Lightning Capital has launched a brand new $100 million early-stage fund and introduced in former Andreessen Horowitz accomplice Michele Griffin to steer it. 

As basic accomplice and COO, Griffin will assist to mix a mega-fund mentality she discovered on the East Coast with the agility of an rising supervisor.

Lightning Capital, based in 2018, is elevating Enterprise Fund II, concentrating on Seed and Sequence A cheques of $1 to $5 million throughout round 10 to fifteen portfolio corporations. 

It’s going to put money into “AI ripple results”, which means startups which can be constructing for AI’s second-order results because it strikes from experimentation to deployment, reshaping industries, infrastructure, and work. For instance, corporations that make the workforce really feel excited and ready for potential future adjustments, slightly than displaced. 

Griffin joins by way of a merger with Premier GTM, a go-to-market advisory she based after leaving a16z, the place she helped construct the agency’s working platform, or basically its portfolio assist features. Premier GTM has suggested VC corporations together with Craft Ventures and Norwest Enterprise Companions.

“I undoubtedly didn’t should [merge], as a result of my enterprise was going exceptionally properly, however I felt like there was an enormous alternative for us to deliver that talent set collectively and for me to lastly make investments,” Griffin tells Tech Funding Information. 

She was all the time thinking about investing, she provides, but it surely’s not typical for an working accomplice to maneuver into an funding position at mega-funds “despite the fact that we’re so hands-on and have such an awesome lens.”

Griffin says she sits on each side of the equation in relation to go-to-market methods. “I can see whether or not an organization can really promote, and I do know the enterprise panorama properly sufficient to identify gaps they don’t even know they’ve but, however will,” she provides. 

A hands-on method 

Her remit spans Fund II and broader operations. She can even give attention to bringing in high advisors from her community to assist portfolio corporations via their progress. 

“At these mega corporations, they’ve folks on workers for each business-building query. Rising managers can’t afford that,” she mentioned. “What I’ve constructed, and what I deliver to Lightning, is a platform and community of ‘Avengers’ we are able to deploy into our corporations – the very best folks, into the largest gaps, in a short time.”

For instance, she has introduced in a authorities contracts workforce to assist founders at a reduced price, and plugged in specialists to market expertise leaders to construct gross sales groups.

Lightning’s two co-founding basic companions, CEO Jason Albanese and CFO Jock Percy, additionally come from working backgrounds, having each constructed and offered corporations prior to now. 

Enterprise capitalists are inclined to say that they put money into the very best groups. Certainly, “it’s a cliché for a cause,” Albanese tells TFN.

“Execution is 80, 90% of the success of corporations, versus their concepts,” Albanese says, including {that a} key a part of the agency’s mannequin helps founders let go of being a “jack of all trades” and construct out a robust management workforce as an alternative. A part of the trio’s promote is founder teaching, they goal to show founders the best way to develop their companies with out burning out and to really feel comfy delegating. 

The now-three GPs are break up between San Francisco, Miami, and New York, which means their publicity skews in direction of these markets. They do have a world remit, nevertheless, together with Europe.

The brand new fund sits inside a multi-fund construction that features a secondaries and treasury technique, geared toward LPs that Albanese describes as “institutional gentle”. It contains household workplaces and corporates searching for publicity to enterprise capital with extra versatile liquidity choices than conventional VC. 

Certainly, it comes as enterprise capital faces a liquidity crisis. This might ease when hotly-anticipated IPOs from the likes of SpaceX and Anthropic happen. Lightning considers its quick time period liquidity, medium time period liquidity, and longer-term liquidity choices, that are doable because of the break up of its funds, as an edge. “It’s a really highly effective choice” for LPs, Albanese says.

The companions didn’t disclose how a lot of the fund has been raised.