Jean Paul Chauvet, Lightspeed, $2+ Billion Valuation
In today's episode of Unicorn Builders, we speak with Jean Paul Chauvet, CEO of LightSpeed, a publicly-traded commerce platform helps merchants simplify, scale and provide exceptional customer experiences. The cloud solution transforms and unifies online and physical operations, multichannel sales, expansion to new locations, global payments, financing and connection to supplier networks. To date Lightspeed has raised more than $1 billion in funding.
JP and I had an insightful and candid conversation about his personal journey, his buy vs acquire framework, lessons from rapid growth, a behind the scenes look at their IPO and much more.
Listen to the full episode:
JPs Story
JP was born in Lagos, Nigeria to an Irish mother and French-Lebanese father. Reflecting on his early years, JP said: “For me it was a golden childhood. Nigeria is now a dangerous country, but when I grew up, were close to the beach and it was a really nice. My dad was doing big civil engineering work, had a company doing that, and it was a very fun childhood.”
He started in Product Management and spent the first 20 years of his career establishing himself as a the “go-to-market guy” for high scale companies.
In 2011, JP joined Lightspeed an early stage startup with just 40 employees. Today the company has grown to more than 3000 employees, $500+ million in annual revenue, and a public valuation of more than $2 billion. After a four year stint as Chief Revenue Officer followed by a six year stint as President, JP was named CEO in 2022 after founder Dax Dasilvaas stepped into the Executive Chairman role, part of a long term succession plan.
#1: Listen to your customers and build solutions to solve their emerging problems before your competitors can.
“We have always been ahead of the game and we've always been ahead of the trends because we listened really hard to our customers throughout the entire journey. We were the first mobile iPad based or iOS based in stores. That's why. Because we were the first Apple wanted to sell hardware, they brought every customer to us. Then were the first to be in the cloud, which means the first to not have a database underneath the counter.
Then we were the first to do omnichannel, which means were the first to say, no, it's not about ecom and offline, it's about channels. You need to be a platform that integrates both. And at the time, everybody's like, what are you saying? And we're like, no, we think that the so I think we read the market really well throughout every one of our evolutions, which means that we were never on our back foot."
#2: Constantly reinvent yourself but keep your mission consistent
“Every year we have to reinvent ourselves and some are tougher than others. And when I started were only doing retail and like hey, we have to do restaurant. That is a big so we built a platform for restaurants. Then in the retail side we said oh, our ecom is not good, we got to reinvent this, let's start over. And I'm just giving you all the years, but every year was a quest. You got it there. And I think your strategy needs to remain very constant, your mission needs to be very constant and nothing has changed.
That's why I'm really proud that I'm eleven years in the company and the mission is exactly the same, the strategy is very much the same but what we've done is over time we've pivoted and we've made slight adjustments to optimize and enable us to go faster to accomplish the vision in a faster way”
#3: Build or acquire: how to decide
“It's going back to crossing the chasm. Do I have enough time and resources or will I be obsolete by the time I build what's on the market today?
I'll give you an example: kitchen display. We went to the market, we scouted the market. We looked, we found one that was functionally, very rich. But then we looked at the code base and like, oh God, that thing is not going to evolve. So we ended our scouting going, okay, how much would it take to build? And it was a reasonable time. And we said, okay, forget to buy, we're building this one.
There are others where Ecommerce is a good example. We were like, okay, we need something as good as shopify because that's the minimum standard right now. How long would it take for us to build this? And the teams came back with three years and a half, and like, yeah, but if it's going to take three years and a half, by the time we get there, the market is going to be in a completely different spot, so we'll never have the right timing to get there. So then I was like, okay, let's scout the markets. And somebody scouted the markets, we came back going, hey, there's this amazing company called Ecwid. The code base is brand new. It's truly headless, it's outstanding, and the price is not that bad. And we're like, okay, let's go buy them."
#4: Your job is to create believers.
“I bring people to a spot where there is a belief. It starts with belief. Do you believe? And I go back to the early days of Lightspeed. I used to tell everyone we're going to be public. We're going to be a billion dollar company. And we're going to get there. And we are here today. I've never doubted. And I think people I'm good at getting people to believe this and so getting the right talent in the company to work hard to make this a reality.”
Behind the scenes of an IPO
“Like every entrepreneur, I wanted to ring the bell, and this was probably the biggest achievement of my career, was taking a company from very small to IPO.
What was it like? It was thrilling. You do your pre road shows. After you do your road shows. I guarantee any founder on this call that you've never worked as hard in your life. When you do an IPO. You do the road shows, which is the most exhausting thing. It's almost like the biggest drain. You do? Probably 15 to 20 investor calls a day. At night. You're in planes. You go from one city to the next. It's like there's no break for roughly six to ten days. I was super proud because were so over.
I mean, I think it was more than ten times oversubscribed. So everybody wanted our stock. Everybody was buying in. So you have this great intensity, and then at the end of the road trip, you basically end up in a room with bankers. And they tell you, and in our case, they told you, look, this was one of the most successful IPOs they'd ever you know, we're Canadian, so not that many tech IPOs in Canada. And even though we did a us Double listed us. And Canadian IPO. And then they tell you, wow, you're going public tomorrow. And they're like, Here it is. It's Done. You get to distribute the book. You get to privilege the investors you like the most. And then it's kind of surreal. You go out with your exact team that night and everybody's feeling electric. The message leaks out. The world knows you're going public tomorrow because you have to tell them.
And then you have everybody in your entourage, I think basically calls you all night. And you're just sinking in all this, and you're like I think it's a great moment of pride. And then the next morning, you go out there, you ring the bell, everybody takes pictures. And we had the first day. I think the pop was something like 40 or 50%. And overnight we all end up millionaires. But I don't even think that's the reward. The reward is. Wow. And a lot of the coworkers that have been with us for the early days, we've always had that as a dream. And that's what brought us to work so hard to be this leader and to make it happen. And then that day ends. And the next day is almost as usual."