The Seattle transplant has carved out a spot among the world’s best seed investors after a decade grinding his way to Silicon Valley’s inside track.
By Iain Martin, Forbes Staff
Washington native Chris Howard’s weekly commute for over three years was a two hour flight to San Francisco. Crashing four nights a week on a friend’s sofa wasn’t easy, but it gave him a chance to meet early-stage startups, stake out Y Combinator and build out an extensive network of Bay Area founders and investors. A decade on, Howard has made it to Forbes’ Midas Seed List of the world’s best early-stage investors for the first time thanks to investments like Figma, Flexport, and Convoy made with his futon-era contacts.
Howard began his career as a marketing agency executive for brands like Lexus and New Balance shoes before a brief spell working at Gear.com, a dot com sporting goods ecommerce company, gave him the taste of startup life. That experience, and the company’s takeover by Overstock, inspired Howard to go back to business school, where he hustled his way into an internship with Bellevue, Washington-based venture fund Ignition Partners.
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“It was really challenging for me to go down that path because I hadn’t been at Amazon or Microsoft… traditionally people entering venture had that sort of background,” says Howard. “The secret ingredient was understanding the customer or what makes the product special and the same principles apply to shipping containers or New Balance shoes.”
The enterprise software-focused fund founded by a cadre of former Microsoft veterans like John Connors and Brad Silverberg hired the MBA graduate as their first associate and tasked him with working on deals like cloud platform Heroku, app builder Parse and payments business Wepay. “There are just not that many spots in the venture world and Chris was just relentless about getting onboard,” says John Connors, Ignition managing partner.
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In 2010, Howard talked the partners into allowing him to launch a seed program inside the fund as traditional Series A investors began a shift to back earlier-stage startups. Hunting for ideas and opportunities led Howard to the Bay Area and a crop of new startups like PagerDuty, Kong and Hipmunk. It was a time consuming effort, but it paid off. “My wife is a saint. She helped navigate three kids under four while I was on a plane to the Bay Area,” says Howard.
The out-of-towner’s seed credentials were sealed by some early, and influential friendships with Y Combinator’s Paul Graham and Sam Altman, picking tech power broker Ron Conway as a mentor and a weekly reservation on SV Angel investor Kevin Carter’s sofa. “I’ve been one of Chris’ biggest fans for a long time. Chris and I share the same philosophy of always putting the founder first,” says Conway.
In 2013, Ignition partner Silverberg pushed Howard to make a permanent move to the Bay Area under the banner of his own fund, Fuel Capital. There he landed seed deals in industrial-focused unicorns like Flexport, trucking software startup Convoy and HR platform Lattice for whom his background in marketing giant consumer brands proved useful. “If you help founders along the way with raising money, building a deck, making introductions but then go deep on things like marketing it means that they tell their friends,” says Howard.
Howard’s marketing chops have since come to partially define Fuel’s pitch. When he made an early investment in the merch platform Teespring, Howard moved into their office to help run its marketing team. “Chris would say, ‘I can give you 15 hours a week’ to work for the company without a salary to help us succeed and that’s something that no other investor would do,” says Walker Williams, cofounder of Teespring, which was acquired by Amaze last year.
Along the way, Silverberg retired, and Howard recruited TaskRabbit founder Leah Solivan as a new general partner, later scooping up Jamie Viggiano, the marketing director of the handyman marketplace, to double down on the Fuel’s promise to supercharge its startup’s marketing. “Chris is more about the story, brand positioning, and product marketing, and that applies to anything,” says Lattice co-founder Jack Altman.
Howard also scored investments in some buzzy startup brands like Figma and ThredUp and forged a rule to avoid board seats. “We stand in your corner, not your kitchen,” says Howard. “Being a founder is lonely and sometimes you can’t talk to your team, spouse or board and we like to be in a position where we can be a trusted third partner.”
Jack Altman, brother of former Y Combinator chief and OpenAI founder Sam Altman, vouches for that. In 2014, Howard pushed him for an executive role at Teespring, and then backed his HR unicorn startup Lattice. “He believed in me very early and when I started Lattice he was my very first investor,” says Altman. “You have no doubt that Chris is on your side.”
Howard was one of a gaggle of Silicon Valley playmakers to back Ryan Petersen’s freight startup Flexport’s $4 million seed round. And when he did, the Fuel Capital investor brought a lot more to the table than just his initial $250,000 check, says Petersen. “Chris turned out to be one of my helpful investors. He introduced us to a bunch of great talent, advisers and capital,” says Petersen.
The Fuel Capital returned six months later with an unusual offer—a $2 million check to be priced at the next round’s valuation. “He invested more in the business even when we didn’t realize we needed the money,” says Petersen. “That money turned out to be super important to Flexport being able to get to the point of raising our series A because we had more runway.”
A check book, marketing hacks, and bulging Rolodex might not ultimately be where founders get the most value from Howard. Unlike many rival investors, the former psych major’s willingness and ability to listen to founders’ fears without interjecting with second hand advice, or some business school case study, has won him a loyal, and now influential following. “When I have been in deeply low emotional points I have never felt I had to hide or sugar coat this from Chris and knew if I’m in a pinch I could call and he would answer,” says Altman, who has since invested with Fuel Capital.
Howard has now firmly put down roots in the Bay Area, though his fund gave up its Burlingame office in the pandemic. Like Fuel Capital, the San Mateo county suburb straddles the more staid, enterprise-focused Valley, and what remains of San Francisco’s high-energy startup scene.
Howard now needs to plot his second decade at Fuel without earlier supporters like Silverberg, and Solivan, who plans to launch her own fund to back underrepresented founders. Howard rode one shift in seed investing, but now the model of a solo general partner faces challenges from multi-billion funds crowding into ever early stage investments, while angel investors write ever-larger checks.
Despite those changes you are still likely to find Howard camped out at one of his startup’s offices, or a founder’s little league game. “The market is more and more competitive so we just have to be clearer about our offering,” says Howard. “Marketing is still our secret sauce and how we can add value.”
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