Jeff BussgangManaging Partner & Founder at The Graduate Syndicate General Partner & Co-Founder at Flybridge Capital Partners

Jeff Bussgang

Managing Partner & Founder at The Graduate Syndicate
General Partner & Co-Founder at Flybridge Capital Partners

Jeff is a managing partner and founder of The Graduate Syndicate, created by Flybridge in 2016 to invest in seed and pre-seed startups founded by recent Harvard graduates. He is also a general partner & co-founder of Flybridge since early 2003.

Jeff’s investment interests and entrepreneurial experience are in blockchain, consumer, e-commerce, machine learning, and mobile start-ups. Additionally, he serves as a part-time Senior Lecturer at Harvard Business School and teaches a class on entrepreneurship and lean start-ups called Launching Technology Ventures.  

In this capacity, he has co-authored over thirty HBS cases and notes regarding startup management and entrepreneurship. 

Prior to co-founding Flybridge, Jeff co-founded and served as President, Chief Operating Officer and Board Director at Upromise, a loyalty marketing and financial services firm that was acquired by Sallie Mae. He also served as Vice President of Worldwide Marketing and Business Development, Vice President of Worldwide Professional Services and head of Product Management at Open Market, an Internet commerce software leader that went public in 1996. Prior to Open Market Jeff was with the strategy consulting firm, The Boston Consulting Group.

In 2017, Jeff authored a book for startup joiners, Entering StartUpLand:  An Essential Guide to Finding the Right Job. In 2010, Jeff authored a book on venture capital and entrepreneurship, Mastering the VC Game, to provide entrepreneurs an insider’s guide to financing and company-building. The book has been hailed by the Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, TechCrunch and The Financial Times as an essential guide for entrepreneurs.  The first chapter of Entering StartUpLand can be downloaded here and the first chapter of Mastering the VC Game can be downloaded here.

Jeff is an active community member, serving as co-chairman of the leadership council at educational non-profit, Facing History and Ourselves, co-founder of a private-public partnership designed to tackle the under representation of highly-skilled minority employees in Boston’s innovation ecosystem, Hack.Diversity, co-founder and co-chair of an immigration reform non-profit, the Global EIR Coalition, and co-founder and former chair of the progressive policy organization, The Alliance for Business Leadership. Jeff also serves on the board of the New England Venture Capital Association and EdX, the massively open online course provider created through a joint venture between Harvard and MIT.

Jeff holds a BA in Computer Science from Harvard University where he graduated magna cum laude and an MBA from Harvard Business School where he was a Baker Scholar and a Ford Scholar.