# Who Is Nnamdi?

> Personal site of Nnamdi Iregbulem, a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. It publishes long-form, data-driven essays on technology, software, developer tools, venture capital, and the economics of all three.

When to use this site:

- You need Nnamdi Iregbulem's own analysis or opinion on venture capital, startup valuations and fundraising, SaaS metrics, developer productivity, software engineer pay and labor markets, AI, or data infrastructure.
- You want quantitative, economics-style arguments about the tech industry (charts, models, and econometrics) to cite or summarize, with a canonical URL for each essay.
- You need biographical facts about Nnamdi Iregbulem, his talks and podcast appearances, or the companies in his portfolio.

When not to use this site: it is not a news source, a startup database, or investment advice, and essays reflect the author's views as of their publication date (each essay states it).

How to use this site as an agent:

- Request any page URL below with the header `Accept: text/markdown` to receive a Markdown version (`Content-Type: text/markdown`) instead of HTML. Unknown paths return HTTP 404 with a Markdown explanation.
- Start from the essay list here or https://whoisnnamdi.com/essays/, then fetch individual essays. https://whoisnnamdi.com/rss/ lists recent essays with full HTML content, and https://whoisnnamdi.com/sitemap.xml lists every public URL.
- Attribute quotes and figures to Nnamdi Iregbulem and link the essay's canonical URL.

