HWS News
8 April 2026 • Alums Where Ideas Become Reality — and Opportunity Gives Back
AI Venture Exec Adam Chaput ’07 applies his approach to building tech startups to supporting HWS students.
Adam Chaput ’07 has made a career out of turning business ideas into reality. At Boston-based Stackpoint Ventures, he builds AI technology startups and connects them with the infrastructure and capital needed to bring their products to market — often within six to nine months.
He started his career in product development more than 20 years ago at Yahoo! where global business leader and former Yahoo! Chief Operating Officer Dan Rosensweig ’83 brought him to intern. Chaput was hired full time after graduation and proceeded to help generate more than $1 billion in revenues building new products and leading operations for Yahoo!’s flagship media businesses. He later went on to Boston-based housewares e-retailer Wayfair, where Chaput helped drive $10 billion in growth over seven years leading product development across their portfolio.
His work at all three businesses sits at the intersection of creativity, collaboration and a found comfort with uncertainty, a mindset he traces back to his liberal arts education at Hobart and William Smith.
“You have to get comfortable with the uncomfortable,” he says. The lesson he repeats to company founders at Stackpoint today is the same one he shared in 2006 as Student Trustee when addressing first-year students during Convocation.
“If you learn how to think in the classroom, where do you learn how to “do?” To truly test yourself and find your strengths and weaknesses, you must become comfortable with the uncomfortable,” he recalls.
During that address, Chaput also described the privilege of a college education and witnessed the impact of philanthropy. For years he assumed giving would come later in life, but conversations with his wife, Atsuko Chaput — a successful entrepreneur herself — led the couple to act sooner.
“We did some reflecting last year and thought, ‘What about the students who need help right now?’”
In response, the Chaput family committed $25,000 over the next five years to a named Annual Fund scholarship.
“As a family, we wanted to engage more thoughtfully, because the students there now might someday be my colleagues,” Chaput says. “I want to be a part of that. And if they are looking for professional support when they graduate, I want to be able to provide it — I'm not removed: I’m still actively in it.”
The studio model at Stackpoint emphasizes hands-on teamwork: listening carefully, asking the right questions and solving problems from multiple angles. “It’s about using your whole wealth of knowledge,” he says.
That mindset, Chaput says, was shaped at HWS, where he studied public policy, Asian languages and cultures, English and theater. Writing, storytelling and cultural awareness, he says, have proven just as important as technical expertise: while technology moves fast, people still have to creatively problem-solve together.
“You’re helping engineers, designers and business teams understand a vision — why something matters, who it’s for and where it’s going,” says Chaput, who is eager to support students as they take on the uncertainty and risk of their early journeys.
“It’s about investing in people,” he says. “You never know what they’ll build next.”
Top: Adam and Atsuko Chaput with their daughter Leina
