01: Ryan Hoover (Weekend Fund) | "101 Guide For Emerging Fund Managers" | 1947 VC

You know, at the end of the day, you know, it's power law. So it's like going to be one company, two companies that really, you know, drives a majority of the returns. And we wanted to have enough shots at bat to find those companies. And maybe the best example of that in our first fund is a $75,000 check in deal in their first round, or rather their seed round. I guess technically the YC was their first round. And that of course paid off tremendously and represents, you know, I don't know the exact percentage, but well over 95% of weekend fund one's like portfolio value or maybe 90%. I don't know the exact number, but a lot. And that's just how venture works.

Today. We had Ryan hoover on the 1947 VC podcast. Ryan is the founder of Weekend Fund. Weekend Fund is an early stage fund that writes 100k to 300k, checks into early stage startups around the world across consumer and B2B. Weekend Fund helps with product community building and GTM strategy. Alongside an LP collective of 350 exceptional founders and operators. Ryan also founded Product Hunt. We covered a wide range of topics such as how did Ryan get into angel investing? What led him to start the Weekend Fund, the importance of portfolio construction, how to model the fund, how to source LPs, raise capital from LPs, what are LPs looking for when investing in fund manager managers, portfolio management, when to do the first close. Who is Ryan outside of work and a lot more. Now I bring you the one and only Ryan Hoover. Ryan, welcome to the show.

How's it going, Shiva?

Good man. I'm very, very excited to host you. I think a good starting point would be, Ryan, how did you first get into angel investing? What made you start Weekend Fund? What was the thought process like?

Well, technically the first check I wrote was actually not an angel investment, but a fund investment. So a little bit unusual. A lot of people start angel investing with their own capital and then eventually maybe do SPVs, maybe raise a fund. I actually didn't do that for a number of reasons. Long story short was running Product Hunt and we actually had sort of a policy pre acquisition of essentially teammates shouldn't be investing. Generally. It wasn't the most strict policy in the world. But for me, particularly as a CEO, I felt like that would be a potential signaling issue or perceived signaling issue or risk. Particularly at that time too when there are a lot fewer CEOs and kind of operators actively investing in. I decided not to do any investing. I also didn't have much personal capital anyway, so I didn't really have many, many opportunities to do so. But long story short, after the acquisition with AngelList, it. It actually made a lot of sense to invest in some ways partly for my own personal kind of like learning and, and exploration. But also being with an angellist is actually a very cultural component. As you know, a lot of people who are at Angel List invest and that creates a lot more, I'd say, like empathy or understanding of like customer they're serving. So ended up raising weekend fund back in 2017 right when AngelList was releasing and kind of rolling out their funds product, you know, that was a $3 million fund, very small and that, that was my first check was was investing out of the fund actually got it.

And Ryan, you know, when you were starting around doing weekend fund, how did you go about portfolio construction? You know, how big the fund side should be, what kind of check sizes you should be writing? Lead follow on. Would love to, you know, sort of like walk us through your thought process.

