YouSaid · the spoken record

Bucky Moore

lines on the record: 66
first: 2025-05-05
most recent: 2025-05-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I'd love to see Lights be continue to assert itself as a truly global multi-stage generalist platform. I would love to be a part of shaping that legacy in the sense that I have driven and helped driven excellence in the early stage enterprise investing that the firm does.”
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“I think the first thing I'd say is they both love having each other in our lives, right? I think that's the core thing that I think is just so important for that founder.”
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“Look, I think someone who's been very generous to me over the years is the person that actually hired me into Venture. It's this guy named Mike Dauber, who's a partner at Amplify Partners, which is a wonderful new firm that's really, really gotten off to an incredible start, again, with focus on both early stage and these more deeply technical software businesses. They've since branched out quite a bit. But what I can tell you about Mike is he is just an incredible mentor and he has imparted so much belief and wisdom on so many young people in this industry. And I think helped a lot of people gain the confidence and sort of the clarity of purpose around what it means to do this job well and why they're capable of doing it. And I'll be forever grateful for Mike for just always believing in me every time I've made a change in my career, every time I've had a tough decision to make. I've called Mike and he's really, really been someone whose feedback I value immensely.”
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“I see a world in which both ends of the barbell really, really continue to rise, meaning small dedicated specialist firms on one end and large platforms on the other end. And I think that uncanny valley in between is going to be an increasingly challenging place to be over time if this notion of trillion dollar companies continues to play out the way it seems to be today.”
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“I do not think it's a permanent structural challenge because I believe that in the same way that great entrepreneurs flock towards white space, there will be solutions and new products that get devised by investment managers to solve for these liquidity challenges that we're faced with today.”
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“Traction market. I've already told you why I think people are more important than everything. Some of the biggest mistakes I've made as an investor is when I've ignored traction because I've had reservations about the market. Traction is so hard to manufacture. And I think that traction signifies a quality of founder that is good enough to figure out how to overcome any market size limitations that exist. And so I've learned to overweight that.”
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“I think Bahoon is known as someone who is very metrics driven, and I think that could not be more false. He has this incredible taste in people.”
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“So I think this is fundamentally different. And if you compare it to cloud, for example, adoption was fairly slow in the beginning, right? Kind of gradually then suddenly. Here, I think the difference is that there's this broad base consensus that failure to embrace AI to the fullest extent as a company is just like existential to its existence. And I think if you start to kind of ask yourself, like, what does it mean for the entire industry to conclude that like if I don't adopt this technology, I'm going to be left behind, what you start to see is this voracious appetite to go and adopt it at all costs in every nook and cranny of the business. And I think this honestly explains why you're seeing these companies grow faster than we've ever imagined. I think it explains why investors are so bullish on these app layer companies, because they're going and talking to these CIOs and hearing things they've never heard before. Like, I have to adopt this everywhere. I'm going to get fired type of urgency. So you're just seeing unprecedented appetite and urgency because of this view that if I don't adopt this technology, my company will perish. And again, I think that's just yet another reason why we're in this really, really unique.”
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“It looked as though pre training was no longer as lucrative a scaling dimension as it was originally positioned as. I think there were a lot of people that were rationally saying, hey, like progress is going to slow down and things might be the way they are now, right? Then this test time compute paradigm came along. And now we have things like post training and reinforcement learning that are presenting additional scaling dimensions that I think like it's just really hard to say and it's really hard to say because there are these amazingly talented people inside of all these research labs that are every day trying new things and trying to figure out what that next scaling dimension might be. So I think the right way to frame the answer is like when do we run out of new scaling dimensions? And right now that appears to be very unlikely, at least in the near term. But at some point it could happen. But I also have just learned to never bet against human ingenuity and given the best and the brightest are now so heavily concentrated inside of these big labs trying new things every day. I personally believe like there will always be new scaling dimensions and whether the next one is as steep in terms of progress as the”
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“And so I think as a result, to me, AGI feels like it's here in a lot of ways. And even if we were to kind of say, hey, the capabilities that we have today are it and it's not going to get any better. We are so early in bringing these capabilities to bear in society and in industry that I personally think it's an incredible wave of technology, even if the progress halts today. And I think there's a lot of people kind of holding out for this moment of singularity. And I'm not sure it's as black and white in that as that I'm not sure it's as critical as that for the industry to play out favorably for all these different stakeholders.”
