Liew on the future of media: meet Millennials where they are

And will Twitter be replaced by Snapchat and Whisper?

At Vator's annual Splash LA event on Thursday, Jeremy Liew, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, sat down with Vator CEO Bambi Francisco to talk about trendspotting in the LA startup scene.

Liew is known for his investments in some of the top companies in the LA tech scene, like Whisper and Snapchat, where he put in $485,000 when the company was only 10 months old and only had a few tens of thousands of users. 

So who better to ask about the media will look like in the future?

"You have a 13 year old, where does he spend time? Phones and feeds. That is where people are spending their time so you have to build media companies that meet people where they are. This concept of omnichannel in retail, everyone in retail works omnichannel, the gap used to be all stores, then catalogs and then the Web," he said.

Bonobos started just on the Web, and it has opened up physical stores, and its doing catalogs as well. You've got to meet your customers where they are. I think the same thing is happening in the media environment."

For example Vice, which started out as a magazine, then moved to the Web and mobile, is now on TV. BuzzFeed, which started on the Web, and then moved to mobile and has made the transition to an app, and is doing a lot more video. Both companies started in one place and went where the users were.

"Right now, if you're going to target millennials, they're in their phones and their feeds and they're not reading magazines and they're not watching TV. Video has got to be mobile video. If you're going to target the millennial audience, you gotta be where they are, and that's, I think, how that stuff is playing out and I think that's going to be a really difficult transition for a lot of the traditional media companies."

MTV, for example, started out being aimed at 20-somethings, by a 20-something founder. Now that guy would be in his 60's and still chasing that audience.

"He doesn't have same, intuitive, understanding of what it is. Like, he's trying to study it, whereas the founders of Snapchat, the founders of Whisper, they  are all millennials, and they are intuitively building products for themselves. That's a way easier thing to do in a mission-driven environment."

Given all of that, plus how it has struggled, including with its stock, which has dipped below IPO price, is there a future for Twitter, or will be it be replaced by Snapchat? Francisco asked him.

"I think because we're early-stage investors we focus on the value that was created from the founding of the company, not from the time of the IPO. Twitter, Pure Storage, Zynga, Groupon. Zynga and Groupon are two companies I think are regarded as having underperformed, because they're well below their IPO price. I would refrain and say, 'That's a company that's a $4 billion company, or a $2 billion company, that's only 6 years old. How can that be a failure? Jobs and enterprise value and happy customers are created."

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