Principal Alayzain Rizavi Joins Ridge Ventures
Ridge Ventures is kicking off Q4, and spooky season, with some scary-good news: we’re adding Zain Rizavi to our team as Principal!
Zain joins The Ridge Familia after a stint at Pelion Venture Partners, an early-stage firm based in his home state of Utah. At Pelion, Zain sourced and partnered with a wide array of enterprise startups, including Harmonic Labs (startup database), Open Raven (cloud security), Macrometa (edge computing), and Presidio Identity (identity fraud), as well as B2C companies like Yendo (credit platform). With investments like these under his belt, Zain knows what gets us amped — Seed and early Series A stage, founders oozing with domain expertise and pathfinding towards product-market fit.
Zain’s path to VC was all hustle, smarts, and good old-fashioned elbow grease. During his senior year at The University of Utah, where he majored in Political Science, Zain axed his law school plans — sorry, Mom and Dad — and caught the venture bug after interning at Pelion, a position that dovetailed into a Special Projects role at a then-upstart Cloudflare (~400 employees). After three illuminating years of corporate development work at Cloudflare, where Zain contributed to the Bandwidth Alliance, Analytics Partner Program, and Cloudflare for Teams, among other initiatives, he landed his first full-time investment position.
Two years later, Zain is bringing his endless curiosity, empathy, and impact-driven approach to Ridge. His character and track record are emblematic of Ridge’s values: a champion of early-stage enterprise founders who’s passionate about massively innovative solutions and the equally impressive people behind them. We’re thrilled to have Zain on our team, and know his insights will be greatly beneficial as we seek out the next generation of companies changing the world through data and code.
(Zain, an avid cyclist and former rugby player, isn’t too skilled on the slopes, but we’ll get him up to speed at our next ski summit.)
Feel free to drop Zain a line. He’s enamored with all things cloud: networking, edge computing, infrastructure, security, you name it.
Welcome aboard, Zain!
