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Moore: Formal board seats are usually unnecessary until Series A

Bucky Moore · Why Bucky Moore Joined $30 Billion AUM Megafund Lightspeed · Sourcery with Molly O'Shea · May 5, 2025 · at 25:57

Bucky Moore, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, discusses startup governance and whether early-stage investors should take formal board seats during seed rounds.

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“That said it's not clear to me that, that construct needs to exist at seed and pre-seed in a way that necessarily, like, makes the company better off. And so typically what I see is that there are cases where, like, the founder wants to form a board, they want the investor involved at seed, and that's fine. Like, I think I'm, you know, our job is to adapt to the needs of founders, like, fundamentally so. But in general, typically I think the lead seed investor can be really, really deeply involved, and then as the company kind of turns the quarter to a series A, that's when I think, like, memorializing that construct in a bit more of a formal way is, is is, is, is, is probably healthier.”

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