VC Spotlight: Dorothy Chang, Venture Partner, Flybridge Capital Partners
Dorothy Chang, Venture Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, knows a thing or two about storytelling. As you’ll learn below, her career started at a tech PR agency and has included a number of stops in comms and marketing roles while working with startups.
So it may come as no surprise that one of the key elements she looks for in founders is whether they can tell a good story. “Great storytelling can make an unbelievable difference for a startup’s trajectory,” she told us.
Dorothy is also the cofounder of Lynx Collective, which connects NYC founders, investors, and the startup ecosystem through events and insights shared in its weekly newsletter. Connecting startup founders looking for knowledge sharing opportunities with investors who want to meet the next great entrepreneur, is, as Dorothy says, a “win-win.”
We caught up with Dorothy to discuss her career, how the NYC startup ecosystem has evolved over the last decade, her efforts to cultivate the NYC startup community, and much more.
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Where did your career start?
Dorothy: On 17th street at a tech PR agency representing IBM. A couple years in, I started working with startups and never looked back. Since then I’ve run communications at Foursquare, led marketing at Paxos, co-founded the first VC fund fully focused on blockchain (Liberty City Ventures), and brought the startup mindset to grow the coding nonprofit Kode With Klossy.
You joined Flybridge in 2024 — what was the catalyst?
I was back in the startup world building Lynx Collective as a community that connects early stage founders and aspiring founders with the people and resources they need to be successful.
At the same time, I took on a side gig as a partner at Flybridge’s pre-seed fund Next Wave NYC, investing in pre-seed AI startups in NYC. All of the work meshed quite well and I found myself working more and more closely with the Flybridge team; it all came together naturally and I joined Flybridge full-time at the end of 2024.
What stage do you invest at and what’s your average check size?
Flybridge’s main fund is a seed stage fund; we typically write 8-10 checks a year that are $1.5-3M. We also have a few pre-seed funds like Next Wave NYC and XFactor Ventures — overall we write 40+ pre-seed checks a year at $50k-$150k.
We are always looking for extremely ambitious founders who think a bit differently about the world and are highly driven to change it. We love getting involved at the very earliest stages and no idea is too crazy or early for us to consider.
You’re also the cofounder of Lynx Collective. How has your experience with Lynx Collective influenced your perspective on supporting early-stage founders in the NYC startup ecosystem?
Through Lynx Collective, I’ve gotten a closer sense of what very early stage startups need in this day and age. With AI accelerating everything, founders are expected to be able to build more and make more traction than ever, before they raise their first dollar. That can be pretty daunting for founders who are building businesses for the first time in this era, or without insider connections.
So there is a strong need for community, for knowledge-sharing about company-building and fundraising, understanding the expectations and how it all works. On the flip side, investors are hungry to meet founders and find the diamonds in the rough. So connecting investors and founders is a win-win for everyone.
You’ve spent a large part of your career in communications and marketing. How has that background shaped your approach to evaluating and supporting startups?
I had an a-ha moment when I was working for Brooke Hammerling at her boutique PR agency BrewPR. Our client roster would have made an incredible VC portfolio — we had startup clients that were acquired by Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter, PayPal, and more within just two years. We were in a fortunate position to have a long client waitlist and folks pitching us to represent them all the time — so we developed a strong filter for evaluating them. We looked at whether founders had the potential to tell a newsworthy, compelling story about themselves and their businesses — and if there was room for us to add value. This turned out to be a great filter. Even “boring” businesses can do incredible things if their leadership is able to ignite interest.
Besides storytelling, there are a lot of other fundamentals that a great business must have in place. But great storytelling can make an unbelievable difference for a startup’s trajectory. As an investor today, great storytelling is something that I want to see in my founders, and it’s a special something I can provide specific guidance on to help them succeed.
Having been deeply involved in the NYC startup scene, how have you seen the ecosystem evolve over the last decade, and where do you think the biggest opportunities lie today?
The ecosystem has absolutely exploded and grown so much — it’s awesome to see people coming from all different walks of life recognizing that they can create something new and that New York is a great place to do it.
These days, AI makes it easier than ever to build a prototype, or even a full product. So technical skills are actually starting to become commoditized. Now, exceptional technical talent will still be incredibly valuable within very technically complex and innovative startups. But there is now far more room for business model innovation to spur on a new generation of startups that apply the latest AI technology to business use cases. This is far more possible for non-technical founders today than ever before.
