CX Talks With Lightspeed Venture Partner Anoushka Vaswani

If you haven’t yet heard, Fullview recently raised the largest seed round in Danish history!

The effort was led by the legendary Lightspeed Venture Partners and joined by a group of 24 angel investors, including founders and leaders from world-class companies like Coinbase, Unity, Celonis, Pleo and Personio, among many others. As you can imagine, smashing the record for the largest seed round raised in an entire country is no mean feat, but we’ve had plenty of people working behind the scenes to make it possible.

We'd like to introduce you to one of them today. World, meet Anoushka Vaswani, one of Fullview’s biggest champions and chief spearheader of record-breaking seed rounds. 

Breaking the mold

Anoushka has an impressive resume. A double major in Economics and Psychology from Columbia, where she graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. A Harvard MBA. Years of experience in tech and VC. Gigs at Goldman and McKinsey, where she led the firm’s first project with Facebook on the launch of internet.org. A successful stint at Masterclass, where she joined as their third-ever project manager and launched an interactive player for the Herbie Hancock class. Two years as an investor at Matrix, where she supported entrepreneurs raising their first rounds of funding. And finally, a partnership at Lightspeed, which is well-known for being amongst the first VCs to invest in behemoths such as Snapchat, Affirm and Grubhub.

What we find more impressive than her resume, however, is her mindset. She's lived in the United Arab Emirates and Turkey and Brussels and the US, so it should be no surprise that her worldview is as varied as her investment portfolio.

She's on record saying that her international upbringing has given her a deep appreciation for the fact that there is no one-size-fits-all model for success. We couldn't agree more, which is why we were eager to get her on CX Talks when she recently visited Copenhagen.

What follows is a transcript of the interview she did with Fullview CEO Daniel Bakh, edited and condensed for clarity. Be sure to also check out the video interview, which we'll embed below.

The interview

Daniel Bakh

‍‍Anoushka, thanks so much for joining us today and flying all the way from San Francisco to be with us. Diving straight in, you've invested in a lot of B2B software companies, what are some of the most important trends you see in SaaS today? 

Anoushka Vaswani

Thank you so much, first of all, for having me. Two of the most interesting things we're seeing in SaaS right now, with the first being something that has been going on for a long time, is the consumerization of SaaS and the other is around distributed and remote work. The consumerization of SaaS has been a trend for the past ten years, where the people that buy software have shifted. No longer is it a centralized IT team buying software solutions. Instead, it's individual decision-makers, knowledge workers at companies and independent teams picking what tool is the best for them in their day-to-day workspace.

The second has been a trend that has been evolving over the last two or three years — really, through covid. No longer is the consumer sitting in an office, going in every day. A lot of people are just logging in from their laptops and using different software solutions. And so the way software solutions need to be constructed to meet a pretty distribute remote workforce — whether on the buyer side or the provider side — has really shifted. I think the next generation of software companies will really need to nail that software experience on both ends.

Daniel Bakh

Going off of that, you're a very focused investor at Lightspeed and you only do a few select investments a year. What do you look for when you're looking to make an investment in a SaaS company? 

Anoushka Vaswani

Ultimately, venture is a people-driven business. The biggest thing we look for is [the] team and people you're going to be working with. Hungry, ambitious founders that kind of have an unfair advantage to win their market and really understand their space. The second thing is that we're really a student of various markets and we like to deeply study a space before making an investment. And the third thing we care about is product and a product offering that resonates with customers, that has pull and that people rave about. Those are the three things we really care about most at the early stage.

Daniel Bakh

Speaking of which, customer support has gone from being seen as a cost-center in a lot of businesses to now being seen as a great potential growth driver, right? How does customer support fit into these trends that you just talked about in the SaaS market? 

Anoushka Vaswani

A lot of organizations are recognizing that customer support isn't just this cost-center, but can be a really powerful revenue-generating center if done well. The most forward-thinking companies we see — and I think this is catching on to the broader industry — have been talking about CX and teams around that and what your CX strategy is. Because, if done well, you can both service your customer, as well as use it as an opportunity to upsell and really delight them. That's a really important trend we're seeing. I think the second trend is around distributed, remote work, where, more so than ever before, individual consumers are buying products online. That's happening across every industry and they're looking for easy, seamless self-serve experiences where issues are resolved automatically. And that bar for what support looks like keeps getting raised.

Daniel Bakh

Going off what you just said, I think another important trend is also the fact that customer support tools shouldn't just be like a duct tape solution to your product. Because, often, if there is an issue with your product that has caused a customer to reach out to you, you shouldn't just use your chat or your zoom call or whatever tool you're using — hopefully, Fullview, right? — to say 'let's just quickly and manually help this customer out'. You should actually be using it to improve your product over time.

Anoushka Vaswani

Totally! And especially in this era of product-led growth and a lot of customers preferring to sign up and start using tooling on their own, having visibility into what your users are doing in your application, where they're getting stuck, what their issues are and really listening to your customer is more important than ever.

Daniel Bakh

Absolutely! Now that we've just closed this great funding round with you helming it, another question I have is what was it that you saw when you first met me and Dorin and the team that made you bet on us? You know, we were young people halfway across the world from where you live in silicon valley that came to you saying 'We know what it takes to revolutionize customer support.'

Anoushka Vaswani

It was interesting that prior to meeting you at Fullview, I'd spent the last three years with the broader Lightspeed team just studying the support landscape. From service desk to remote management solutions to call center solutions. What you both had built was an incredibly special product. And we heard this echoed in a number of customer calls we did: it's really intuitive and easy to use with less than five minutes of implementation time. When we hear this kind of feedback on a particular company, that's the first thing that really made us take note. And then we got a chance to walk through the Fullview demo with you and see it live and see how seamless it was to start using for an agent and a customer to immediately start to communicate. I think that was pretty special.

Daniel Bakh

Yeah, definitely. An easily implemented solution that is seamless to use and does all of these things in one is definitely the key.

Anoushka Vaswani

Yes, that's an incredible value proposition.

Daniel Bakh

I want to take a moment to ask you, Anoushka: where do you see Fullview — or where do you hope to see Fullview — in ten years from now?

Anoushka Vaswani

I think the goal here is to build a generational company. We've only been working together for a couple of months now, but the speed at which the company has iterated, launched new product and adapted the offering to your customers has been pretty remarkable and very unique. And so, hopefully, in ten years, we'll be reflecting on this conversation. Maybe a different spot, different couch, but I think this is going to be a really exciting and long journey.

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