20VC: Lightspeed's Nicole Quinn on Why We Are Not In A Consumer Downturn, Why M&A Has Not Been This Exciting For A Long Time & Why Amazon Is Never Your Friend

Nicole Quinn is a Partner @ Lightspeed, one of the world's leading venture funds with a portfolio including the likes of Snapchat, Nest, StitchFix, AppDynamics and Max Levchin's Affirm, just to name a few from their incredible portfolio. At Lightspeed, Nicole focuses on the consumer market having made investments in the likes of Cheddar, Zola and Rothy's. Prior to Lightspeed, Nicole worked at Nutmeg, one of London's leading fintech players and before that spent 8 years covering consumer, eCommerce and brands at Morgan Stanley on the equity sales and research side. At Morgan Stanley, Nicole worked on the IPOs for Facebook, Groupon and Pandora. Fun fact: Nicole is also a star of the big screen featuring on Apple TV's Planet of The Apps. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Nicole made her way from Morgan Stanley to a leading London Fintech player to now, a partner a Lightspeed in San Francisco? 2.) How does Nicole define "digitally native brands"? What are the core benefits of owning the entire customer journey? Why does Nicole believe that brand is a key network effect today? 3.) Why does Nicole disagree that we are in a fallow period for consumer? How does Nicole analyze the incumbent heavy competitive landscape? Does Nicole believe that Amazon does more to make the market than destroy it? 4.) Why does Nicole believe we are in a consolidatory environment? What about the current ecosystem makes now the most exciting time for M&A in a long time? How does Nicole analyze M&A's ability to move the needle with transactions like Bonobos' acquisition? 5.) Being a star of Planet of The Apps, how important does Nicole think it is for investors to have public brands today? How does Nicole view VCs and digitally native brands in the same way? How does this mean that VCs should act in market? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Nicole’s Fave Book: The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton Nicole’s Fave Blog: Lean Luxe Nicole's Most Recent Investment: Rothy's As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Nicole on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. Lattice is the #1 performance management solution for growing companies. With Lattice, it’s easy to launch 360 performance review cycles as often as you want. And you also get a continuous feedback system with OKR goal tracking, real-time feedback, and 1-on-1 meetings to make sure employees get feedback between reviews. Find out why the likes of CoinBase, PlanGrid, Birchbox and WePay trust Lattice as their performance management solution by heading over to lattice.com to start investing in your people. That’s Lattice.com. Recurly, the company powering subscription success, with Recurly’s enterprise-class subscription management platform providing rapid time-to-value without requiring massive integration effort and expense and they have the ability to not only increase revenue by 7% but also reduce the all-important churn rate. That is why thousands of customers from Twitch to HubSpot to CBS Interactive trust Recurly as their subscription management platform. Check them out on recurly.com that really is a must.