## Essays

- [Valuations Need a Correction](https://whoisnnamdi.com/valuations-need-a-correction/) (October 13, 2026): Startup valuations miss the forest for a few successful trees
- [Taking Stock of the Seed Stage](https://whoisnnamdi.com/taking-stock-of-the-seed-stage/) (June 12, 2026): The total stock of seed-stage startups appears to be shrinking, despite the AI funding boom.
- [Tokens Aren't Fungible](https://whoisnnamdi.com/tokens-arent-fungible/) (February 11, 2026): Open source LLMs are 90% cheaper than closed source models, yet they capture less than 30% of token share
- [Seed Valuations Aren’t Valuations](https://whoisnnamdi.com/seed-valuations/) (October 2, 2024): It’s not obvious what drives them
- [AI Benchmarking Is Broken](https://whoisnnamdi.com/ai-benchmarking-broken/) (May 28, 2024): We should take AI models seriously, which means taking their evaluation seriously
- [The Venture Activity Index – Q4 2023](https://whoisnnamdi.com/vai-q4-2023/) (March 7, 2024): Capital deployment remains depressed, sitting about 50% below trend
- [The Series A Bust](https://whoisnnamdi.com/series-a-bust/) (January 3, 2024): Investors have lost faith in Series A as a sign of product-market fit. In other words, they expect more but believe less.
- [How Redpanda is Taking Data Streaming Mainstream](https://whoisnnamdi.com/data-streaming-mainstream/) (August 10, 2023): Monitoring that even (Franz) Kafka would approve of
- [The Venture Activity Index](https://whoisnnamdi.com/venture-activity-index/) (July 25, 2023): Measuring the state of the venture "business cycle"
- [The Shadow Price of Venture Capital](https://whoisnnamdi.com/shadow-price/) (June 14, 2023): Valuations are 60% too high relative to the volume of venture funding
- [Don't Discount Interest Rates](https://whoisnnamdi.com/discount-rates/) (May 10, 2023): It's Jay Powell's world. We're just living in it.
- [We Don't Have Nearly Enough Startups](https://whoisnnamdi.com/not-enough-startups/) (January 11, 2023): Where did the explosive growth in venture activity come from?
- [Old Valuations Die Hard](https://whoisnnamdi.com/old-valuations/) (December 13, 2022): Private valuations substantially lag public tech valuations
- [It's Valuations (Almost) All the Way Down](https://whoisnnamdi.com/its-valuations/) (November 1, 2022): Venture funding hasn't grown as much as you think
- [Beats and Misses Are Forever](https://whoisnnamdi.com/forever/) (September 14, 2022): Revenue surprises permanently shift the trajectory of SaaS companies
- [Layoffs Don't Tell the Whole Story](https://whoisnnamdi.com/layoffs/) (August 31, 2022): Hiring freezes matter more than layoffs
- [COVID Hurt Most Software Companies](https://whoisnnamdi.com/covid-hurt-software/) (August 2, 2022): COVID put software companies on a permanently lower growth trajectory.
- [The Dark Matter of Software Valuations](https://whoisnnamdi.com/dark-matter/) (July 19, 2022): Exploring the vast "dark matter" of the software universe
- [Series A Rounds Are a Math Test](https://whoisnnamdi.com/series-a-math/) (June 27, 2022): Low monetization requires extraordinary traction, and vice versa.
- [Funding Simply Shifts the Bottleneck](https://whoisnnamdi.com/funding-bottleneck/) (April 22, 2022): A frothy funding environment means more competition for talent. Funding gets easier; hiring gets harder.
- [Breaking Apart the Rule of 40](https://whoisnnamdi.com/rule-40/) (March 3, 2022): Rules are meant to be broken, and the Rule of 40 is no exception
- [Schrodinger's Balance Sheet: When Equity Becomes a Liability](https://whoisnnamdi.com/schrodingers-balance-sheet/) (February 7, 2022): Preferred equity exists in a constant state of quantum superposition. It's neither equity nor debt, until it is.
- [Introducing a New and Improved SaaS Metric: Weighted ACV](https://whoisnnamdi.com/weighted-acv/) (January 11, 2022): ACV isn't as useful a concept as people think. We need a different SaaS monetization metric.
- [Companies Rarely Grow Into Their Valuations](https://whoisnnamdi.com/grow-valuation/) (November 9, 2021): Companies don't catch up to their valuations; their valuations catch up to them.
- [WebAssembly-ing the Pieces: Vectorized’s Data Policy Engine](https://whoisnnamdi.com/data-policy-engine/) (October 9, 2021): Rather than ship data to code, which is expensive and latency-prone, why not ship code to the data?
- [You Can't Eat Relative Growth](https://whoisnnamdi.com/relative-growth/) (September 23, 2021): In startup land, we talk way too much about relative growth. We'd do better to ground our thinking in absolute growth.
- [Do Wealthy Investors Have an Edge?](https://whoisnnamdi.com/wealthy-investors-edge/) (August 18, 2021): The super-rich earn more on their investments than the rest of us. Something nefarious, or something else?
- [PhDs Aren't Starting Companies Like They Used To](https://whoisnnamdi.com/phd-founders/) (July 8, 2021): The burden of scientific knowledge and managerial complexity is crushing our best and brightest.
- [Awesome Developer Advocates Are Hiding in Plain Sight](https://whoisnnamdi.com/developer-advocates-plain-sight/) (May 25, 2021): Why you shouldn’t filter for social media following or prior experience
- [The Developer Productivity Manifesto Part 3 — Leaving Software on the Table](https://whoisnnamdi.com/leaving-software-on-the-table/) (May 5, 2021): Quantifying the billion dollar impact of developer inefficiency
- [The Developer Productivity Manifesto Part 2 — More (Developers) Isn’t Always More](https://whoisnnamdi.com/more-developers-isnt-always-more/) (April 16, 2021): Adding more cooks to the kitchen rarely helps
