Chris McCann

Venture capitalist, photographer, and coffee roaster.
Based in the SF Bay Area

Work

  • GP and co-founder of Race Capital, a seed-stage VC firm in Palo Alto focused on AI infrastructure, enterprise software, security, and developer tools

  • We lead early rounds, typically $4–6M, and work closely with technical founders from day one

  • Some companies we've backed: Databricks, Solana, Groq, GoodNotes, Vectara, and others

  • Previously at Greylock Partners, where I founded and ran the community program

  • Co-founded StartupDigest — one of the first curated tech newsletters, 1M+ subscribers across 550 cities, acquired by TechStars in 2012

  • Early advisor to the Thiel Fellowship and StartX at Stanford University

Photography

  • Started shooting in 2010

  • Named National Geographic Photographer of the Year in 2016

  • Led to exhibitions, commissions, and work that continues today. View work →

Coffee

  • Came to specialty coffee seriously a few years ago and haven't looked back

  • Roasting on a Roest L200 sample roaster, focused on light, expressive roasts that taste like the place they came from

  • Studying varieties, processing methods, and building direct relationships with producers

  • Drawn to roasters doing this well: Moonwake, Substance, Sey, Picky Chemist, Big Sur

  • Attending World of Coffee San Diego 2026 — always happy to connect with roasters and producers

Things I’m thinking about

  • Seed investing and coffee roasting share similar challenges: you have to make expensive, high-conviction bets with very little data, before most of the information exists. The difference is that a bad roast costs $40 and a week. A bad seed check costs $6-$10M and three years.

  • I've tried to turn my coffee practice into a system - measure, roast, cup, iterate, repeat. What I've learned is that any closed loop system will eventually get stuck. You reach a local maximum and can't see past it without an outside signal. I had to taste the same coffee at Moonwake to understand what I was actually optimizing toward. Seed investing has the same problem and the stakes for getting it wrong are much higher.

  • Building a firm is harder than building a system. Systems are repeatable. Seed investing at its best is a gut skill built on pattern recognition that's hard to teach and hard to verify until years later. Figuring out how to scale that without losing what makes it work is what I'm working on now.