Yeah, I mean it's been so the first fund, you know, I started off, you know, as I mentioned, many people weren't raising funds actually back then 2017, it was, you know, a lot less common than you see today, partly because the tooling wasn't there. AngelList really made it a lot more accessible and, you know, abstracted a lot of the complexity and like, you know, all the things that nobody wants to do, like the back office setup and accounting and legal and all that stuff. And, and so now we see a lot more people investing. But at the time I was like, I don't know how much I could raise. Like, will anybody give me money? So my target was $1 million. I was like, I'm going to raise a $1 million fund which is, you know, obviously very tiny in the world of funds. And to my, I guess, surprise and delight, I, you know, I reached out to product investors, people I'd known for a long time, and that million dollars grew to $3 million, which still very, very small but you know, reached that goal. And at the time, anything within that range $3 million, even sub 10 million dol the difficulty in getting into deals, meaning the check sizes can be relatively small, yet still very meaningful for the fund. And so from a portfolio construction perspective, I did have some criteria and decisions that I made at the time. One was I wanted to be more diversified fund. I didn't want to be super concentrated. I did not want to lead deals, partly because I believe if I'm Thinking about the fund like a product, like I'm selling a product to a founder. Many ways I think it's actually better to deploy capital that's meaningful for the fund but still leave plenty of room for other people and other co investors and become more of a collaborative player. That also for us allows us to be, you know, attracts more deal flow from other investors. You know, because we are not elbowing other people out of a round. We're actually want to bring deals to other friends and they do the same, you know, in reciprocation. So didn't want to be a lead. We want to have a more diversified fund. At the same time we knew that we didn't want to invest in like a hundred companies in like a two year time period. Partly that decision was driven by just reality. To invest in 100 companies in two years, you need to talk to a lot of companies. And especially at the time I was still leading product and I was still CEO of the company. And so I wasn't necessarily full time on the investing side. So that was another component. Is okay, what's the right number? And did some research on at the end of the day it's power law. So it's going to be one company, two companies that really drives a majority of the returns. And we wanted to have enough shots at bat to find those companies. And maybe the best example of that in our first fund is a $75,000 check and deal in their first round, or rather their seed round I guess technically the YC was their first round. And that of course paid off tremendously and represents I don't know the exact percentage, but well over 95% of we can fund one's portfolio value or maybe 90%. I don't know the exact number, but a lot. And that's just how venture works. So that's a long, long answer to your question and a little bit roundabout. But yeah, we're very much non lead diversified and trying to write small enough checks that are still meaningful for the fund so that we can be collaborative.

Got it. And Ryan, has your portfolio construction evolved from Fund 1 to 2 and 3? If it did, what was the thought process around it?

Slightly. We've continued to play the same game, meaning there's different games to play in ventures. So the most obvious is are you a follow on collaborative investor or are you a lead? Like that's a big decision. Once you're a lead, you're now playing a very different game. You're usually the one single player who's competing for that lead position, you also come with a little bit more strings attached, meaning if the lead is not doing their pro route in the next round, like that can be a signaling issue. That can actually be also a really challenging relationship dynamic to manage. So there's, there's other things to, to take into consideration if you're playing that type of game. And so for us, we've always played the same game in the sense that we've always been collaborative. And while the fund size has increased, we went for 3 million, the first fund, second fund was 10, our latest 21. We may actually not ever raise a larger fund than this, at least for first checks into two companies. Partly because our fund, our check size, once it gets to, it's always subjective. Once it gets to over a half a million dollars that you have to deploy now, you're, you're getting into a position where you need to be earlier in the conversation, usually with the founder, and make sure that you can, you know, deploy that capital soon enough in their fundraise process. If you're meeting them when they're 90%, you know, committed, good luck trying to fit a half a million dollar check in there. You may then have to be the one cramming people down. And I just don't want to be in that position if I can help it. And so we want to keep the funds still relatively small, but we're, we're very much playing the same game. I would say there's, there's some strategic things that we have changed slightly. I haven't shared this actually, but in, in, you know, about two years ago when we were planning Weekend fund three, our current fund, so planning maybe six months or so before like the actual raise, and maybe this is actually two and a half years ago when we were first talking about this, the market was not at the time, not as bull as it was like 18 months ago. Valuations, although they had increased, weren't crazy. And we had a strategy around actually finding very ambitious and early founders, like pre founder individuals, and did a lot of research in like the Thiel Fellowship and some other similar types of models to try to understand like hypothetically, what would an investment portfolio look like if we were investing in people before they left their company, before they even started, you know, their startup, and could we do so at like meaning like good entry prices? Long story short, we had a whole fund model that was like a separate pool of capital specifically designed for small checks into very, very, very early founders. And we ended up scrapping that strategy entirely. And it was Driven partially because the market got so frothy and it became very difficult for us to frankly sell a founder to take hypothetically 100k check at a $2 million valuation or even a $1 million valuation. Anything over 2 million made the model very difficult, difficult to actually work because we had an assumption around higher failure rates. So therefore we need lower entry prices and we also need to do so at a high enough volume to reach at least enough people to catch, you know, the next deal, theoretically. And so anyway, I share that more as an example of like, we had some ideas but the market shifted and that really shifted our, I think, ability to execute on that model. And we scrapped that strategy entirely.