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“It seems like most people believe that this path to AGI is just this ever increasing upward slope. Again, I don't have strong intuitions on whether that's true or not, but my instinct is we should be much, much more open-minded to the possibility that we could arrive at some form of plateau and still have an incredible outcome for society and an incredible outcome for entrepreneurs and venture investors. And so in a sense, you could say, hey, AGI is already here in certain pockets. Like there are clearly things that these products can do that an army of the smartest humans in the world would never, ever be able to try, right? Now that we have test time compute, the same thing that brought us AlphaGo is sort of bringing an equivalent of that in all these different domains where unlike the human brain, these AIs can just try hundreds, thousands of different paths to get to the best possible answer, whereas we kind of have to think about the best one. So in a sense, like humans are still predicting the next token. Whereas I think that these models with test time compute infrastructure are able to figure out, you know, how can I try this a thousand times and then decide what the best next token is, right?”
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“My sense is without going overboard on conflicts of interest, being in as many of these companies as possible, given what I know today is very rational. But I also think it's rational and becoming to say, hey, we believe in one of them. We're just going to concentrate all of our resources in that. I think there's no middle ground. You either have to be in all of them or you have to pick one of them. That's my view.”
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“Argument that I would make would be today there are a lot of decisions that trickle into the RD and research organizations of, say, an open AI that are in service of helping them build better products in the short term, right? Like the model needs to behave a certain way. So ChatGPT can be better or deep research can be better or whatever it may be. There are for sure short-term optimizations being made there. And I've seen it with my own eyes when I talk to people that work at those companies. The argument for not getting caught up in that is you can just be entirely long term. You can make buller research bets. You can allocate resources differently. You can maintain a smaller team that's more focused, as you said. So I think that's really the argument is like having to generate revenue and build a business that you can take public someday is going to come with short-term thinking. And if you sort of say, hey, let's assume we have access to capital that we need and let's say we can just kind of sweep all that aside. What does that value? I think it buys you less distraction and more ambition.”
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“It seems very likely to me that in some form or another, every single one of these frontier model labs will begin building both business and consumer facing products. And I think what you're seeing with OpenAI is certainly foreshadowing of that. You could argue X is trying to build its own super app around its models, of course. And it's hard for me to see how each one of these players doesn't kind of end up in that place. Now, there is a unique play here, which is SSI, Ilias Gaver, and Daniel Gross's company, which said, we're not going to do that. And you could say, hey, that's a really contrarian move, but what it allows them to do is keep a very lean team and kind of go straight shot towards AGI, as they famously talked about.”
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“Of its model, and I think it's better and performs better against my evals. I'm currently using OpenAI. It's not terribly hard in most application areas to switch to that model. So you have downward pricing pressure, you have zero switching costs, and you have a lot of competition. And then you have this kind of ever increasing sense of CapEx to drive that innovation forward that I think just like kind of as a death by a thousand cuts kind of impact on the quality of those API revenue businesses. And so I think what you're going to see is that those businesses where you have where a company has the flagship model that everybody wants for a given use case, like you could say Anthropic's been very dominant, for example, in Cogen, those businesses will look very healthy. But the moment another player releases a better model in that use case, like the revenue is going to yo-yo. And so what I've really come around to is that it's these products that are going to be built on top of these models, even inside of the model labs, not just by third parties that are going to be much, much more compelling businesses long term than say the model APIs themselves.”
