Chris Howard
Founder of Ritual Capital
Burlingame, California
Overview
Work Experience
Founder and Managing Director
2023 - Current
Ritual Capital is a $38M seed-stage venture firm that invests in infrastructure and developer tools, SaaS companies, and select consumer ideas, investing collaborative ~$300k checks in exceptional founders building enduring, iconic companies.
Founder and Partner
2013
Fuel Capital is an early stage venture fund based in San Francisco, CA. Early investor in companies like Cambly, Clearbit, Convoy, CTRL Labs, Figma, Flexport, Fly, GoodDog, Highspot, Joy, Kepler, Lattice, Nervana, and VetCove.
Fuel Capital is an early-stage venture firm investing in consumer, business software and cloud/ infrastructure companies.
Principal
2007 - 2013
Ignition Partners was an early stage venture fund with over $2 billion under management across six funds. The firm invested in 70+ portfolio companies across cloud-computing, infrastructure, mobile and consumer. Notable investments include Splunk, Xensource, Cloudera, and Docusign. Launched Ignition Seed, a dedicated seed-stage investment program in 2010. The firm invested in approximately 40 seed-stage companies, including PagerDuty, Kong, ConnectedHQ (acq by LinkedIn), Cue, Hipmunk (acq by Concur), Mattermark, Minomonsters, Realm, and Zencoder (acq by Brightcove). Also worked closely with our investments in Heroku, Parse and WePay.
Ignition Partners is a venture capital firm dedicated to helping the best entrepreneurs seize opportunity.
Account Lead, New Balance
2003 - 2005
Heckler Associates is a brand development firm helping iconic companies like Starbucks, Panera Bread, New Balance, K2, Cinnabon, Ivars, Rainier, Redhook, Suncadia, and Visio define and become leaders in their category. Launched Aravon, a New Balance start-up brand and Procare, New Balance's fit specialist network.
Heckler Branding is a logo and graphic design firm.
Business Development
2001 - 2003
Design and marketing firm specializing in brand strategy, print, and interactive communications. Clients included Microsoft, Attachmate, WCI Telecom, Kibble & Prentice, and Columbia Hospitality.
Marketing Manager
1999 - 2000
Ran the marketing programs for closeout sporting goods retailer prior to an acquisition by Overstock.com.
Gear.com Online sporting goods retailer.
Raised $12,000,000.00 from NAI Elliott, Sugar Mountain, Kellett Investment, Madrona and Westlake International Group.
Account Executive, Lexus
1997 - 1999
Managed the national television, print, and outdoor brand campaigns for Lexus. Coordinated the American Cancer Society’s national “Hope. Progress. Answers.” re-branding initiative.
Team One is a fully integrated advertising agency headquartered in Los Angeles.