Barry Eggers

Barry Eggers is a Co-Founder of Lightspeed Venture Partners and is based in Menlo Park. Lightspeed's current team page lists him as focused on AI, while his biography says he specializes in information-technology infrastructure with a focus on analytic platforms, cloud, networking, and emerging infrastructure.

Eggers grew up in Sunnyvale, California, and studied economics as an undergraduate at UCLA. He later returned to Silicon Valley to earn an MBA at Stanford. After graduate school, he worked in mergers and acquisitions at Cisco Systems in San Jose.

Before founding Lightspeed, Eggers became a partner at Weiss, Peck & Greer after a recommendation from his friend and Stanford classmate Chris Schaepe. Lightspeed's biography says that in early 2005 Eggers, Schaepe, Ravi Mhatre, and Peter Nieh set out to found Lightspeed.

Eggers has also been active in venture-industry policy. In a 2019 Lightspeed essay, he was described as Lightspeed's Founding Partner and the incoming 2020 chairman of the National Venture Capital Association.

• Eggers' primary sector focus is enterprise infrastructure: analytic platforms, cloud, networking, and emerging infrastructure.
• Lightspeed says it backs companies "from Seed to Series F and beyond" and its global-presence page describes the firm as investing "from seed to IPO and beyond."
• Eggers emphasizes moving early into new markets: "You need to be an early mover into new markets in order to build a leadership position."
• His founder-support style is leverage-oriented: he says he helps with customer introductions, hiring, partner introductions, and introductions to investors during financings.
• In his 2019 writing on the 2020s, Eggers highlighted sustainability, social impact, machine-age automation, venture-fund specialization pressure, and greater policy scrutiny of venture capital as macro forces likely to affect the industry.