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“So I think for me, the thing I've changed my mind on the most in the last 12 months specifically to AI is how to think about like the net revenue mix of companies like OpenAI Ananthropic. And so look, I remember when investors were considering participating in a $30 billion valuation round for open AI. The question in the room was like, should we even value this chat GPT thing as anything? Like, is it worth anything or is it just a proof of concept to show what the model is capable of? And conversely, I think people were looking at these API businesses where they make the model available to developers and saying, hey, this is going to be like Stripe or Twilio or, you know, the next great API driven business. And I think what's happened in practice I didn't anticipate, which is that it turns out that these API driven businesses are really, really tricky. One, you have this kind of 100x year over year decrease in prices per token. So you have like downward pricing pressure that is inevitable, driven by the competition. Two is you have this like almost zero switching cost where let's say, you know, Claude releases a new version.”
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“Think the answer is somewhere in the middle, which is that, of course, multistage firms, by virtue of being multi-stage, they want to be first. That's where the generational returns get made. And we've seen that time and time again. If you look at some of the best venture investments in history, they've been these seed investments in these companies that have gone on to grow really, really large. And they've come from an investor who's continued to concentrate more and more capital in that company over time so that they have a large amount of ownership at the end of the day. That is where I think the competition lies. And that's obvious, right? But I also think that the great seed firms like one, they're heavily reliant on collaboration with the multistage firms to be kind of sources of capital for downstream rounds. And conversely, I think that every good multistage firm is humble about the fact that there will be companies that were either non-obvious to them or not visible to them, that these seed firms will find and will be good partners to. And so I think for a multi-stage firm to alienate those seed funds and say, hey, we just don't want to work together at all. We'd just be crazy. And I can tell you that none of the multistage firms that I know well.”
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“Just like the quality of the company at that stage and how they've executed against the milestones that they set forth that determines the Series A success rather than say like the whimsical taste of the multistage firm that led the seed. So what I found is like there are absolutely cases where multistage firm will say, hey, we feel good about our ownership. Like we feel good about the amount of money we have in the company, like we want to help you raise a series A from someone else and we'll do pro rata. And if that company is a good company and it's hit its milestones, that round will get done and it does all the time. And, you know, often it's another multi-stage firm that comes in and does that. But I can tell you that there is this meme sort of where a company doesn't perform to expect expectations. And then the fact that the series A comes together seems to kind of be blamed on the fact that the multistage firm didn't want to follow on. And I just don't believe that.”
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“So, what I'd say is that when a larger, let's call it multi-stage firm does lead a seed round and decides not to lead the next round, that is certainly something that like the next round of investors are going to want to understand better and think about and we'll sort of take as a signal. Like there's no doubt about it. I'm not going to deny that. I will also say that any seed investor competing with a multistage firm will go very, very out of their way to instill this wild fear in the founder's mind about like the risk of that. And I can tell you that what I've seen in practice is that I don't think it's as much of a risk. And perhaps I'm biased. I mean, I have worked at a smaller firm before and kind of been on that side of the fence. But what I would say is that when a firm doesn't want to go and do that Series A, it's really just the fact that the company hasn't necessarily achieved the milestones that they agreed upon with the entrepreneur in the early days for the company to be Series A ready. And so sometimes that's a downside scenario where let's just say like things didn't go as well as you'd hoped. Maybe they took longer and you just have to go and raise because you have a runway issue. But usually what I find is that it's like.”
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“I would say it's possible if you make a very, very small investment in a company at the very early stages to use that as a wedge to build a compelling relationship with an entrepreneur. But it is by no means a given. I can tell you countless examples of where, let's just say later stage firms or even just firms that weren't necessarily the lead investor in the early days did something, let's just call it low conviction, thinking they were going to get access where it just didn't serve them. So I think it really comes down to this kind of this point about picking once again, which is like, hey, if you're going to start doing that as a later stage firm, you've got to be committed to putting the legwork in to actually use that as a wedge to develop that relationship that does give you the access. Because I think the check itself does not. And so where this comes back to picking once again is like, let's say you do that a hundred times, which of those 100 are you going to put that work in with, right? And so you have to have taste, judgment, and sort of an instinct for as these companies are developing, like which of those do I need to really spend time with? And I think that goes.”
