Gavin Christensen
General Partner at Kickstart
Salt Lake City Metropolitan Area
Overview
Work Experience
Founder and General Partner at Kickstart
2007 - Current
Founder and Managing Partner
2007
In partnership with the Utah ecosystem, I launched Kickstart Seed Fund in Summer, 2008. Kickstart is a seed-stage investment fund that is the most active investor in the thriving Utah and Mountain West Tech Ecosystem. To date, KSF has invested in nearly 100 companies. See our website, kickstartfund.com for more details.
Kickstart is an early-stage VC fund that provides smart capital, a connected community, and expert guidance to companies.
Board Member
2014
Lucid is the parent company of two cloud-based visual productivity solutions: Lucidchart and Lucidpress. Lucidchart is an essential visual productivity platform that helps anyone understand and share ideas, information, and processes with clarity. Lucidpress is an intuitive design and brand management platform for creating on-brand content faster. Together, they are utilized in over 180 countries by more than 15 million users, including Amazon, Delta, Visa, Toyota, Procter & Gamble, and 96 percent of the Fortune 500. Lucid’s partners include industry leaders such as Google, Atlassian, Amazon Web Services, Salesforce, and Microsoft. Since the Utah-based company’s founding in 2010, it has received numerous awards for its business and workplace culture. The Lucid team has expanded from one ambitious college student wanting to improve the way he worked to a team of nearly 400 employees helping people around the world work visually. With teams dedicated to front and back-end engineering, customer service, sales, marketing, product, and quality assurance, Lucid is a company that has grown tremendously in the last several years and expects to continue that growth for many years to come. From day one, the Lucid team has been scrappy, innovative, bent on growing like crazy, and wildly successful. The company holds true to its core values, which include teamwork over ego, innovation in everything we do, individual empowerment, initiative, and ownership, and passion and excellence in every area.
Lucid Software is a visual collaboration suite that helps teams implement an idea into reality and game-changing solutions.
Raised $670,362,414.00 from Steadfast Capital Management, Tiger Global Management and Alkeon Capital.
Member Board Of Directors
2018
Spiff is a compensation platform for revenue and sales organizations that helps automate complex commission processes and motivate sales.
Raised $112,000,000.00 from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Kickstart and Album VC.
Board Member
2014
Today, our experiences and memories are more valuable than ever—and Chatbooks helps you hold on to what matters. We collectively take over 3 trillion photos each year, and most of those memories get lost in a digital abyss, never to see the light of day. Chatbooks is on a mission to make creating a photo book as easy as taking a picture. The $10 photo books, which automatically pull photos from your Instagram, Facebook, and Camera Roll via 5-Star iPhone and Android apps, are designed to tell the ongoing story of your life with zero effort. And with the recent addition of Chatbooks' machine learning-based auto-curation technology, it's now easier than ever to get your best photos off of your phone and into your hands. Chatbooks was recently recognized as Utah’s fastest-growing startup by the Top 25 Under 5, as a 2016 Utah Top 100 Emerging Elite Winner, as well as Utah Valley’s #1 startup to watch. We’ve raised over $20 million in venture capital financing, and are proud to be backed by Utah's best venture funds. Chatbooks is headquartered at the base of Mount Timpanogos, on the banks of the Provo River at the mouth of Provo Canyon. We’re just minutes from some of the best and most diverse outdoor living in the entire US.
Board Member
2021
Board Member
2021
Elements Advisors is an online software platform that offers processes, frameworks, and assessments for financial planning services.
Raised $12,999,993.00 from SaaS Ventures, Kickstart, Forward Venture Capital, Flyover Capital and Grand Ventures.
Board Member
2018
At Claravine our mission is to provide digital marketing data governance for analytics and marketing teams. Many companies are forced to make budget decisions based on partial or inaccurate data. Our clients never have to wonder if their campaign summaries are correct; they are. And they are produced and maintained at a fraction of the cost our clients were spending before they met us. Please visit our website and request a free professional consultation.
Claravine helps connect, standardize, and govern marketing data that adapt to changing business needs.
Raised $30,500,000.00 from Peninsula Ventures, Grayhawk Capital, Silverton Partners, Five Elms Capital, Kickstart and NEXT Frontier Capital.
Board Member
2019
Zight is a visual work communication tool for organizations to easily create, upload, and manage visual content.
Raised $19,100,000.00 from Peter Kazanjy, Grayhawk Capital, Peninsula Ventures, New Ground Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Forward Venture Capital, Nordic Eye Venture Capital, Kickstart, Derek Andersen and Cervin Ventures.
Board Member
2013
RackWare is focused on delivering solutions to easily and cost-effectively enable the use of cloud for today’s enterprises.
RackWare offers mobility to the data center to leverage private, public, or hybrid cloud environments.
Raised $21,039,680.00 from Signal Peak Ventures, Kickstart and Osage Venture Partners.
Board Member
2018
Localfluence is a company connects brands to locals who have local influence.
Raised $2,114,998.00.