I keep noticing that, you know, you've been tinkering around a few ideas here and there. I think we can get to those ideas in a bit. But before that, Ryan, now you know that you want to do a fund, you got your portfolio construction in place, now it's about time to fundraise. Can you maybe walk us through the fundraising process? Meaning how did you source LPs, how do you build relationships with them? And what types of LPs do you reach out to? And what kind of deck would close those LPs?

Yeah, so there's. I talked to somebody last week about this. We've had a lot of friends and just acquaintances, you know, asking for advice on how to fundraise and the fundraise process. I break it into three categories of people that we reach out to and in this actual sequence as well. So step one is people in your network that you know that you trust, that trust you. These could be high net worth individuals, it could be other funds, it could be maybe family offices that you have a connection to already. And that's a good place to start because especially in the beginning when you don't have social proof, when you've raised $0, it's harder and harder to get other people to come on board. So having more momentum and more capital committed and hopefully for some, some people that have some strong reputations can be helpful. So it's like one people in your network, some of it's very tactical, like create a spreadsheet, look through your LinkedIn, Twitter lists, like emails, like everything, just brain dump all the possible people that might be a good fit. And then there's a lot of nuances and how to actually, you know, reach out to them and, you know, ask for money essentially, which we could talk about if useful. But that's step one and sort of category one. And then once You've had, once you've kind of exhausted that network, which most people do pretty quickly, you're rarely will you actually raise your entire fund from your first degree network. You usually going to have to go outside of that. The next step is to ask those people who were LPs or who are LPs now for recommendations. And there's, there's ways to do that if you just say, hey, can you introduce me to somebody else that might invest? Like that's a little difficult. Like it's always easier to answer a question that's very specific. And so the way that we approached it was, hey, Bob. Bob is, let's say, is someone who I know who's investing in the fund. Hey Bob, can you introduce me to, you know, one or two other people that might be potential LPs? I'm looking for people that are like XYZ, like kind of give some sort of criteria to give inspiration essentially for people that they could think of. And here's a blurb you can send if you want, just forward this email directly to them. Basically you want to decrease the friction to make it easy for them to take that action. And what we found is like really good results for a few reasons. Like one, these people are already investing, they're already committed, they already have some sort of confidence. And so, you know, why would they not want to bring in, you know, other people or friends? And, and two, they're going to be the best recommenders. Like the people who are investing in a round are always the best referrals. So we got, I wish to map out the actual numbers on this, but most of those people introduced us to one to three other LPs and then well over 50% of those people that we had meetings with then converted. So it was almost like I joke that there's like an LPK factor. Like for every LP you get, it introduces X number of other LPs and it results in of course, a lot of meetings, a lot of emails. But that's fundraising, you know. So anyway, that's category two and then category three we did in Weekend Fund three. So we did not do this in Weekend Fund one or two. But category three is what we call like a community race. So we already had majority of the fund raised, I think 18 or 19 million. We were targeting 20 million for this latest fund. And we structured the fund as a 506C so we could talk about it publicly. And we opened up applications, essentially said, hey, if you want to invest, I think between 2000 to $10,000 LP check. So we actually capped it at $10,000 is the maximum check size. You know, apply here, enter your information. And it was more like here's your LinkedIn, here's who you are, just high level information. And our goal with that was, was not necessarily to raise money. We already basically reached our target, but it was really to build more this network of strong operators and founders as LPs who could be a source of deal flow, could help the portfolio, who could help with diligence. And we got, I think it was around 700 or so accredited investors apply to invest. And we did have some limits of course in the number of people we could take. So we took 180 of those people, bringing our total count of LPs to about 370 in this latest fund. And that's been great. It's been very helpful and effective and having this kind of army of operators and founders on board.