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“Better as they spend more time with customers. And so I think where this comes back to this question is if you're not spending time with early stage companies and you have that sense of just how fast things can change when companies are moving fast, you start to lose sight of that and you make mistakes where you start to take a fixed view of these companies rather than a more fluid and dynamic one. And so I agree strongly with your statement. And I think it's especially important for these really, really large funds to be playing there actively.”
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“So, this kind of comes back to my view that I shared with you about how if you're going to build one of these mega platforms and sustain a compelling position in the market with one, you really do have to stay dedicated to like the craft of helping people build things from scratch. And to do that, you have to be in the precede and see business. And I think the moment you stop doing that is the moment you lose the instincts for just like how fast these companies can change and how quickly the story can improve such that you kind of sit back and are looking for perfection instead of really seeing what these companies can be. And like I actually think that these AI app companies we keep talking about is a great example of like if you looked at Harvey at the Series A and you saw its product, you probably weren't that impressed. It was just a very early product. The scaffolding of it was clear. What was possible with better models was clear, but it was still a very early and raw product. And I think one of the mistakes that you could say a lot of investors have made in this wave of AI investing as it relates to these app companies is they fail to imagine what they can be as the models get better, as their understanding of the pain point gets better.”
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“Who has deep, deep AI engineering expertise in the form of their CTO. And they've been able to recruit an incredible engineering team of AI practitioners because that leader is someone who has that expertise. The other form factor of this that I don't think works as well is when you have CTOs that are, say, domain experts, like they've built something in the category they're working in, but they don't have that AI engineering expertise. They're just not able to get the talent in the building that I think you need to be a market leader in one of these big categories.”
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“One that we wanted, but I can tell you the price was a lot higher than it would have been had we leaned in earlier, right? And I think what that came down to is we wanted to see whose products were good, whose weren't. And I can tell you with hindsight, there's this instinct that I've kind of honed in on, especially with these AI app investments, which is you think it's the domain expertise that matters. It is without a doubt the AI expertise that is more scarce and therefore matters more. And so I can tell you right now that there are these companies out there that have deep domain experts building application layer AI companies, but they're really struggling to recruit the AI engineering talent that you need. And given how fast this technology is moving, like you have to have people in the company that have these innate instincts for how to wield it and how to understand where it's going and therefore build for that future versus build for today. And I think if you don't have people on your team that are like truly AI native and truly AI engineers, you're just not going to nail that the way the team that does will. And like, you know, a good example of this that's public would be Harvey, right? Like Harvey actually has the perfect union of like a former lawyer and someone.”
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“So I would certainly agree with this. I think it's the single biggest challenge of making C and Series A investments right now. Like, let's take these AI app categories that we're meeting every day, for example. It used to be the case, as you said, there might be like one or two players that you'd have to pick between. And now it's probably more like four to six. And so I can tell you like sort of a recent example in an anonymized way, like one of the most recent investments I made was in an AI app company. And I can tell you that we had been spending time with this team really since they'd raised a very small seed ground and we had been really excited about the category, building a lot of altitude on it, but everyone's product was under development. So it was really hard for us to determine who had the best product. So, okay, that's fine, then figure out who the best founder is, right? And there was a set of founders that had deep domain expertise in this area, but very light on the AI side of things. And then there was a set of founders that had very deep AI expertise and very light on the domain expertise. And I can tell you that we waited to pick the company that we pursued and we succeeded at pursuing an investment in the world.”
