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Chris Howard

Founding Partner at Ritual Capital

Burlingame, California

Work Experience

  • Founder and Managing Director

    2023

    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.

2007 - 2013

  • 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.

2003 - 2005

  • 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.

2001 - 2003

  • 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.

1999 - 2000

  • Marketing Manager

    1999 - 2000

    Ran the marketing programs for closeout sporting goods retailer prior to an acquisition by Overstock.com.

1997 - 1999

  • 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.