“The market size for Discord was completely unknown when we invested, but the product experience was amazing and you could feel the community coming together. That is why we believed.”
Nabeel attended the Maryland Institute College of Art to study design. “I love it all—painting, sculpture, and design.”
“Silicon Valley in the ’90s was about finding ways to make the culture of engineering and sales work together. The next 10 years will be about finding ways to make design and product work with engineering.”
Nabeel’s first experience with Postmates convinced him to invest when the company had just 10 employees. “My son broke a 101-degree fever, and I couldn’t leave to get Tylenol so I used Postmates. The Tylenol appeared in 20 minutes. It was totally magic.”
Nabeel led Cruise’s Series A—a year later GM bought Cruise for over $1B. “When Kyle Vogt paints a vision for the future, you want it to exist. I get excited to work with founders like Kyle who are taking big, bold risks.”

Nabeel Hyatt

General Partner, Early

For Nabeel Hyatt, product comes first, and everything else follows. He believes the technology that founders build, not the team’s pedigree or a big market size, says everything he needs to know about a company. “You can learn more about a team and how they see the world by simply experiencing their choices with the product than you ever could from a pitch,” he says.

Nabeel has always been a maker. He started his first technology company at 16-years-old and spent the early part of his career as a serial entrepreneur, participating in his first IPO before the age of 25. His last company, Conduit Labs, was acquired by Zynga where he joined the leadership team through the hyper-growth of scaling from 200 to 2,000 employees in a few short years. In 2012, Nabeel joined Spark as a General Partner to open the firm’s San Francisco office.

Drawing on his entrepreneurial background, Nabeel backs companies that use technology and design to build revolutionary user experiences. He believes that providing founders with an unwavering support system for bringing their vision to life leads to products that will transform the way people interact with technology in the future. “There is no startup playbook,” he says. “I don’t prescribe a way to build your company—together we will figure out the best way.”

Companies
Adept
AllStripes
Capella Space
Cruise
Discord
Harmonix
Instawork
North
Postmates
Proletariat
Standard Metrics
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