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“I think it's easy to say that on the bad days, but ultimately there is just so much amazing work to go and do. And really we're bound, I think, more by like, can we help enough of these founders that come from unlikely backgrounds go and pursue their visions? And so I personally have a view that I think the industry is in a healthy place. And it's just hard for me to say there's too much capital chasing too few opportunities. I feel like I'm seeing the future every day candidly. And I just can't spend time on every single one of these.”
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“Honestly, Harry, I think I'm just too much of an optimist at heart to say that there's too much capital flowing in. I think that.”
2025-05-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I've realized is it's not to say that work doesn't matter, it's actually very important and very useful, but really all it does is it gives you a flashlight to say, And I think the hardest thing to do when you're a thesis driven investor is to go do that work and have the humility and the restraint to conclude that there aren't great founders in that space. And that's okay because I'm going to go move on to the next one. Because what matters is I find those people. So I would say that's the thing that I've changed my mind on. And then to answer your question, the bad investments that I've made, they've been because I've downweighted the execution capacity of the team and the quality of the team that the founders can build around them at the expense of my intrigue for the product and the technology.”
2025-05-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Would say the single biggest thing that I've changed my mind on as an investor in the 11 or so years that I've been doing this comes down to what I did before investing, which is I was, as I said, I was a member of Cisco's corporate development team. And at a place like Cisco, when you're a member of a corporate development team, your job is to go and look at markets and technology and figure out like, what are the lucrative markets? What are the dynamic markets? And then what is the right technology that the company should have to go and prosecute that market? Notice I did not mention founder quality or quality of execution in that entire statement. So I think when you come from a role like that and you move into venture, it's very tempting to kind of like apply that same lens to looking for great companies. And again, I can't say anything about this that hasn't already been said, but like it's very, very obvious to anyone who's been doing this for a long time. Like you just get this visceral feel for it's all about the founders. And so I would say that like the thing that I've really changed my mind on is I used to kind of go around developing theses and trying to figure out like where the world was going on the level of markets and technology.”
2025-05-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think ultimately it's really hard when there's so many founders that are coming in your door, which many firms like Lightspeed or Kleiner Perkins have the luxury of experiencing, it's very, very hard to figure out what is the 9 out of 10 one and the 10 out of 10 one. And I think you can talk about that in the context of who the great founders are. You can talk about that in the context of momentum. But my point is, it's a very humbling job for that reason. And I think to say that no one has to pick that's at an existing firm because the great companies are the great companies, that just hasn't been my experience.”
2025-05-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, that strategy can definitely work, but I would argue, and this is maybe the world's smallest violin, that picking is actually much, much harder in these larger firms that have notoriety in the market. And the reason for that is because the opportunity set that they have access to and the number of founders that are willing to lean in and work with them is just higher. And so you just have more inventory to choose from. And I think because you have a little bit of magnetism to you as a platform that a lesser known firm doesn't, you just end up having a lot more at the top of funnel to sift through. And I think if you're not very diligent about how you prioritize and manage that, picking actually can be like the failure mode of a lot of GPs at these funds.”
2025-05-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think this is like a very good segue into theoretically why domain expertise and specializing in domains matters, which is like if the game really becomes, how do I pick which founders to spend time with and how when I meet a new company, can I readjust my prioritization of spending time developing insights and rapport with that founder and that company? Domain specialization really, really helps there. Being domain focused really, really helps with that picking aspect of picking who to spend time with, who to position yourself with for when they do decide to raise. And then ultimately when they do decide to raise, being able to like reinforce that like, hey, did I pick the right person to spend time with or not? Or am I just running away with this because I've spent so much time on it, which is a whole nother bias you have to manage.”
2025-05-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They just had insights about the business that not even my existing investors had. And the only way to develop those insights is from spending time thinking about the business at the level the founders do more than just about anyone but the founders. And so how this comes back to picking is you have to pick which companies in which people to do that with. And if you don't and you rock up to one of these processes that is very competitive, there's always going to be someone who is at a great firm with a great brand who has done that work and that person will win. I see it every day.”
