Lightspeed Venture’s Jeremy Liew: Early persistence with Snapchat is about to pay off big time.

SAN FRANCISCO — Don’t underestimate the power of targeted persistence. Case in point: Lightspeed’s Jeremy Liew, whose early pursuit of Snapchat in 2012 is now just weeks away from paying off in a big, big way.

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Not only was he hawk-eyed in spotting a unique opportunity to invest, he also had the gumption to go out and make it happen. The details, according to the WSJ:

In 2012, [he] caught wind of a hot new messaging app called Snapchat. He heard about it through a fellow partner whose teenage daughter had it in rotation along with Instagram and Angry Birds.

Then [he] embarked on a digital sleuthing operation to track down whoever was behind the app. . . . It included him pinging a webmaster, guessing email addresses, and searching on LinkedIn, before he eventually tracked down Snapchat’s URL registrant — Toyopa Group. That finally led him to founder Evan Spiegel, then a student at Stanford.

The service had already taken off by then. “He couldn’t pay his server bills, and I said, ‘maybe we can help you with that,’” Mr. Liew said.

Getting creative is exactly what was needed in order to get in on the ground early with Snapchat during those very early days. Fast forward five years, and Snap, Snapchat’s parent company, having just filed for its IPO yesterday, is expected to go public at a $20-25B valuation. As the IPO nears this coming March, both Liew and Lightspeed are poised for a significant windfall and an impressive exit.

Where does Jeremy fit into modern luxury? Snapchat isn’t the only smart investment Jeremy’s made over the last several years. He’s also an active investor in the modern luxury and e-commerce space. Through Lightspeed Ventures, he’s invested in the likes of Bonobos, Honest Co, StyleSeat, and StitchFix — plus other upstarts well respected here at Lean Luxe, including Cheddar and Affirm. He’s not quite Kirsten Green level status when it comes to modern luxury investments, but it’s still a strong track record.