Bijan Sabet

Co-founder & Partner Emeritus

For Bijan Sabet, making the right investment comes down to asking himself four simple questions. Over the years, he’s honed his eye for spotting exceptional founders, which led him to invest in Twitter at the Series B stage, serving on the board from 2008 to 2011, and Tumblr at the Series A, serving on the board from 2007 to 2013.

Bijan spent the first ten years of his career in the startup world. Living in San Francisco during the early days of the consumer internet, he helped build foundational entertainment platforms including WebTV. When he and his wife had their first child, he moved back to Boston to become an Entrepreneur in Residence at Charles River Ventures.

There he met Santo Politi, who was just beginning to think about starting a new venture capital firm. In 2005, Bijan joined Spark as a co-founder with the goal of building a new kind of firm—one that would push back against the traditions, good and bad, of typical venture capital. The approach has helped him identify founders who are fundamentally changing the way people interact with technology. “I find that the entrepreneurs I’m drawn to are willing to take a bigger chance on things,” he says. “It tends to lead to better results in terms of the mission, the purpose, and types of people they can recruit.”

Companies
Adept
AllStripes
Capella Space
Cruise
Discord
Harmonix
Instawork
North
Postmates
Proletariat
Standard Metrics
Zum
  1. Are the founders extraordinary?
  2. Do I love the product?
  3. Is the vision compelling?
  4. If I wasn’t a VC, would I want to work for the founders atthe startup?

Bijan is a lover of the arts and an active street photographer.

Bijan led Spark’s investment in Twitter when the company had 11 employees and a couple hundred thousand active users.

After meeting 19-year-old David Karp, Bijan quickly became one of Tumblr’s power users and a proud early investor. Six years later, Yahoo acquired Tumblr for $1.1 billion.

Microsoft acquired WebTV in 1997 for $425 million.

“For me, it was really exciting to build something from scratch and to invest in the rare founders who merge extraordinary technical abilities with consumer taste and product design.”