Yeah, got it Ryan. And you know, are there any, I would say essentially for your first fund you're really selling a story. And let's say if you have a portfolio of companies and it adds weight to that story, how's the, any tips or advice that you would give? And emerging fund managers pitching to LPs what to include in their deck?

Yeah, I mentioned earlier we had a lot of people reaching out saying hey Ryan, Vedica, who works with me on the fun side as well, they'd asked her as well, like hey, do you have any advice on fundraising, on LP communications, all these things. So we started a newsletter called Signature Block to answer some of these questions. And we actually did one post on basically decks, like what to put in your deck. And we got crowdsourced a bunch of information and decks from other fund managers. So anyway, there's a post that goes in more detail than I could describe here. But I mean some of it's the basics. I mean obviously like who are you? What is your focus? What is your fund construction strategy? What's your track record? If you have an angel background, what have you invested in? What are the results of those investments? A lot of what LPs now I should actually say different. LPs have different. They're looking for different things. Just like an investor investing in a startup, sometimes they have more bias towards team or product or market. Some LPs have a different bias towards different things. The more institutional kind of investors tend to ask more questions around portfolio construction and mechanics. And like, is this a, are you doing this as a one off fund? Are you building a franchise? Is this like a multi decade like career that you want to pursue whereas your high net worth, you know, individual might not even ask any questions about that. They might be looking more for, you know, what's your neat focus or strategy, you know, to win great deals. So yeah, there's a lot of the post I mentioned will go into more detail and if anyone's listening, yeah, just go to SignatureBlock Co and you'll find more there. But I think the biggest thing is figuring out how you're going to get access to the best deals and how you judge those investments. I think is the through line that everyone's going to be asking for. Partly because there's so many companies out there and there's so many funds and so many investors and so a lot of it's like around the differentiation and what makes you unique essentially.

Got it. And also Ryan, how, you know, how have you positioned yourself? There's so many funds in the US now. Right. You know, here's why NLP should be investing. This is our differentiated, unique, unique value proposition that we have.

Yeah, yeah. This goes back to actually the follow on or collaborative investor versus lead investor kind of piece. So we think about it like a founder is essentially selling equity for something and the equity is there's a certain number, is it 1%, 2%, 3%, 10%. And essentially if you think about it, hopefully they're getting their money's worth in a way. And so if you're selling 10% of the company, you better deliver like 10% or more equity value as an investor. If you're selling 1%, maybe the bar is lower. So that's not to say that we're writing small checks so that we don't have to deliver 10% of equity value or a lot of value but we want to be positioned where we can provide a lot more value than the equity that they're giving up essentially and, and then do so with a bunch of other investors that in aggregate can provide a lot of value. So a lot of the way that we approach it is, you know, our, our experiences in, in by our, it's Vedic and myself comes from a product background. She was in the FinTech B2B space stripe and true layer. Mine is more consumer used to work in the gaming industry and the product hunt and both of us come from a kind of a product lens. And then the other area that we have more operational experience is in the community building side. So we talked to founders and we're like okay, we, if you want to ask us questions and jam on, you know, product or community building. Like that's, that's where we have confidence that we can help and support, especially in the earliest stages when all those things are being defined. But if it's in enterprise sales or if you need advice on data science, architecture or, you name it, anything outside of those areas, we actually Defer to our LPs and this is why we raised from so many people. So if it's, you know, enterprise sales related conversation, maybe I'll, I'll connect with them with Armando Mann, who's One of our LPs, he did this at Dropbox and Google and Hoppin. If it's data science related. Abe Othman, head of data science at Angellist is one of our LPs and a collaborator of ours. And so there's, there's people in our network that we, and route them to. And the beauty of this model is that it allows us to also scale, well, scale beyond our own skill set, but also scale beyond our own time to some extent as well. And our LPs, you know, implicitly they sort of sign up. It's not like we put them to work every week or even every month, but as an lp, they have a financial interest in the portfolio succeeding and also hopefully an emotional like interest in supporting as well, whether it's supporting the fund or supporting just early stage founders in general. So we think of ourselves very much as, you know, hopefully a high ROI check for the high ROI investment. Think about it like, founders are also investing to some extent compared to like the value that we're providing so. Or the equity that we're taking. There's a lot more I could say there in our pitch and like it helps to be, you know, founder of Product Tent, where it's like an open, warm conversation. People know of me a little bit and hopefully I don't think I'm like some random psycho on the Internet, but it makes the initial conversations warm generally.

