Next stop, VC

Fresh from organizing online fundraising for President Obama's campaign, Facebook Inc. co-founder Chris Hughes has joined Cambridge, Mass.-based General Catalyst Partners as entrepreneur-in-residence. Hughes, 25, will split his time between Boston and New York and help the firm build a new generation of digital media and social-networking startups on the East Coast.

With Harvard classmates Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, Hughes founded social-networking site Facebook in 2004. He left the Palo Alto, Calif., company in 2007 to work on the Obama campaign as its director of online organizing. In General Catalyst, he joins a firm with $1.8 billion under management that is now investing a $715 million fund in early-stage software, new media, and clean-energy companies.

We spoke to Hughes about his new role.

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The Deal: Why are you joining a venture capital firm?

Chris Hughes: I've been really fortunate to have great experiences at Facebook and on the Obama campaign. Now I want to be on the East Coast and help facilitate a new generation of entrepreneurs. With my background in liberal arts, I wouldn't have done what I have except for being around the people I knew. But I got the lay of the land pretty quickly, and now I'd like to help others take new ideas and turn them into companies.

Which companies in General Catalyst's portfolio do you admire?

Kayak.com [an online travel site] and Brightcove Inc. [an online video services company] come to mind. Both use technology to break down the barriers to access in ways that are similar to what I was doing at Facebook and on the Obama campaign. Before Facebook, you could communicate with your friends by phone or e-mail, but you couldn't log onto a single Web site to find out what your friends are doing. With the Obama campaign, we were doing a lot what people have been doing on campaigns forever: knocking on doors, raising money, holding events. But we used technology to do it more efficiently.

Why didn't you join the Obama administration?

Working in the Obama administration is an amazing opportunity for the people who are doing it. But one of the key qualities you need to have is patience, because there are a lot of different people with competing interests, and you have to take the time to work within the constraints of the law, the budget and politics to build things online. My personality and background are more attuned to working on a campaign or building a startup from the ground up. I'm not the type of person who would enter a big company, so working for the federal government didn't resonate with me.

What do you hope to accomplish at General Catalyst?

I want to help build a community of entrepreneurs and help everyday people understand that you don't necessarily need a computer science degree or live in Palo Alto to build a great company. I moved to New York in January, and it's clear to me there are a lot of people from a lot of different industries with a lot of cool ideas for things that might work on the Web.

The challenge is connecting the dots between their ideas and the reality of building a company, including understanding how startups work, internalizing the culture of a startup and getting the resources, including financial and legal, to actually turn an idea into a reality. 

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