Bucky Moore is a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners focused on AI, infrastructure and cybersecurity at the earliest stages; before that he was a partner at Kleiner Perkins, where he led early investments in companies such as Together AI, Teleport and Labelbox. — Bucky Moore, Lightspeed team profile.

Visual summary of operating lessons from Bucky Moore.

Part 1: The AI Paradigm Shift

  1. On a Sea Change: Bucky Moore: "we are in the midst of a sea change that AI is driving in terms of how technology is really impacting our working and personal lives." — Kleiner Perkins on Bloomberg Tech: Bucky Moore and Vipul Ved Prakash on Together AI (transcript).
  2. On Being an Infrastructure Investor: Bucky Moore: "I consider myself to be an infrastructure investor. And what I mean by infrastructure is the underpinnings that power these digital experiences that we're increasingly relying on to live our lives." — Kleiner Perkins on Bloomberg Tech: Bucky Moore and Vipul Ved Prakash on Together AI (transcript).
  3. On AI as an Underpinning: Bucky Moore: "I think of it as yet another one of these underpinnings that is going to change how software gets developed" — Kleiner Perkins on Bloomberg Tech: Bucky Moore and Vipul Ved Prakash on Together AI (transcript).
  4. On Value in the Stack: Bucky Moore: "what we see time and time again is that value can acrewue at all three layers of that stack." — Kleiner Perkins on Bloomberg Tech: Bucky Moore and Vipul Ved Prakash on Together AI (transcript).
  5. On Three Layers: Bucky Moore: "we think about this space really in three layers." — Kleiner Perkins on Bloomberg Tech: Bucky Moore and Vipul Ved Prakash on Together AI (transcript).
  6. On Commoditization: Bucky Moore: "the technology that comes along that is as useful as this, it tends to trend towards commoditization." — Kleiner Perkins on Bloomberg Tech: Bucky Moore and Vipul Ved Prakash on Together AI (transcript).
  7. On Language Models: Bucky Moore: "Historically, AI adoption has been held back by the technical expertise and proprietary data required to operationalize it. Language models upend this constraint." — Infrastructure in '23 (Kleiner Perkins).
  8. On Foundation Models: Bucky Moore: "This illustrates the true power of “foundation models” – their ability to lower the barrier to adoption of AI to near-zero." — Infrastructure in '23 (Kleiner Perkins).
  9. On Consolidation in AI: Bucky Moore: "we are witnessing “an ongoing consolidation in AI” that is both incredible and exciting." — Computing and data infrastructure in '22 (Kleiner Perkins).

Part 2: Infrastructure & The Computing Stack

  1. On Javascript: Bucky Moore: "The future of cloud is here, and it’s Javascript" — Infrastructure in '23 (Kleiner Perkins).
  2. On Write Once: Bucky Moore: "Javascript is the only language that lives up to “write once, run anywhere.”" — Infrastructure in '23 (Kleiner Perkins).
  3. On Tools for Language Models: Bucky Moore: "The opportunity to build new infrastructure and tools that make it easier to build with language models is increasingly clear, and has become the single most active design space in infrastructure over the past year." — Infrastructure in '23 (Kleiner Perkins).
  4. On Cloud Provider Weakness: Bucky Moore: "It’s no secret that design and UX are a glaring weakness of the cloud providers." — Computing and data infrastructure in '22 (Kleiner Perkins).
  5. On Utility Providers: Bucky Moore: "We will begin to think of the cloud providers as “utility” rather than “solution” providers." — Computing and data infrastructure in '22 (Kleiner Perkins).
  6. On Developers and Clouds: Bucky Moore: "It’s clear that developers will be interfacing with them more, and cloud providers less, over the coming years." — Computing and data infrastructure in '22 (Kleiner Perkins).
  7. On Operational Analytics: Bucky Moore: "I expect the next big opportunity to be operational analytics." — Computing and data infrastructure in '22 (Kleiner Perkins).
  8. On Two Terms: Bucky Moore: "if I had to predict two terms we will be hearing more of this year, it would be “change data capture” and “materialized views.”" — Computing and data infrastructure in '22 (Kleiner Perkins).
  9. On Unbundled OLAP: Bucky Moore: "In the unbundled OLAP architecture, data is stored directly in object storage like S3 or GCS." — Infrastructure in '23 (Kleiner Perkins).