Got it, got. One of the unique things is, you know, the high value per dollar is, you know, what you're offering there and Right. What are the nuances that you've seen? You know, maybe one that I faced was okay, when to start investing, meaning should we close the fund, the, you know, the first close of the fund, let's say 25, 30 and then start investing. What are your thoughts around that?

I was talking to a friend of mine who started this fundraise, I want to say a year, a little bit over a year ago basically as the market was getting much more challenging and you know, he's making progress, but I think he Maybe only had 10 or 20% of the fund raised and committed so far. He's asking that same question, like, should I just start deploying or should I wait? I don't know what the right number is, to be honest. You certainly don't have to wait till 100% of the fund is raised to start deploying by any means. But let's just say that you hypothetically raised 10% of the fund and you have a certain portfolio construction in mind. Let's just say you raised 1 million of your $10 million fund target and you're writing 150k checks. Let's say, on average. The challenge with that is let's say that you, for whatever reason, can't raise the rest of the fund. And now you've essentially created a fund construction of six companies when your model actually accounted for 35 or 45 or something. That's the tricky part. So you do take a risk the earlier you start deploying capital. So, yeah, I don't know what the right number is. I think it's subjective, too. And how, how confident are you in getting to at least 50% of that goal within a reasonable timeframe? Maybe a good rule of thumb is not to start investing until you have at least 25% of the fund, you know, target raised. Now, you could technically start writing slightly smaller checks, but assuming you get to your fund target now, you have like this weird. It doesn't really match your full fund construction where now your earlier investments are like slightly smaller position size than the rest of them. So I don't know, it's a delicate.

Balance, I think, or maybe just, you know, start with a smaller fund size and then just keep figuring it out.

Yeah, you know, I'm glad you mentioned that because I, I've had some friends say, hey, I'm going to raise a $50 million for sons. And I have to be careful because I don't want to be disrespectful, you know, my feedback or input on, on what they're pursuing by any means. But a lot of the times I'm like, why are you raising such a big fund? I don't understand, like, if it's just you, what do you need such a large fund for if you're investing in early stage? And what you can always do is, of course, raise a smaller fund, deploy it over a couple years, and then raise your next fund to larger size. And why put yourself through, frankly, all that, those headaches, you know, Another component too that's important is if you're raising a $50 million fund, you need access to either one. You have to have good relationships with some deep pockets that can write 10 million dollar plus checks. Or you need to start going to the institutional investors. And those just take a long time. Those are long conversations. Typically they often want to talk to you and maybe invest in your second or third fund, not your first fund. So in some ways you're, you're spending more of your time fundraising when you could maybe raise a smaller fund and just start deploying capital now. And, and that's why we're doing this, right? Like we're not starting a fund to raise money from LPs, like it's a means to an end ultimately. So, yeah, I'm very much pro small funds personally for a bunch of reasons.