This is particularly interesting in NYC which tends to index higher on non-technical founders (as compared to the Bay Area).
So there are tons of opportunities in every sector that people can now go after. NYC continues to have the huge advantage of having representation across many different industries and verticals. If you’re building in New York, it’s likely that your end customer is here and you can easily reach them and build for them.
What’s the most common mistake you see founders make when pitching to investors?
Founders today need to recognize that AI makes it easy for everybody to build everything. When they pitch, they really need to show that they’re building a venture-scale business, and why they might win.
A lot of people are utilizing AI in brilliant ways that work for them — but that’s not the same thing as building a tech startup. It’s like back in the day, launching a dotcom wasn’t the same thing as a startup. Sometimes it was just a website. Today, sometimes, it’s just an AI bot or an agent — that’s not the same thing as a venture-scale business.
So founders can’t just apply chatbots to a business application and call that a startup. They have to truly re-imagine work and tackle a huge market with something new that people actually want… and they have to beat their competition to it.
They should assume that there are 50 other teams with just as much sector experience building the same thing, and there isn’t room for 50 winners. Founders have to be honest with themselves about whether they have a true advantage — whether it’s proprietary data, deep customer connections, differentiated insights, an innovative angle that’s impossible to replicate, a killer go-to-market motion that no one else can touch, a vision for why this approach will continue to win 5, 10, 20 years down the road.
What’s an investment from the last 12 months you’re especially excited about?
There are so many we haven’t announced yet that I wish we could also talk about! What I can talk about: Covenant is taking a really focused approach to legal AI by focusing specifically on private markets, that’s an investment we made out of our main fund. Out of Next Wave NYC, CivicReach is applying the best of AI-powered customer service to local governments and Hopscotch Labs’ Beebot is Dennis Crowley’s latest startup in the location space, with audio as the main interface. There is so much creative innovation and we’re excited about what’s being built for developers, businesses and consumers.
What are some of the top resources you recommend for founders starting out?
The Experimentation Machine is a great book written by my partner Jeff Bussgang that helps founders to figure out how to use today’s AI tools to find product-market fit.
If you’re not immersed in the startup world yet, I think it’s super helpful to meet other founders — whether through communities like mine (Lynx Collective) — or other great ones like nextNYC and South Park Commons.
There is so much information readily available out there. Read newsletters and blogs from top VCs, follow USV’s librarian on X, listen to Heidi Roizen’s Startup Solution podcast, Rob Go’s Idea Maze, Reid Hoffman’s Masters of Scale. There’s endless content, so limit your consumption to what is actually saving you time. Spend most of your time just building, you’ll learn so much more that way!
What’s your favorite or most frequently used AI tool?
I default to ChatGPT for a lot; when I want quick answers that are going to be a bit deeper, more informed, more customized to me than Google. I love using deep research for when I want to understand something more complex. By the way, I only use AI for editing my writing, not creating it from scratch; I’m too particular about my writing.
I also use Originalis (a portco) for more specific VC work, like investment analyses.
You have a founder or LP in from out of town… where are you taking them?
Lately, I like Olle for slightly elevated Korean food, La Dong for hot pho on a cold day. For fancy sushi, I like Sushi Nakazawa. And for private dining experiences, Blackbarn’s cellar is terrific for standard American fare, I love the Korean-Chinese restaurant Octo, or Piggyback for more casual Southeast Asian food.
Choose one: power breakfast, power lunch, or work dinner. Where?
It’s a power lunch for me. I have kids and live in New Jersey, so I try not to let work take up those specific hours that I treasure with my family. My go-to is abc kitchen - there’s something for everyone, it’s delicious and somehow there’s always a table available.
And finally… what’s the best slice of pizza in NYC?
I’m going to add to the controversial claim the New York Times once made that the best pizza in NYC is actually in New Jersey, when it named Razza as the winner. Well before opening up Razza, the owner had co-founded Arturo’s, which is now Artie’s, in Maplewood, NJ, and there is no pizza I enjoy more. The special pizzas feature local ingredients that change with the seasons — incredibly fresh zucchini, corn, ramps. Come visit me in New Jersey and I’ll take you there!