Part 3: Open Source Dynamics

  1. On Proprietary Best-in-Class: Bucky Moore: "I personally hope and believe that we're going to enter a world where we're going to have best-in-class models that are proprietary in nature from the likes of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic and so on." — Kleiner Perkins on Bloomberg Tech: Bucky Moore and Vipul Ved Prakash on Together AI (transcript).
  2. On Open-Source Models: Bucky Moore: "As the performance gap narrows, and the infrastructure for self-hosting models matures, I expect the use of open-source models to become increasingly popular." — Infrastructure in '23 (Kleiner Perkins).
  3. On API-Only Models: Bucky Moore: "OpenAI models are proprietary, and only accessible via API." — Infrastructure in '23 (Kleiner Perkins).
  4. On Open-Source Inference: Bucky Moore: "if you look at the inference calls that the average AI native app is making today, you're starting to see a percentage of those calls go towards open source models. It's usually lower stake stuff where cost matters, where convenience matters, where control matters." — Bucky Moore: The Next Decade of AI Infrastructure (Lightspeed, transcript).
  5. On Control of the Model: Bucky Moore: "sometimes you want to use a smaller model because you get better latency properties or sometimes you simply don't want the data to leave the environment that you're building in and you want to have full control over the model in a way that only open source can give you." — Bucky Moore: The Next Decade of AI Infrastructure (Lightspeed, transcript).
  6. On New Patterns and Workloads: Bucky Moore: "That new pattern is often enabled by some new technical innovation. That new pattern unlocks new workloads and those new workloads need new infrastructure." — Bucky Moore: The Next Decade of AI Infrastructure (Lightspeed, transcript).
  7. On Bottom-Up Thinking: Bucky Moore: "the time I spent there really just has trained me to look at things from the bottom up in that sense rather than the top down." — Bucky Moore: The Next Decade of AI Infrastructure (Lightspeed, transcript).
  8. On Agents Needing Infrastructure: Bucky Moore: "the number of companies that are effectively making a bet that there will be agents all around us and those agents will need infrastructure and tools and all kinds of primitives to do their job" — Bucky Moore: The Next Decade of AI Infrastructure (Lightspeed, transcript).
  9. On Impact Across Industries: Bucky Moore: "it's just unbelievable how much impact these companies that are being built in that fashion can have in terms of like their surface area across every industry" — Bucky Moore: The Next Decade of AI Infrastructure (Lightspeed, transcript).

Part 4: The Art of Venture Investing

  1. On Focus: Bucky Moore: "our view is ultimately focus is the winning formula. And what we mean by focus is focus on stage, focus on sector, and focus on geography." — Kleiner Perkins on Bloomberg Tech: Bucky Moore and Vipul Ved Prakash on Together AI (transcript).
  2. On a New Tool: Bucky Moore: "Whether we ultimately decentralize some things, most things, or everything does not matter. What matters is that we have a new tool in our toolbox to solve real problems with software" — Computing and data infrastructure in '22 (Kleiner Perkins).
  3. On the Growth of Venture: Bucky Moore: "the venture capital industry continues to evolve and has evolved a substantial amount over the past few decades. And one of the ways it's evolved is it's grown a lot in size." — Kleiner Perkins on Bloomberg Tech: Bucky Moore and Vipul Ved Prakash on Together AI (transcript).
  4. On Expensive Companies: Bucky Moore: "the best companies always feel expensive" — 20VC: Bucky Moore at Lightspeed Venture Partners (transcript).
  5. On Market Sizing: Bucky Moore: "I think market sizing really matters in terms of just being sober about the size of the opportunity" — 20VC: Bucky Moore at Lightspeed Venture Partners (transcript).
  6. On Conviction: Bucky Moore: "you really have to build conviction" — 20VC: Bucky Moore at Lightspeed Venture Partners (transcript).
  7. On Early Signals: Bucky Moore: "there are signals that I saw for those companies that were sort of foreshadowing of what was to come that I can now look for in other companies." — 20VC: Bucky Moore at Lightspeed Venture Partners (transcript).
  8. On Becoming More Discerning: Bucky Moore: "I've become a more discerning investor in the sense that there are signals that I saw for those companies" — 20VC: Bucky Moore at Lightspeed Venture Partners (transcript).
  9. On Working With a Team: Bucky Moore: "I really like playing with a team." — Why Bucky Moore Joined Lightspeed (Sourcery, transcript).
  10. On Stakeholders: Bucky Moore: "a lot of things that you have to undo, a lot of stakeholders that you have to respect and be very mindful of." — Why Bucky Moore Joined Lightspeed (Sourcery, transcript).