And Ryan, you know, when you're doing your first fund, you're reaching out to a lot of LPs and some of them end up saying no because that's how they function. They usually want to invest in fund two or fund three. So how do you keep the, you know, the conversation going? What are the tactics there?

Yeah, there's, there's a bunch of different ways you can do that. And I'll be honest, we don't, we haven't really prioritized or executed on keeping them warm, to be honest. It hasn't been a priority for us to do it proactively. We do it sort of implicitly and ad hoc basis, but the best way is actually adding them to your LP updates, honestly. So if you talk to some institutional LP who you know is not going to invest in until like, you know, fund two or three, you can ask them, hey, would you like to receive my LP updates? And you know, I'll add you to the distribution list. And I think it's probably the best way to do it because it's, you know, it gives them more data points, it allows them to see how you operate, how you communicate, and it doesn't cost you any more time or effort really. And so I think that can be a very valuable way to keep them warm, but also in a way that's like genuine. Of course, some of those LPs also like to catch up, you know, once every six months, every 12 months, and kind of get to know you as well. If it's a priority to, if your goal is to raise a much larger fund, then it should be a priority. For us, the reason why it hasn't been is because our goal is not to raise a massive fund. That may change in the future. That's probably the best way of doing it. I do recommend people have conversations with institutional LPs if they have an ability to, even though they know that they're probably not going to invest in the fund because you have to have that initial touch point. You need to start building that connection and that trust early on. Most of them, again, are just not going to invest until they've met you and seen kind of how you operate many months or maybe years prior to.

Got it. And let's assume, Ryan, we, you know, one is deploying out of their fund. One, they've, let's say, deployed, I don't know, 60, 70% of it. When is the right time to start raising for fund? Two, is there like, any frameworks one should have in mind?

Yeah, I mean, I guess it all comes down to, like, how, how quickly do you think you can raise the next fund? And that may change from today versus 18 months ago or, you know, 24 months ago when it was much easier to raise a fund. So I don't know. I think that's going to be different for each person. Some people, even in this environment, could raise, you know, in one month. They'll have majority of the commitments, you know, locked in and then maybe two months for like actual wires to come through. Especially for those that do more of a public raise, I find that to be, well, one, you just have access to a lot more LPs because you're publicly sharing it with the world. But it also creates a little bit more urgency for everyone who is committing or participating. It's like, like, okay, this fund is publicly out there. They have, you know, commitments coming in. I better write the check, you know, before I miss out. So it creates a little bit more urgency than your traditional fundraise process. Speaking for ourselves, like, we will probably start conversations somewhere between four and six months before we. Probably six months before we need more money to deploy. I feel like that's a safe number without extending it so far. Like, it doesn't make sense for us to start that like a year in advance, I don't think.

Got it. And Ryan, you are onto your fund. Three, you've been investing for some time now. What's something that you know now you wish you knew earlier?

There's like a bunch of things I could say. I'm trying to figure out the right thing to share. There's one thing which is so I haven't figured this out exactly, I'll be quite honest, is when to follow on when to double down. I find this, this topic is one of the most heavily debated and challenging decisions. I find there's certain funds on one spectrum who, whether it's doing pro rata or in between rounds, if they can, there's some that have zero reserves. Absolutely. As a rule of thumb, just never double down and try to deploy the largest check. In the beginning. We tend to err more on the side of we try to invest a large enough check where we assume that will never be able to invest another check in the round because if it's, if the company's really taking off as an early stage investor. This is one of the downsides of not being a lead investor is sometimes you, even if you have on paper pro rata legally, sometimes you don't in practice because you have a large fund coming in, leading the next round and then pressuring the founder to decrease everybody else's allocation to get a large enough stake in the company. And we don't want to be a difficult investor by not being flexible on some of those terms. So that can be challenging. Other challenges can come where this was especially true a few years ago. A lot of these companies were getting marked up 3 to 5x within less than 6 months. And the risk profile is relatively similar to our initial investment. And so we actually passed on some of those, those pro ratas or like, you know, opportunities to double down because we felt that it was just a much higher valuation and it just didn't make sense. We kind of think of it like, would we invest this company if we weren't investors today? Like in isolation and at that price? Not. No. But then there's the cases where if we double down in deals like Series A, which felt very expensive at the time, that would have, you know, I don't know the math but like theoretically would have been, well, many millions of dollars in additional, like money to our lp. So the hindsight will kill you. So I didn't answer your question because it's, it's a topic that I think is very nuanced and very difficult to figure out. Yeah, hindsight Will. Everyone's always like, oh, of course we should have doubled down on this company. But at the time, you have to remember, like the information you knew at that time was very different than the information you know now. And I think it's a very difficult decision to make for every investor.

