UPDATE:

Chris Albinson is taking on a new role as CEO at Communitech on May 16th, 2021 – read more about his decision here.

Chris and the team at BreakawayGrowth will continue to support our existing network of founders and gurus.


We help bold founders build extraordinary companies.

We look for founders with a capital efficient mindset who will achieve more with less. We have seen it before where founders will use extra money to hire more engineers rather than pay themselves more. This matters.

Our focus is on early stage companies in North America. We are happy to partner with founders early and be the first investor or invest as part of a larger syndicate in pre-seed, seed, Series A & B rounds.

Our partners have been early investors in companies that have created $45bn+ in value including: Pinterest, Docusign, MongoDB, Newbridge Networks & Juniper Networks.

Once we invest then we really dig in to genuinely help our founders in every possible way from recruiting to product to strategy to fundraising, etc. Just ask any founders we have invested in before. We make a difference by challenging our founders to be the best they can to enable their companies to truly perform.

General Partner

Chris J. Albinson is based in San Francisco and is the co-founder of the C100, MIE, FCC, and Panorama Capital. Chris is currently Managing Director & Co-Founder of Panorama Capital, Chairman of the Board at Ninth Decimal, an investor in DocuSign, Pinterest, Turo, Stance, 33Across, and an Angel investor in Uberflip, People.AI, and 4 stealth companies. Exits include: DocuSign (IPO), Ticketfly (acquired), Elemental Technology (acquired), Good Technology (acquired), PasswordBox (acquired). Previously, Chris was a General Partner at JP Morgan Partners and General Partner & Founder of Founders Circle Capital. Chris also helped grow four startups, most recently as Chief Strategy Officer for Digital Island (IPO & acquired by Cable & Wireless).

Team

Merrill Joy
Director, Investor Relations & Community Manager

Merrill Joy is BreakawayGrowth’s Director of Growth Talent. Merrill is passionate about connecting awesome people together. Previously, Merrill worked with amazing innovative technology companies and matched them with extraordinary talent. Over a decade of experience of connecting and driving effective team building, she is now leveraging this experience to build the most effective and talented community to build companies that get to a billion in revenue faster and more efficiently than ever before. 

Nick Harrison
Associate

Nick Harrison is based in Ottawa, Canada. Most recently, he led channel sales and international growth strategy at Toronto-based Turnstyle Solutions (acquired by Yelp). He also founded and ran an independent theatre company called Trivial Theatre as Artistic Director, after ten years as an actor and performer. While earning an HBA degree at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario, Nick worked as a researcher for Chris at Founders Circle Capital. He also serves as a board member with the civic education organizations Synapcity and the Social Planning Council of Ottawa.

Robert Elensky
Entrepreneur-in-Residence

Robert Elensky is our EIR focused on the fintech, insurtech and machine learning/AI. Robert is also an active COO for Senso.AI, and is based in Toronto. Previously, Robert held CEO and Chairman positions in both public and private companies across 5 continents. His deep expertise was gained through senior operating roles, consulting engagements, investments, joint ventures, acquisitions and the creation of fintech companies. Robert has successfully completed consulting engagements for industry, corporate and government leaders in emerging and developed countries. Robert graduated with an MBA from the Richard Ivey School of Business and a BA Economics from the University of Western Ontario.

Luis Robles is an experienced technology investor and entrepreneur with 15 years of experience in Silicon Valley. He was a partner on the early-stage investment team at Sequoia Capital where he worked on enterprise, cloud, security, and big data  opportunities. He championed the firm’s investments in MongoDB, ThousandEyes, SpringPath, and CoreOS. After Sequoia he was a co-founder and VP, Products of Diamanti (an enterprise data center infrastructure company) and he has remained an active participant in the seed / angel investing ecosystem. Earlier in his career, Luis was an early member of the software engineering and product management staff at VMware, leading products that became important contributors to its IPO. He holds BS and MS degrees from Stanford in computer science, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. Luis is based in San Francisco, California.

Portfolio

See the companies we support.