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Chip Hazard

Chip Hazard is a venture capitalist based in Boston and New York who co-founded and serves as general partner of Flybridge Capital Partners, a seed-stage firm now concentrated on artificial intelligence infrastructure and developer platforms [1][2][6]. He entered venture capital in 1994 at Greylock Partners, where his first investment closed on the day Netscape launched, and he has since described living through successive platform shifts from the early internet to mobile, cloud computing, and generative AI [18]. He co-founded Flybridge in 2002 and has also co-founded XFactor Ventures, an early-stage vehicle backing women-led companies, while sitting on the board of MongoDB since 2009, a company he backed when it was still known as 10gen and that has since grown into a public company with a market capitalization above twenty billion dollars [4][6][7][8][18]. His portfolio also includes Firebase, Stack Driver, Nasuni, BetterCloud, and Codecademy, and more recently he has made seed investments in companies such as Arcade.dev, Mako, Prime Security, fiveonefour, and Glimpse [9][10][11][12][13][17][18][19]. He holds a bachelor's degree from Stanford University, where he competed as a two-sport athlete, and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School before beginning his investing career [14][15][16][18].

Hazard has written and spoken publicly about how he evaluates early-stage founders, arguing that at the seed and pre-seed stage there is little data to underwrite, so judgment centers on people rather than metrics [17]. He describes assessing what he calls the "minimal viable founder," a combination of deep domain expertise, obsession, and unconventional thinking, and separately evaluates evidence of grit, resilience, and a fast working pace, since he argues startups largely win or lose on speed of execution [17][19]. He has noted that a large share of the founders he has backed, roughly seventy percent by his account, come from nontraditional, underrepresented, or immigrant backgrounds, which he treats as one signal of resilience [19]. In his account of the diligence process, an initial pitch is typically followed by a one-on-one, slide-free conversation intended to surface traits that do not come across in a formal presentation, and he has said his gut sense of a founder often forms within the first fifteen to thirty minutes of that first meeting [17]. He has also argued that effective early-stage investing requires holding skepticism about a venture's many possible failure modes alongside genuine optimism about how a market could look years later, a balance he describes as being an "optimistic skeptic" [19].

At Flybridge, Hazard has said the firm is now entirely focused on pre-seed and seed investing, split roughly thirty percent pre-seed and seventy percent seed, and entirely focused on artificial intelligence, with most portfolio companies based in Flybridge's core geographies of Boston and New York [17]. He has pointed to a 2019 blog post on applied AI as evidence that the firm identified the current AI shift before it became widely hyped, and has described the release of ChatGPT as a turning point comparable to the Netscape launch that opened the web era, after which Flybridge committed fully to AI-focused investing [18]. He has also argued that, much as companies once described themselves as "internet companies" before that label became meaningless as the internet became ubiquitous, the category of "AI companies" will eventually dissolve as AI becomes embedded across nearly all software products [18][22]. Flybridge's most recent fund, announced with roughly one hundred million dollars in capital, is directed specifically at AI infrastructure and developer-platform startups [18].

Experience

  1. General Partner and Co-Founder
    Flybridge Capital PartnersMay 2002 to Present
  2. Co-founder and Investment Partner
    XFactor VenturesJul 2017 to Present
  3. Board Member
    MongoDBOct 2009 to Present
  4. Seed Investor
    Arcade.devDec 2024 to Present
  5. Seed Investor
    MakoMay 2024 to Present
  6. Seed Investor
    Prime SecurityJan 2024 to Present
  7. Seed Investor
    fiveonefourOct 2023 to Present
  8. Seed Investor
    GlimpseMay 2023 to Present

Education

Media & appearances

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