Got it. And Ryan, you know, you've been thinking around few ideas, of course, you know, recently you've started, you know, posting market maps, you Have Signature Block and few other ideas, you know, must be, you know, going around in your head. What are you most excited about of late? And maybe you can talk about it.

Excited about in terms of venture tech or. Yeah, which.

Any of your projects.

Yeah, right now, I mean. So Signature Block right now we it's the most niche newsletter of all time in a sense, which I kind of like. It's not supposed to be big. We don't even have almost 9,000 subscribers. So it's not very many people. But if you think about it like these people are managing billions of dollars in aggregate. These are all mostly investors, some of their angels of course, but a lot of fund managers. And Signature Block's been great in that it's allowed us to create this communication channel with a large number of future or current co investors. And our goal is to create something that's content that's somewhat evergreen. And so hopefully the content that we're creating is valuable next year and 10 years in the future. And if you actually think about some of the inspiration was for venture hacks to some extent. So for those that don't, you know this, but those that don't know Venture Hacks was like the beginnings of angels essentially. So it was nivea naval sharing information for founders. And this is back at a time when there really wasn't a lot of educational content or information for founders and even basic stuff like what to look for in term sheets or how to pitch investors. We felt that there was a similar hole in the fund's ecosystem. There's a lot of information about investing, broadly speaking, but less so about managing and raising a fund. And also to be clear, we're definitely not experts. I've been at this for almost six years, but that's not a long time compared to a lot of other investors. So the way we've approached it is crowdsourced it from other people as well. So we share our take but you know, we also get input from other investors, many of them who are, well, way more experienced than us, on how they approach, you know, portfolio construction or you know, how to pitch lps, what questions to ask founders, those types of things. So anyway, Synergy Block has been fun. We there's a lot of appetite to from subscribers to do more community related things. Meaning a lot of these investors have asked like hey, I'd love to meet other, you know, co investors, other people who are also investing in, you know, space tech or you know, ESG or you know, consumer social, whatever. And we're exploring some kind of different, different areas there to kind of expand beyond just the content that we're, we're crowdsourcing and creating. But tbdn, exactly what that looks like.

Got it. And thanks for doing it, Ryan. I'm a power reader of signature block. I'm getting to learn a lot and you know, my copilot has been bugging me. He's knocking my back and he wants to get in. And so what he's asking, Ryan, you know, man, you've had a lot of success through product hunt, now through investing. And what he's asking is how much of your success would you attribute to luck and why?

Yeah, it's an interesting question. Because there's certain things in your control. Well, some people would argue there's no free will, but that's a whole other topic. There's certain things that are in your control and then there's certainly other things that are not. And on one side, one, one way of approaching life is to try to optimize for luck in a sense and, or serendipity, whatever you want to call it. And so putting yourself in places that can create some sort of positivity. I'll use my time in San Francisco as kind of one of those. So I moved from Oregon, where I'm from, in 2010 and moved to San Francisco to join a company and I don't think Productant would exist if I wasn't in San Francisco simply because it exposed me to a different network. A lot of people who were excited about technology got my brain thinking in a different way and that created a lot of serendipity and you could call that also luck as well. So, yeah, I mean, certainly a lot of life. You know, I mean the other reality is like, I grew up in a middle class family and like I had decent education and like, you know, had food on the table and all those kind of things too. Like that was outside of my control. I had no, no decision in my birth, unfortunately or fortunately. So yeah, there's, there's a lot of luck that goes into life, but I think there's, there's an ability to influence the opportunity to experience luck in life as well.

