Bucky Moore @ Lightspeed Venture Partners: Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed

The best companies always feel expensive. If you look at, like just how unique these companies are on a top line basis, I mean, we're talking about billions of dollars of run rate, growing in excess of 100% year over year. I don't think we've ever seen that before, right? We're talking about going from talking about $30 to $50 billion outcomes to multi-trillion dollar outcomes in the form of SpaceX or OpenAI, or Anthropic where the active sizing of market is just, at least from my experience, so imprecise that it, it borders on being a fool's errand.

Ready to go?

(Intro music playing)

(clicking clock) Bucky, I, dude, I'm so excited to make this happen. We've known each other for many years. Um, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thanks for having me, Harry. As they often say, "Long time listener, first time caller," and it's been really fun to watch your meteoric rise over the years. I, as you know, I've been watching since the beginning.

Dude, I so appreciate that. But you have some big news today, and so I just wanna start on that. What's the big news for us today? And then we can roll from there.

Yeah, thanks. So the big news is today I am officially announcing that I've joined Lightspeed Venture Partners as a partner, and uh, after seven and a half years at KP and almost 11 years in the venture business, this new chapter in my career is really, really exciting in the sense that I- I feel like I really get to step into a truly global platform and really play a role in kind of driving what was once the core of the firm forward, which is this early stage enterprise investing that really set the tone for Lightspeed's success and what it was able to become today. So I feel really, really grateful to partner with that team and, and, uh, yeah, that's the next chapter of my career and, and I think it could be the last.

Dude, I'm, I'm, A, thrilled to hear it. Congratulations. Amazing news.

Thank you, Harry.

I wanna start on like, Lightspeed are one of few firms that, in the nicest way, are walls of money. Um, you, there's GC, there's a couple of other big names who just have pretty much more money than anyone else. Why do you think these mega platform plays are likely to be the winners in the next generation of venture?

So I think we're in this really unique point in time, both in terms of the technology entrepreneurship industry and, and consequently the venture industry. And that if you look back five or seven years ago, we would be talking about companies like Databricks or Snowflake or, or even DoorDash on the consumer side as sort of the, the hallmarks of venture success. And I think what we're seeing now is that there's this new shape of company that's emerging that really, in some sense, puts those to shame, right? We're talking about going from talking about $30 to $50 billion outcomes to multi-trillion dollar outcomes in the form of SpaceX or OpenAI, or Anthropic where Lightspeed is very proudly an investor. And I think what that means is you also sort of have to take a step back and say, "Okay, so like where is the alpha gonna come from in the industry if that's the case?" And I think what I'm seeing and, and sort of have been thinking about for a long time is that these platforms that, um, that, that have the scale of some of those that you mentioned, Lightspeed included, you know, they get to have really interesting conversations about like, "Hey, what if we invest a billion dollars in one of these companies that could be worth trillions of dollars? And, and what if we were to succeed in, in terms of turning a billion dollars into 10, $20 billion?" I think that's just not a conversation that's ever been had in the venture industry and frankly, any other asset class that I'm, that I'm familiar with. And I think for that reason, it's really clear to me that having the chip stack that these large platforms have is, is really uniquely beneficial at this point in time. But what I will say is that none of that matters if you don't maintain a lot of dedication to early stage investing. If you're Sam Altman or you're Dario and you're asking yourself, "Do I want to hitch my wagon to one of these firms by raising billions of dollars from one of them?" You know, you're thinking a lot about like what their brand stands for. And I think that these companies, in spite of running towards these trillion dollar outcomes, are still very much startups and entrepreneurial in the way they think about their DNA, and therefore they wanna partner with someone who shares that DNA. And I think the only way for a venture firm to sustain that is by staying true to early stage venture, working with raw formation stage companies and spending lots and lots of time kind of trying to figure out who that next wave of entrepreneurs are. And so I think it's really important that Lightspeed continues that focus and I think that's something they and a few of their peers, um, do a really good job of.