2025-05-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so let's unpack this by first talking about what it takes to win in one of these really competitive opportunities. I feel like there's this sort of meme going around that it's all about like famous VC picking you up in his helicopter and flying you to his house on an island or the courtside seats at the Warriors or Knicks game or the Michelin star meal with a famous person joining. Look, these parlor tricks exist. Every firm engages in them, depending on founders, like they either respond positively to it or not. But ultimately what I found in practice is that none of that stuff really matters. What matters is did you put the work in to develop a deep connection and a deep set of insights with that founder, their vision, and the company that they're trying to build? And that just takes time. And I think it takes time in the sense that every process I've been in that has been highly competitive, the winner, if it wasn't me, was the person that had been doing that work for the better course of a year. And I'll give you a quote of founder told me once when an opportunity didn't go my way. He said, the person that I went with,”
2025-05-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like where the future was going and the role that they could play in shepherding him that way. And I think you're going to see more and more of that where once there's like a magic moment that a CIO sees, there's a bit of this mimesis that picks up where every CIO is going to hear about the fact that they adopted this technology successfully and then they're going to want to go and do it themselves. And so I personally am looking for companies like that that I think really can kind of be something that the CIO walks into the boardroom and says, hey, like this is that thing that you asked me to do. I've adopted it. It's working. Employees are happy. We're getting all these productivity gains. And I think we're just scratching at the surface of where that's going to show up. Like you're going to see it in finance. You're certainly going to see more of it in software engineering. You're going to see it in cybersecurity. And again, I think like Glean and Windsurf are just good cursory examples of like that trend that's going to continue playing out and why I'm so bullish on these enterprise apps.”
2025-05-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, first, I have to give kudos to my former partners, Mamoon and Lee Marie, for being the leads and involved in those two companies. But what I would say is those two companies in particular to me found this zeitgeist at the seniormost decision maker level, right? If you go and talk to a CIO or a CTO of a large enterprise today, they're furiously seeking out ways to apply AI to their business. And the reason for that is because their CEO and their board told them, you're going to get fired because the entire fate of our company depends on leaning into AI if you don't help us do this. So there is this veracity and this appetite to bring new solutions that sort of comprise like what it means to bring AI into business, into these companies. Like I've never seen before. And I think Glean found that very early on and the rest is history. It's just been an incredible trajectory. And I think scaling into a true household name that embodies what like the AI app business of tomorrow looks like. I think similarly with Windsurf, they did a really, really good job of going to these large enterprise technology leaders and helping them understand.”
2025-05-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Feel like I've become a more discerning investor in the sense that 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.”
2025-05-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, so I think core to any VC's job is the ability to prioritize and ruthlessly reprioritize. And part of that is just like, what are the best ideas that I have in front of me at any given point in time? I'm going to spend time on those. And right now, to your point, the bar is going up for what best idea looks like when it comes to growth rates and momentum. But I really think you're right to say that what great looks like has really changed. I think the book is still being written on some of those companies that you mentioned and their peers in terms of just how durable that revenue is. Again, I'm not going to repeat myself and go down that rabbit hole. But I think what you're seeing is that the pent up demand for intelligence and all of these different areas of like work is just so unbelievably high that the growth rates in the market pull around these companies are like nothing we've ever seen. And I can tell you now as an investor, when I'm out there looking for new ideas, I am often looking for the signals that I saw in companies like Glean or companies like Winsurf that have just had this incredible market pull and reception. And I can tell you that it's almost made me at least.”
2025-05-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years to get right, that can also be something that's very defensible and hard to replicate. And so I think the game has changed a little bit on this front. And I think that these more deeply technical software products just take more time. And you do have to be more open-minded to these timelines being a little bit different than the canonical. It either works in the first 12 months or not.”
