The founding problem was a bill. Eric Hatzimemos and Oliver Libby were working with young companies that needed strategic advice and could not afford conventional consulting fees. They accepted equity for their help. It was a practical accommodation with a larger possibility inside it: if the advisers owned a stake, their relationship with the business could extend beyond the assignment. The invoice had become an invitation to stay.
In 2009, they co-founded H/L Ventures. Hatzimemos is its chairman and CEO; Libby is its co-founding managing partner. Their company-building approach places sustained involvement alongside investment. The interesting part of the arrangement is what happens between the conspicuous occasions: the founding announcement, the funding round, the exit. A business has to get through Tuesday, too.
Hatzimemos came to this work by a route that included Brooklyn prosecution, New York City government, public pension funds and corporate advice. The sequence gives his venture career a particular texture. Before helping young companies find their footing, he had worked inside institutions with obligations already attached. Those earlier jobs belong in the story, even when they do not fit neatly on a venture-capital slide.
A lawyer’s route through the city
Hatzimemos earned a bachelor’s degree at City College of the City University of New York in 1989 and a law degree at New York Law School in 1992. He was admitted to the New York bar in 1993. His education began locally, and much of his early professional life remained tied to the city. Brooklyn was a place where he would serve as an assistant district attorney.
His public-service roles widened from there. He became New York City’s assistant criminal justice coordinator and then assistant counsel to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. He also represented the mayor on the boards of trustees of the city’s police and fire pension funds. Criminal justice, legal advice and pension oversight sit in different administrative compartments. In his career, they appear next to one another.
Consider the change in scale those responsibilities imply. A prosecutor works within a legal process. A mayor’s counsel deals with an administration whose decisions reach across departments. Pension boards bring investment decisions into the lives of public employees. It is a professional history that crosses the boundary between public authority and financial stewardship well before the words “venture studio” enter the picture.
He later completed executive-level coursework in private equity, pension management and investment management at Wharton and Harvard Business School. Those courses are worth distinguishing from his degrees. They add a financial strand to an education grounded in law, without requiring the biography to acquire a ceremonial collection of extra diplomas.
A deadline that could not slip
On September 11, 2001, Hatzimemos was working at City Hall. In his later account, the first impact shook his office. He and colleagues went outside, saw the burning tower and headed toward the site. These were events he would continue discussing publicly many years after leaving municipal government.
During the following days, one of his responsibilities was helping reopen the New York Stock Exchange. The goal was Monday morning, September 17. Getting there involved coordination around buildings, electrical power, transport and the people required to resume operations. A market opening is a precise event. The work that makes it possible spreads across many institutions.
“Everybody did their job and you didn’t think about it.”
Eric Hatzimemos, recalling the work after September 11
That recollection puts the emphasis on people doing their assigned work. It leaves little room for the tidy retrospective in which one individual carries an entire city. Hatzimemos described a collective effort, with separate tasks contributing to an outcome that mattered far beyond the exchange itself. The date was fixed; the coordination had to be made to work.
There is no need to turn this experience into a convenient explanation for every later business decision. It has its own weight. It also establishes something concrete about his professional background: before entering venture building, he had participated in work where the ability of institutions to operate was an immediate public concern.
The fee problem that became a firm
His private-sector career included managing-director work at Giuliani Partners, which he co-founded in early 2002, and a senior-director role at Greenberg Traurig. At the law firm, he advised leadership on firm development. These were advisory positions concerned with organizations and their direction, rather than a conventional progression through venture investment jobs.
The move toward H/L came through work with Libby. Their experience of accepting equity from companies that could not pay standard fees gave them a way to think about an enduring business relationship. They founded the firm during the aftermath of the global financial crisis. The timing belongs to the history; the useful detail is the problem they were trying to solve.
Advice paid for by the hour has a natural stopping point. Equity introduces a different horizon. It gives an adviser a continuing financial interest in what the company becomes. The H/L founders organized their firm around continuing to help build companies, drawing on strategic assistance and professional connections as well as money.
