Attention, founders: Lauri Moore probably wants to meet you. I mean, I can’t speak for her entirely, but she did say:
“You can quote me, ‘lunch is on me,’ and I’m game for a whiteboarding chat,” she told me over the phone.
Moore is joining Bessemer Venture Partners as a partner, Fortune can exclusively report. She was previously a partner at Foundation Capital, where her investments included co-working startup Gable and a number of open-source-focused AI startups, including Infield.ai. At Bessemer, Moore will focus on investing in early-stage dev tools, infrastructure, and data science, all categories that Bessemer has played in before—the firm has previously invested in Auth0, HashiCorp, Imply, and Twilio.
It’s a sort of funny day for Moore and me to be talking on the phone. I was at a San Francisco Mexican restaurant furiously typing, while my family group text wouldn’t stop popping off about the CrowdStrike mega-outage .
“We have the ground shifting underneath us when we’re thinking about software engineering for an AI world,” said Moore. “My perspective will require reimagining some of the building blocks of engineering—and clearly the events of last night told us we have a long way to go in terms of reliability and monitoring.”
Moore is joining 113-year-old Bessemer just a few months after longtime partner Ethan Kurzweil left the firm, setting up his own shop with Kristina Shen and Mark Goldberg (formerly of Andreessen Horowitz and Index Ventures, respectively). I asked her how we should think about what’s next for Bessemer.
“The firm is bigger than any one person, but also by design evolves with and flows from the conviction of its team and the founders we are proud to stand behind,” she added via email. “For example, the transformation that's happening at the infrastructure and tooling layers, driven in large part by AI-enthusiasm at the application layer, is a particular area I'm excited about…Next, you should expect to see us continue to partner with founders building in this sector.”
Her career in venture wasn’t a given—a self-described “professor kid,” Moore grew up essentially on campus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She started her career at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York before moving to startup-land. She joined a startup called Apture as a product manager, and it was acquired by Google shortly thereafter. Moore subsequently spent much of her career emphasizing product, working at startups, at LinkedIn, and as a founder, before joining Foundation Capital in 2022.
“In a sense, venture is also a product,” Moore says, even if the product development cycle is a bit different. “In every other product I've worked on, I’ve constantly gotten feedback…In this structure it’s less common to get feedback, but it’s something I think about a lot. Because I want to make sure what I’m offering to our founders continues to add value.”
So, if you’re a founder out there, Moore likely wants to meet you—and she wants your feedback.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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