Got it. And Ryan, if money and attention are not needed anymore, you have them both. You know, you have money of, you know, fame. What would you work on?

I don't know actually. I mean, I'm. My life has been very focused on work stuff generally. Like even, yeah, from like a kid days, I was like tinkering with different, like business ideas and it's kind of, like, work stuff is kind of like a game. It's kind of fun for me. Not all the time, but certain activities that are like work I put in quotes is enjoyable. And so I think something entrepreneurial would still be in my. My path. I have tried to kind of explore some other hobbies. I have a really difficult time adopting hobbies. There's, like, you know, lifting. I enjoy, like, the fitness side of things, but everything else has been difficult to stick with. So I don't know, like, if I've asked myself, like, what would I do if I was 100% retired? And I have no idea. Yeah.

Figuring it out. And anything you change in your diet or fitness that's helping you.

I recently did a bunch of blood work. So I'm 36 now, and I think it was when I started, when I was like, 32, 33, I started realizing I'm mortal. And, you know, that the pain in my knee just doesn't always just magically go away the next day. It sometimes sticks around for a while. So I'm trying to get on top of that stuff. And so I did a bunch of blood work, and that gave me, you know, a list of. Here are the levels of that are a little bit off. And so I changed around some supplements that I'm taking, which actually helped. Some issues I had with, like, just being cold in certain environments and, like, cold limbs. I thought it was her non syndrome. Maybe I have a light issue with that. But, yeah, it was something with my. My lack of certain nutrients. But, yeah, I would just recommend getting blood work done. You know, even if you're. You're young, I think it's. It's really helpful, and it's really difficult to know. Like, you're kind of flying blind without that. You know, you can feel a certain way, but there's certain things that are off that you just won't notice or you will after you fix them. Sometimes I think people like, oh, life is like that. And then you're like, oh, wait a minute, like, that pain was optional or that that issue was optional. But I'm still learning a lot about this stuff.

And Ryan, you know, we know you as a. As a tech founder and investor. What do your friends know you for? Who are you outside of work?

Who am I? I'm not gonna lie. It's a question I ask myself. I mean, I like, I like to think I'm. Well, I am an introvert, which a lot of people don't. Kind of assume I'm the opposite, maybe, which I think is true for a lot of people who are like very online people. They sort of. People assume they're extroverted. But actually that's the beauty of being online is you get to control when you interact with people. So that. That's definitely one of my characteristics. I like to think I'm attentive when I'm with people. I try to be very mindful of those types of things. Maybe less so for people who are the closest to me, where it's like we're around each other 24 7. Ironically, I think we treat some of our closest friends and partners like the worst. That's a whole other topic. But I tend to think I'm very attentive and try to be very self aware. I'm very aware of my surroundings and as a result, I try to like, you know, make. Make it clear that I'm paying attention when I'm conversing or interacting with somebody.

How attentive are you to Susie?

She's probably listening to me right now in this room. She can't hear you, but she can hear me. I mean, we're attentive, but we're also. We live together and, you know, we. We both. I heard Siri, just not Susie. Siri just went off on your phone, didn't it? But, yeah, I mean, I think we're. We have our flaws, but, you know, we just were speaking about some stuff earlier today and sitting on the porch outside. We try to do that every now and then in the mornings just to catch up.

Ryan, thank you so much, man. I had so much fun and I myself learned a lot. I'm sure the audience would get to learn a lot from your experiences. Thanks a lot for doing it, Ryan.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Appreciate it.