Jana Messerschmidt

“Every operator in tech should learn how to code.” This isn’t something you’d normally hear out of the mouth of someone in a non-engineering role at your average Silicon Valley tech company. But nothing about Jana Messerschmidt is average.

Jana joined Lightspeed’s consumer investing team after years of investing in and advising early stage companies, and holding a variety of roles across engineering, business development, sales and marketing throughout her career at high growth companies (Twitter and Netflix to name a few).

Jana has been at the intersection of business and technology her entire career. After receiving a B.S. in Computer Engineering from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, she eventually found herself on the business side of tech. As Vice President of Global Business Development and Platform at Twitter, Jana was responsible for strategic partnerships, enterprise sales, developer relations, partner engineering and platform marketing. Prior to joining Twitter, Jana was Director of Business Development at Netflix where she focused on building Netflix’s early streaming partnerships.

In 2015, Jana co-founded #ANGELS, a first of its kind investment collective with A CLEARLY DEFINED MISSION TO GET MORE WOMEN ON THE CAP TABLES OF SUCCESSFUL STARTUPS. Since then, she’s backed ambitious founders pursuing bold ideas across a wide range of industries including BIRD, CAMEO, COLOR, EERO, WINNIE and more.

Beyond investing, Jana’s passionate about hosting events and conversations to build community, diversify networks, and include and promote women in frontier fields shaping the industry. “If we want to foster an inclusive and equitable industry, women and underrepresented minorities need to be included in the wealth creation of successful companies.”