- [The Developer Productivity Manifesto Part 1 — The Flywheel](https://whoisnnamdi.com/the-developer-productivity-flywheel/) (March 31, 2021): Developer productivity is falling. But it doesn't have to. The solution? The Developer Productivity Flywheel
- [Four Challenges Facing Developer Productivity Startups](https://whoisnnamdi.com/developer-productivity-challenges/) (March 11, 2021): The biggest challenges facing developer productivity startups today
- [Robinhood Traders are Last to the Party](https://whoisnnamdi.com/robinhood-party/) (March 1, 2021): Robinhood traders get fleeced not by HFTs front-running milliseconds before their order hits but by other retail investors, days earlier.
- [Why Developers Love Redpanda](https://whoisnnamdi.com/why-developers-love-redpanda/) (February 10, 2021): Why Vectorized's focus on developer experience will unlock real-time streaming for the great majority of developers
- [There's Nothing Magical About the SaaS Magic Number](https://whoisnnamdi.com/magical-magic-number/) (February 4, 2021): Magic number is a bad metric. Sales and marketing drives much less revenue than this not-so-magical number implies
- [Product-Market Fit is Lindy](https://whoisnnamdi.com/product-market-fit-is-lindy/) (December 17, 2020): The longer you search for product-market fit, the less likely you will find it.
- [Why We Will Never Have Enough Software Developers](https://whoisnnamdi.com/never-enough-developers/) (October 27, 2020): Developers are dropping out of the profession in large numbers
- [Enterprise Software Monetization is Fat-Tailed](https://whoisnnamdi.com/software-fat-tailed/) (October 6, 2020): In enterprise software, averages are meaningless. Instead, focus on the tails.
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition (Paper Explained)](https://whoisnnamdi.com/transformers-image-recognition/) (October 4, 2020): Large Transformer trained on large datasets outperform CNN-based architectures and achieve state of the art results on image recognition tasks
- [Pre-training via Paraphrasing (Paper Explained)](https://whoisnnamdi.com/pre-training-paraphrasing/) (September 29, 2020): Transformer model pre-trained on document retrieval and reconstruction performs well on both fine-tuned and zero-shot downstream tasks
- [Top Three Strategic Priorities of Developer Productivity Startups](https://whoisnnamdi.com/developer-productivity-strategic-priorities/) (August 18, 2020): What's top of mind for developer productivity leaders
- [Six Trends Shaping Developer Productivity](https://whoisnnamdi.com/developer-productivity-trends/) (July 14, 2020): We interviewed developer productivity leaders. Here's what they said.
- [Why Don't VCs Index Invest?](https://whoisnnamdi.com/vcs-index-invest/) (July 3, 2020): VCs are picky, not because they have so many options but because they have so few.
- [The Value of College May Be Negative for the COVID Generation](https://whoisnnamdi.com/the-value-of-college/) (June 17, 2020): You might think the value of a college degree has been increasing. You would be wrong.
- [Do College Degrees Matter for Software Engineers? Maybe](https://whoisnnamdi.com/college-degrees-software-engineers/) (May 20, 2020): Do college-educated developers earn more? Yes, but less than you might think
- [Pandemiconomics: Viral Volatility](https://whoisnnamdi.com/viral-volatility/) (April 15, 2020): How the virus rocked stocks
- [Byron Deeter and Jason Lemkin on the State of VC and the Cloud](https://whoisnnamdi.com/deeter-lemkin-state-of-vc-and-cloud/) (March 30, 2020): When to raise capital, what to expect from VCs, and the "new normal"
- [Remote Software Developers Earn 22% More Than Non-Remote Developers](https://whoisnnamdi.com/remote-software-developers-earn-more/) (March 23, 2020): Working remote even just a few days per month leads to higher pay
- [How Age, Race, and Gender Affect Software Engineering Pay](https://whoisnnamdi.com/age-race-gender-software-engineering-pay/) (February 24, 2020): Progress on narrowing pay gaps among software developers
- [The Highest-Paid Software Engineers: 2020 Edition](https://whoisnnamdi.com/highest-paid-software-engineers-2020/) (February 24, 2020): Engineers are the basic economic unit of modern software development. The software production function depends critically on developer productivity and compensation. And yet software engineering pay remains poorly understood.
- [How Uber and Lyft Dominated Ridesharing By Seeing Red Where Others Saw Blue](https://whoisnnamdi.com/red-ocean/) (January 29, 2020): A quick visit to the Red Sea
- [Pattern Matching is Dead. Long Live People Matching](https://whoisnnamdi.com/people-matching/) (December 10, 2019): Venture capital is changing — for the better
- [High Retention = High Volatility](https://whoisnnamdi.com/high-retention-high-volatility/) (November 4, 2019): Why SaaS revenue retention is a double-edge sword
- [Waitlists are a Vanity Metric](https://whoisnnamdi.com/waitlists-are-a-vanity-metric/) (July 28, 2019): Waitlists, registered users, and other cumulative measures better measure the size of your pride than the size of your business
- [How to Conquer Cohort Analysis With a Powerful Clinical Research Tool](https://whoisnnamdi.com/how-to-conquer-cohort-analysis/) (June 3, 2019)
- [Entrepreneur's Ruin, or How Not to Go Bust](https://whoisnnamdi.com/entrepreneurs-ruin/) (February 28, 2019)
- [Meet Dev, the Highest-Paid Software Developer in America](https://whoisnnamdi.com/highest-paid-software-developer/) (January 15, 2019)
- [The Growth-Share Matrix of Software Development](https://whoisnnamdi.com/the-growth-share-matrix-of-software-development/) (November 22, 2018)
- [You Don't Understand Compound Growth](https://whoisnnamdi.com/you-dont-understand-compound-growth/) (October 2, 2018)