Today the firm describes four arms. The studio works with founders at the early stages. CityRock Ventures supplies growth investment. CityRock Private Credit offers another financing path within the ecosystem. H/L Strategies provides selected corporate advisory services. The organization accommodates several kinds of need instead of assuming that every company is asking the same question.
In July 2024, H/L announced the close of CityRock Venture Partners Fund II at $24 million. That figure concerns the fund. It gives a dated measure of one part of the platform Hatzimemos helped create, while the studio and advisory activities explain why the firm’s story extends beyond any single pool of capital.
A partnership with room to disagree
Hatzimemos and Libby’s partnership predates H/L. In an endorsement of Libby’s book, Strong Floor, No Ceiling, Hatzimemos said they had worked together for more than twenty years. He described a relationship encompassing partner, colleague and friend. A firm founded in 2009 thus sits within a longer working association.
The endorsement contains a small, revealing qualification: Hatzimemos did not agree with every policy Libby recommended. He supported the broader aim of government that works for everyone. It is a useful glimpse of their relationship because a disagreement survives inside the compliment. Partnership does not require the two people to become copies of one another.
Libby has, in turn, publicly described Hatzimemos as his mentor and friend. His account of their shared beginnings emphasizes the satisfaction of working with people to grow companies. The two accounts meet around a sustained professional relationship, with enough room for an individual point of view.
That is relevant to a business organized around long engagement. The co-founders themselves have remained in a working partnership across a substantial period. It provides a concrete example of duration, though it should not be mistaken for evidence that every company they support will succeed. Duration makes a relationship observable. Outcomes require their own accounting.
The systems outside the portfolio
Some of Hatzimemos’s affiliations keep the public-institutional strand visible. He serves on the advisory board of New York Law School’s Center for New York City Law, returning to the school where he earned his legal degree. He also serves on the advisory board of Protect Our Power, a nonpartisan effort focused on strengthening the nation’s electrical grid.
The grid panel brings together expertise from the power industry, physical and cyber defense, finance and government. Its subject is infrastructure that people generally notice most when it stops working. For a biography that includes municipal responsibilities and investment, the affiliation adds another specific setting where technical systems and institutional decisions meet.
He is also a board member of the Resolution Project, a global youth leadership development nonprofit. This is a separate responsibility from his venture firm. It places young social entrepreneurs within the range of people and organizations he supports, and gives the profile a nonprofit chapter alongside its commercial one.
Then there is film. Pollack Films lists him as special advisor to its chairman. The 2025 Tribeca Festival credits him among the executive producers of Watch Over Us, directed by Carlos Garcia de Dios. The documentary had its world premiere at the festival. Its credit list puts Hatzimemos in a different kind of company-building scene: the people behind a completed screen project.
A film credit should be allowed to remain a film credit. It neither makes him the director nor explains his entire relationship to the arts. But it is a documented detail that complicates the shorthand of “venture investor.” The same professional biography reaches into a law school, an infrastructure advisory panel, a youth nonprofit and a film organization.
Back to the public conversation
In June 2026, Hatzimemos joined SNF co-president Andreas Dracopoulos at SNF Nostos for The US at 250. The session paired America’s 250th anniversary with reflection on the 25th anniversary of September 11. Hatzimemos spoke about his experience working in New York City government during the attacks. The subject of his earlier career was still part of his public life.
“I’ve never seen courage like that.”
Eric Hatzimemos on first responders, SNF Nostos 2026
The remark returns attention to the people he had seen respond. Across the years separating City Hall from the venture firm, that public memory remained something he could bring to a conversation. His current job title introduces him; it does not exhaust the experiences for which he is invited to speak.
The beginnings of H/L offer a smaller scene to set beside it: two advisers, young companies, fees beyond reach, and an agreement to take equity. From that arrangement came a firm organized around staying involved. The career has several conspicuous milestones. Its most useful question concerns the intervals: once people have agreed on an ambition, who remains available to help with the work?