Sebastian Duesterhoeft

Sebastian joined Lightspeed as a Partner in 2023 to focus on growth-stage investments in enterprise software.

His circuitous path to Silicon Valley started in a small town in Germany, anything but a tech epicenter (even though the neighboring small city of Hanover inexplicably hosted the World Exhibition at the turn of the millennium). Instead, growing up, his passion and focus was on sports, especially handball and basketball.

The painful recognition that he lacked the talent to go pro ultimately put him on the path to become the first person in his family to graduate from college. His finance degree at the University of Mannheim in Germany eventually exposed him to the world of investing and started his passion for studying markets and trying to understand the genetics of generational companies.