On a Monday morning in April of 2023, Lightspeed Venture Partner’s co-leaders Ravi Mhatre (pictured) and Bejul Somaia directed partners around the world to clear their calendars for the day. Get out of everything, they said. Even board meetings.
ChatGPT had come out a few months earlier and the two executives didn’t believe the firm was primed to meet the moment. Khosla Ventures, a direct rival, had an early stake in OpenAI — Lightspeed did not. It had also missed other breakout AI companies, including ElevenLabs and Hugging Face.
Somaia led the meeting and it went for seven hours. The partners broke into subgroups and reconvened. Those in Europe and Israel stayed on past midnight. The question on the table was, if AI is going to change everything, what would it mean to act as though that were true?