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—each company is a unique opportunity to build a new type of culture that matches the founders, product, and their customers.”