Part 5: Founder DNA & Leadership

  1. On the Team: Bucky Moore: "over time, I’ve come to appreciate the team is really all that really matters. The right group of people can shift the entire trajectory of a company, and the wrong group of people will struggle to impact it." — Bucky Moore, Lightspeed team profile.
  2. On Early Training: Bucky Moore: "My early training was about frameworks that helped me size a market or evaluate technology" — Bucky Moore, Lightspeed team profile.
  3. On Visionary Founders: Bucky Moore: "partnering with these innovative, visionary founders that have a unique point of view and how to bring this technology to big markets." — Kleiner Perkins on Bloomberg Tech: Bucky Moore and Vipul Ved Prakash on Together AI (transcript).
  4. On Ownership: Bucky Moore: "It taught me to value people who take ownership." — Bucky Moore, Lightspeed team profile.
  5. On Hard Things: Bucky Moore: "The best kind of progress comes from doing hard things consistently" — Bucky Moore, Lightspeed team profile.
  6. On Serving Entrepreneurs: Bucky Moore: "I want to be in a position where I can serve their needs, be a great partner to them" — Why Bucky Moore Joined Lightspeed (Sourcery, transcript).
  7. On Spiky Founders: Bucky Moore: "finding those unique people that have that dog in them" — Why Bucky Moore Joined Lightspeed (Sourcery, transcript).
  8. On Taste and Picking: Bucky Moore: "there is this element of taste and picking that goes into that that I think you actually have to take very very seriously." — Why Bucky Moore Joined Lightspeed (Sourcery, transcript).
  9. On Aesthetic Consistency: Bucky Moore: "how to apply that aesthetic across every touch point that any stakeholder in the world is going to have with your company" — Why Bucky Moore Joined Lightspeed (Sourcery, transcript).

Part 6: Product-Market Fit & Go-to-Market

Part 7: The Future of Enterprise Software

  1. On Safety and Innovation: Bucky Moore: "we are able to balance safety and innovation as we move the regulatory landscape forward around this technology." — Kleiner Perkins on Bloomberg Tech: Bucky Moore and Vipul Ved Prakash on Together AI (transcript).
  2. On Supply Chain Security: Bucky Moore: "Today, software supply chain security remains in a similarly nascent place to that of network security 5 years ago." — Computing and data infrastructure in '22 (Kleiner Perkins).
  3. On Re-Architecting Security: Bucky Moore: "Existing application security products will need to be re-architected to conform to a world of zero-trust" — Computing and data infrastructure in '22 (Kleiner Perkins).
  4. On Artifact-Based Security: Bucky Moore: "This is why we must move toward an artifact-based approach to security" — Computing and data infrastructure in '22 (Kleiner Perkins).
  5. On Workflow Systems: Bucky Moore: "To tame this complexity, engineering teams are increasingly turning to workflow systems." — Infrastructure in '23 (Kleiner Perkins).
  6. On Big Data: Bucky Moore: "Many are also realizing they don’t have the “big data” that warrants distributed compute to begin with." — Infrastructure in '23 (Kleiner Perkins).
  7. On Cloud Data Warehouses: Bucky Moore: "The success of this architecture seems likely to chip away at the marketshare of cloud data warehouses." — Infrastructure in '23 (Kleiner Perkins).
  8. On Operational Analytics Winners: Bucky Moore: "It seems inevitable that the winners in operational analytics will begin to challenge the dominance of CDWs as more batch queries are operationalized in real-time." — Computing and data infrastructure in '22 (Kleiner Perkins).
  9. On Crypto Regulation: Bucky Moore: "all of the regulatory conversations that are going on with respect to crypto make it a very uncertain place for new businesses to be built." — Kleiner Perkins on Bloomberg Tech: Bucky Moore and Vipul Ved Prakash on Together AI (transcript).

Part 8: Personal Philosophy & Learning

  1. On a Father's Practice: Bucky Moore: "It wasn’t a startup in the traditional sense, but it required the same kind of drive and adaptability" — Bucky Moore, Lightspeed team profile.
  2. On Decentralized Systems: Bucky Moore: "an unprecedented talent migration toward work on decentralized systems, and an ensuingly steep pace of innovation." — Computing and data infrastructure in '22 (Kleiner Perkins).
  3. On Gratitude: Bucky Moore: "we should just feel gratitude that we get to be in the primes of our career during this time" — Why Bucky Moore Joined Lightspeed (Sourcery, transcript).