## About

- [About me](https://whoisnnamdi.com/about-me/): Biography, background, and contact links
- [Talks](https://whoisnnamdi.com/talks/): Podcasts, panels, and presentations
- [Portfolio](https://whoisnnamdi.com/portfolio/): Companies Nnamdi Iregbulem has invested in or worked with

## Optional

- [Button-mashing never worked in StarCraft. Tokenmaxxing won’t work in AI](https://fortune.com/2026/07/29/button-mashing-gaming-tokenmaxxing-nnamdi-iregbulem-lightspeed-ai/) (July 29, 2026, published on Fortune): Like actions per minute in strategy games, token usage is a vanity metric.
- [File Systems for Agents](https://lsvp.com/stories/filesystemsforagents/) (May 21, 2026, published on Lightspeed): An emerging theme among teams building agents: the file system is the ideal memory abstraction for AI agents.
- [Tripling Down on Exa to Build the Search Engine for AI](https://lsvp.com/stories/tripling-down-on-exa-to-build-the-search-engine-for-ai/) (May 20, 2026, published on Lightspeed): Why we tripled down on Exa, the search engine built for AI agents.
- [The Engine That Builds the Engine](https://lsvp.com/stories/the-engine-that-builds-the-engine/) (April 16, 2026, published on Lightspeed): The codebase is a software company's crown jewel — what changes when AI becomes the engine that builds it.
- [The Missing Emotional Layer in AI: Our Investment in Nuance Labs](https://lsvp.com/stories/the-missing-emotional-layer-in-ai-our-investment-in-nuance-labs/) (September 9, 2025, published on Lightspeed): On the uncanny valley of AI avatars, and our investment in Nuance Labs to build AI's missing emotional layer.
- [Search, Perfected for AI: Why We're Doubling Down on Exa](https://lsvp.com/stories/search-perfected-for-ai-why-were-doubling-down-on-exa/) (September 3, 2025, published on Lightspeed): AI agents are only as good as the context they retrieve — why we're doubling down on Exa.
- [AI-Driven Cyberattacks are on the Rise. Are You Ready?](https://lsvp.com/stories/ai-enabled-hacking-is-here-are-we-ready-for-it/) (July 22, 2025, published on Lightspeed): The rising tide of AI-driven cyberattacks demands a new era of smarter, autonomous defense.
- [When Search Becomes Infrastructure: Changes and Opportunities to Watch](https://lsvp.com/stories/next-big-shift-in-search-from-product-to-infrastructure/) (July 8, 2025, published on Lightspeed): For 25 years search meant ten blue links; now it's becoming infrastructure for AI — and that shift creates new opportunities.
- [Apple's AI Reasoning Paper: Good Questions, Few Answers](https://lsvp.com/stories/apples-ai-reasoning-paper-good-questions-few-answers/) (July 2, 2025, published on Lightspeed): A close read of Apple's controversial paper claiming to expose reasoning weaknesses in models like Claude and ChatGPT.
- [Tana: The AI-Native Collaborative Workspace](https://lsvp.com/stories/tana-the-ai-native-collaborative-workspace/) (February 3, 2025, published on Lightspeed): Knowledge work has evolved in waves — our investment in Tana, the AI-native collaborative workspace.
- [Observo AI: The AI-Native Observability Data Pipeline](https://lsvp.com/stories/observo-ai-the-ai-native-observability-data-pipeline/) (January 30, 2025, published on Lightspeed): Observability and security systems drown in operational data — our investment in Observo AI, the AI-native data pipeline.
- [AI Enterprise Market Map: Cutting Through the Hype](https://lsvp.com/stories/ai-enterprise-market-map-cutting-through-the-hype/) (August 29, 2024, published on Lightspeed): Domain-specific apps offer the greatest ROI for enterprise AI — a market map cutting through the hype.
- [Goodfire: Building Interpretable AI](https://lsvp.com/stories/goodfire-building-interpretable-ai/) (August 15, 2024, published on Lightspeed): Why interpretability is becoming critical infrastructure, and our investment in Goodfire.
- [Exa: Redesigning Search for AI](https://lsvp.com/stories/exa-redesigning-search-for-ai/) (July 16, 2024, published on Lightspeed): The coming agentic web needs new infrastructure — our investment in Exa, redesigning search for AI.
- [Substrate: Building Compound AI Systems](https://lsvp.com/stories/substrate-building-compound-ai-systems/) (June 20, 2024, published on Lightspeed): The most magical AI experiences will come from compound systems combining many models — our investment in Substrate.
- [Building With Patronus AI — Automated AI Evaluation](https://lsvp.com/stories/building-with-patronus-ai-automated-ai-evaluation/) (September 14, 2023, published on Lightspeed): Our seed investment in Patronus AI, the first automated evaluation and security platform for LLMs.
- [Securing AI Is The Next Big Platform Opportunity](https://lsvp.com/stories/securing-ai-is-the-next-big-platform-opportunity/) (September 12, 2023, published on Lightspeed): Building with AI creates a new class of security challenges — and a new platform opportunity.
- [Why Lightspeed is Leading Redpanda's $100 Million Series C](https://lsvp.com/stories/why-lightspeed-is-leading-redpandas-100-million-series-c/) (June 27, 2023, published on Lightspeed): Why we led Redpanda's $100M Series C as it reinvents real-time data streaming.
- [Building With Contextual — Enterprise-Ready LLMs For All](https://lsvp.com/stories/contextual-ai-making-enterprise-ready-llms-available-for-all/) (June 9, 2023, published on Lightspeed): LLMs are uniquely suited to enterprise data — our investment in Contextual AI to make enterprise-ready LLMs available for all.
- [Select Star + Lightspeed: Data Democracy for All](https://lsvp.com/stories/select-star-lightspeed-data-democracy-for-all/) (January 31, 2023, published on Lightspeed): The modern data stack changed how organizations work with data — our investment in Select Star to democratize it.
- [Notes](https://whoisnnamdi.com/notes/): Reading notes on economics, statistics, and machine learning papers (HTML only)
- [RSS feed](https://whoisnnamdi.com/rss/): Recent essays with full content
- [Sitemap](https://whoisnnamdi.com/sitemap.xml): Every public URL