Bucky partners with founders who are advancing the frontiers of AI, infrastructure, and cybersecurity at the earliest stages. He joined Lightspeed after more than a decade in the venture business, drawn to the firm’s long-term orientation and strong reputation for backing transformative technical founders.

He first wound up in the SF Bay Area as a member of the Corporate Development team at Cisco, where he helped lead their M&A and investment efforts in cloud infrastructure. There, he interacted with founders for the first time and witnessed how deep technical insights enabled them to not only see into the future, but also define it. He quickly observed that a handful of venture firms consistently backed the most promising enterprise startups, Lightspeed chief among them. This pattern then sparked his curiosity about venture capital, and led him to focus on early-stage investing.

After moving into venture, he eventually landed at Kleiner Perkins, where he led early investments in companies like Together AI, Netlify, Cartesia, Browserbase, Teleport, and Labelbox. He co-invested with Lightspeed on several occasions, and served on a board with Lightspeed Co-founder and Partner, Ravi Mhatre, which ultimately led him to Lightspeed.

Bucky gravitates toward founders who embody the qualities he’d seek in a founder he would want to work for — those with rare ability to blend technical expertise with intuitive product instincts and exceptional relationship-building abilities. These people not only make the extremely complex simple, but also possess the emotional intelligence to forge meaningful connections with customers, talent, and fellow investors alike. He’s especially drawn to new applications and infrastructure primitives that are enabled by AI. While he values product and market insight, his primary focus is the people behind the company. “My early training was about frameworks that helped me size a market or evaluate technology,” he says. “But 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.”

That conviction is rooted in his upbringing. Bucky’s father ran a small medical practice, and watching him build a business from scratch gave Bucky an early appreciation for resilience and resourcefulness. “It wasn’t a startup in the traditional sense, but it required the same kind of drive and adaptability,” he says. “It taught me to value people who take ownership.”

Outside of work, Bucky spends time with his wife and dog, stays active, reads widely, and plays guitar. Whether working through a challenging chord progression or exploring a new idea, he gravitates toward pursuits that require focus and patience. “The best kind of progress comes from doing hard things consistently,” he says. A mindset he brings to venture through curiosity, discipline, and comfort with discomfort.