2025-05-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I think you have a lot of very special founders whose companies don't work, number one. And so you can say that about a number of founders and a number of companies. But I think you're starting to see more and more evidence of these companies that just took longer than people thought, right? I mean, there are just so many now. It's not just Figma that I think you kind of have to stay open-minded to that. And there's another dynamic at play here, which is that I think that so much of the low-hanging fruit has been picked off the tree in terms of like software businesses that you can build that you're starting to see the most interesting companies be those where there's just something deeply technical like a problem they have to go and solve that's never been solved before and i think in doing so that can take in some cases like multiple years to get it right and so you know a recent example of this is clay right clay is this company that's growing very very fast on the sales tech side and if i'm not mistaken it was like five or six years of very little to no growth before uh before it took off and so i think you have to be open-minded to those outcomes and i personally try to lean into those outcomes because i think sometimes if if something takes many”
2025-05-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a hard one. I mean, there's examples like Figma where they toiled in obscurity for some time and became the amazing”
2025-05-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Money, sometimes you can kind of be stuck with that, and there are countless companies in the industry right now where you have really talented founders working on something that's kind of working but maybe not working to the degree that they hope, in some sense they're kind of stuck with it, right? And I really empathize with that and I'm protective of the founders that I work with because I care about them and I value their time because I think their time is valuable.”
2025-05-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I definitely did. Sure, in the case where you feel like you're drawing dead, the ability to find a good home for the company and do good by your investors and your employees is, let's just say, much easier to come by when you keep valuation down. And we all know how that works with corporate acquirers. I was once on a Corp dev team, so I know that world very well. But I think there is like another form of optionality where if you really think that the market opportunity or the range of outcomes that you're scaling into is so vast, keeping it lean also allows you to say, hey, if this doesn't work, do I really have to spend the next four or five years of my life working on this thing that I'm not sure of? Right. Like that time is so precious for great founders. And I've been in situations with founders before where it feels like they are kind of drawing dead and the market's not resonating the way that they thought. Sometimes I think having that extra, you know, two or three years of runway can actually be really, really punitive given the opportunity cost associated with amazing founders time. So I really try on a personal level to be honest with them about, look, like, is this really what you want to be spending the next two or three years of your life doing? And I think if you go and raise too much.”
2025-05-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This actually kind of comes back to the market sizing question you asked, which is there are certain companies that have a very deterministic sense of their market opportunity. Let's say they're going and replacing something that already exists. You see this a lot in cybersecurity, for example. I think these kinds of companies, they understand the headroom and they understand if I get this much market share in this period of time, like this is how big my business can be and therefore how valuable it can be with a modest degree of confidence. Where I get really conservative in terms of the advice that I give founders that I work with on fundraising is when companies are fleshing out a new market. Like we just don't know. It could be really large. It could be non-existent. I can tell you that the cases where I've been involved with companies is where they've done that wrong is when they just didn't understand their market yet, right? And I think if you have a poor understanding of your market and there's a non-zero chance that that market could be very constrained, optionality is without a doubt your friend. And I'm very honest about that with the founders I work with.”
2025-05-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Window that spreadsheet investors have to gain access to these companies is just a lot narrower in the sense that these really, really blue chip companies that are wielding AI in some interesting way, for example, let's say again they're building some kind of an agent that is going after a large existing pool of labor and automating that, they're just raising so much money early before there is a spreadsheet that one's ability as a spreadsheet investor to get exposure to those companies at the kind of entry price and stage that they're used to I think is changing a lot. And so my view is that these spreadsheet investors are just going to keep getting pushed later and later stage. And again, I think the book is still being written on whether that's a good thing for the industry. But what I would say is that there's just so much conviction amongst top investors at the early stages for companies like that that they're just willing to take more risk.”
