LightSource is a business which, in its own words, gives the user ‘superpowers’ – an ambitious statement with plenty of evidence to confirm it. LightSource, based out of San Francisco, functions as a direct materials operating system, but provides so much more with its ‘Spec to Scale’ philosophy.
Spencer Penn, its CEO and Co-Founder, spent most of his career at Tesla prior to this role. He helped lead a program there called the Model Three, which was Tesla’s first mass market electric car. That was his first real exposure to the world of procurement and supply chain, and sparked a love and passion for that side of the business that led him to help create LightSource.
“I got exposed to a lot of challenges and insights, and some of those insights now underlie the product we’ve built at LightSource,” he explains. That love for procurement was inspired, in part, by the former CFO of Tesla, Deepak Ahuja, who Penn reported to and describes as “legendary”. Additionally, the rush to create the Model Three exposed Penn to the sourcing world for the first time.
Addressing a wider problem
After around three years of ideation, LightSource was launched officially in 2021. Penn never really planned to do this professionally; he thought he’d continue working in the tech field as an employee. But several things changed his mind.
“One, I realised the sourcing issues at Tesla weren’t just a Tesla problem,” he explains. “If you look at the income statements of any big manufacturing business, direct materials is the biggest area of spend, and it’s also the least innovative and underserved in terms of technology. So there’s a big market opportunity there. Many of us see it, but it doesn’t mean we quit our jobs like I did.
“The real thing that made the difference, for me, was meeting my Co-Founder, Idan Mintz. He’s my business partner and a brilliant technologist. He’s an engineer, our CTO, and he came from Google X and Google Research. Meeting him showed me I had a real counterpart on the technology side, and made me feel like we could go and pursue the change we wanted to see.”
And so, Penn and Mintz began to bring together the right elements to create a team and draw investor and customer interest. At that point, the risk wasn’t in following through with the idea – the risk was that if they waited any longer, someone else would fill the gap LightSource wanted to fill.
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