2025-05-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That there's this market that they didn't really think about before, that they should be. And I think in that sense, you have this way of kind of dictating that and therefore like trying to size it is just really, really hard. And some of that is like you build new products. Some of that is you reframe an existing view of like how to solve a problem into something that kind of comprises a new market. And then there are these like compound startups, right? And this rippling is, of course, the company that everybody loves to talk about in the sense. But I think what you see with rippling is like, sure, you were kind of starting thinking about it as a payroll product, but they have just been so unbelievably effective at layering on new products that have synergies to the existing core that the market size just keeps getting bigger every quarter. And so I don't spend a lot of time sizing markets, but I do think those companies that are going after an existing market, it would be crazy not to at least think about the size of that.”
2025-05-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, the honest answer is it depends, right? Like in a case where I would say it does matter is if you're building, let's say you're building a cybersecurity company where the play is you have a better solution to something that already exists. You know exactly how much is being spent on that thing and therefore your opportunity is to go and capture as much of that existing spend on that thing and then grow with that market. There, I think market sizing really matters in terms of just being sober about the size of the opportunity and honest with yourself about the right way to build that company and capitalize it. I think there's this other case though where you're doing something fundamentally new. And if you're doing something fundamentally new, the act of sizing a market is just, at least from my experience, so imprecise that it borders on being a fool's errand, number one. Number two, I think you've heard many people say this, but I very much agree with it that like the best founders, they're just so creative and have so much ingenuity in terms of their ability to essentially set their rules, right? And what I mean by setting their own rules is they get to decide what market they're playing and they get to convince customers.”
2025-05-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Talk about like these agent products that are quite literally going from like going after existing software spend to starting to replace human labor, it kind of comes back to this optimism I have around the size of these outcomes. Like I really believe that these software companies that are not just augmenting but in some cases replacing the work that humans do and the budget allocated towards paying them for that work, these companies are going to get bigger, right? So I think the way I think about things today is like when you find one of those companies that has demonstrated some path to market leadership relative to the field because all these categories are very competitive, which is another very challenging dynamic. My view is you really have to build conviction and go all in.”
2025-05-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, my former partner, Mamoon, has taught me many things. One quote that sticks with me on this one is the best companies always feel expensive. And I think that's proven true in every example I can think of. I think it's really about determining, one, like, is this one of those truly special companies? And obviously the earlier you have to make that decision, the much harder it is and the error rate is going to be higher. And I think therein lies probably some reason to be a little bit more constrained on your thinking around price. On the other hand, and this kind of dovetails into like a question of like, well, what does it take to win a competitive round these days? Like, I think there's always someone who is going to believe more than the field, right? And so if that is important to the founder, then you sort of have a hard choice to make. Whereas like if you think that Series A, this is a very special asset and they're pushing price beyond kind of the way your mind can rationalize it. History would say that those companies always feel expensive. Those companies can run and compound for a very long time. And I think especially today when we're in a world where let's say”
2025-05-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think if you pulled investors right now and you asked them, how many of these really, really valuable companies are going to exist in AI, in defense, in robotics, in space? Most of them will tell you there's going to be maybe a few of these companies that get to that really, really massive unprecedented level of scale. On the other hand, I think we're still really early in the super cycle of each of these areas, right? I mean, I think there's a lot of talk about how it's going to be Helsing and Andril. There's a lot of talk around how it's going to be open AI and anthropic, maybe XAI. I just don't think we know. And when I look at like a trend like robotics that is still so, so early, but at least in my mind, I've convinced myself that this time is truly different in terms of the industrial applicability of these products. It really, to me, looks like we could be surprised to the upside. But again, this is sort of our job as venture investors is to be very, very optimistic. So I think that is the number one constraint to this whole experiment playing out favorably will be like, are there more than one or two of these per”
2025-05-05 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC Exclusive: Why Mega Platforms Will Win in VC | Why You Cannot Do VC If You Do Not Do Pre-Seed | Why Market Sizing is BS | Where Will Foundation Models Build/Buy Apps vs Where Will They Not with Bucky Moore · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source