Founder of @ProductHunt. Investor at @WeekendFund. Married to @SandyBKwon. Hi! 👋🏼
NYC / Miami / SF
Joined April 2008
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Announcing Weekend Fund IV, backed by operators and founders (and maybe you).
When we raised Weekend Fund III, we did something different.
Toward the end of our raise, we announced the fund in public and accepted applications from LPs.
Our goal was to make early-stage venture more accessible and align ourselves with an army of operators and founders to help us and the startups we back.
Over 1,000 people expressed interest to join and hundreds did, but there was a problem. Legally, only accredited investors could participate as an LP. Accreditation laws are well-meaning but limit access to the majority of consumers.
With WF IV, @vedikaja_in and I are doing something different.
Like before, we’re onboarding engineers, designers, researchers, data scientists, salespeople, and other domain experts as LPs in the fund. But this time at a larger scale with USVC.
AngelList recently announced USVC, a new kind of fund that’s accessible to everyone, including the non-accredited. It holds positions in private late-stage companies like xAI, Anthropic, OpenAI, Sierra, and Vercel. I personally invested.
Today, they just announced their investment in Weekend Fund IV, one of the first early-stage funds added to their portfolio.
If you’re interested in being a part of Weekend Fund and getting exposure to generational startups mentioned above, visit usvc [dot] com.
Of course, don’t invest what you can’t afford to lose.
Investing in startups is risky and you may lose all your money. USVC shares are illiquid with no guarantee of repurchase.
Consider investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses carefully before investing. Read the prospectus: usvc [dot] com/prospectus.
Also, USVC is currently limited to US citizens. They’re working to open the fund to other geographies.
Lastly, my DMs are open. :)
Modern-day Bezos “working backwards” press release:
“[When building something new] we work backwards from the launch… What’s the copy on the Instagram caption?”
There’s a misconception that a successful launch video needs to cost tens of thousands of dollars and feel like a high production commercial. But @FarzaTV has a different approach.
Farza is the founder of @heyclicky and previously built Buildspace, one of the largest online schools for people working on their own ideas. He’s been making videos for over a decade, and today his posts regularly get millions of views. Rather than treating launches as rare, high-stakes moments, he’s made them part of the everyday process of building a company.
Farza sat down with YC’s @aaron_epstein to share his playbook for turning demos into stories people actually want to watch. He breaks down how he scripts videos that still feel off the cuff, why founders should launch constantly, and and how to figure out which channels actually convert.
01:44 — Launch Constantly
03:38 — Start Shipping Demos
05:02 — Show the Process
06:07 — The Clicky Launch
07:43 — Write a Hook That Stops the Scroll
10:30 — Why Farza Scripts Every Video
12:04 — Designing the First 10 Seconds
15:15 — Demo-Driven Development
17:25 — You Have to Take a Thousand Shots
20:48 — Farza’s Formula for Videos That Convert
23:01 — Turning Demos Into Stories
24:53 — Show What You're Actually Building
29:11 — Finding Customers on Social Media
31:02 — Which Platforms Actually Convert?
39:01 — Why Farza’s First Hire Was a Filmmaker
40:49 — The Video Stack
45:41 — The 30-Day Launch Challenge
I would assume every SMB website is compromised rn.
Just encountered this fake Cloudflare prompt (ClickFix).
I don’t trade public stocks but if I did I would bet on this thesis:
As consumers adopt agents to make purchase decisions, we’ll see significant growth among the *quantifiably best* products and services.
This is the best voice demo I've heard.
True human-level voice convos will unlock many more consumer use cases.
We believe voice is the most natural way to interact with intelligence, so we created Dessa, the most authentic full-duplex speech model ever built. Talking with it feels like talking with a person…full of emotion, nuance, pauses, and a natural cadence.
block.xyz/dessa
What’s it called when the Uber driver isn’t moving for 20 minutes and you’re both playing chicken to see who cancels first?
Today, you can reach "high status" faster than ever before.
Social media made this more accessible a decade+ ago. More recent algo shifts increase status disseminated even further.
I think we'll be surprised how sexy and healthy millennials are at age 60
đź’Ą Introducing Warp Sciences, a new company applying AI and robotics to help the world develop new medicines faster.
We’ve raised a $215M Series A led by @lightspeedvp to bring frontier AI out of the browser and into the lab, and build scientific capacity here in America.
I co-founded Warp with my long-time friend @dpatil, FAIR co-founder @manohar_paluri, and drug hunter Sol Reisberg. The early team is full of incredible people like @bkspears9, who helped achieve Q>1 fusion at LLNL.
Every time you raise, the hurdle to get paid rises
yeah as an employee I would vary of companies that raise very large rounds, in quick succession, without revenue growth or profits following.
It can feel good at the time that your equity value goes up but only way you can actually get value is tender offers or that the company clears that capital stack in some liquidity event.
Also as an employee you probably how the capital is raised and on what kind of preferences or terms.
Ryan Hoover retweeted
Excited to announce the Cosign Awards: celebrating exceptional people, companies, and products that had a massive impact in 2026.
cosign.co/awards
Anyone can nominate and vote. Award winners will be chosen by the public in conjunction with a panel of judges, including industry leaders like @lennysan, @packyM, @amasad, and many more. We’ll host an event in December honoring the winners (10 per category).
For people categories, we’re mostly focused on everyone except the CEO–everyone else building the company behind the scenes.
Companies with the most amount of people nominations will be listed on our “Top Companies to Work For” page.
True to form, at Product Hunt I helped launch the Golden Kitty awards a decade ago to recognize great products. Soon after I launched the Rise Awards, honoring executives and ICs building companies that make them. The Cosign Awards is the next iteration.
We have 41 categories across people, companies, and products.
People categories:
- Future Founders
- Rising Stars
- Engineering
- FDE
- Product
- Design
- AI Researchers
- Marketing
- Comms
- Growth
- Chief of Staff
- Operations
- Talent
- Finance
- Public Intellectuals
- Podcaster of the Year
- Newsletter Author of the Year
- Poster of the Year
Company categories:
- Rising Stars
- Best Place to Work
- Founder Mafia
- Talent Density
- Highest Aura
Product categories:
- Product of the Year
- Launch of the Year
- AI Assistant
- AI Language Model
- AI Coding
- Dev Tools
- Open Source
- Consumer
- Productivity
- Creative & Media Tools
- Product Design & UX
- Enterprise B2B
- Hardware
- Robotics
- Self-Driving
- Healthcare
- Vertical Fintech
- Legal
Deel's global scale is what makes this particularly novel
AI has read the whole internet. But it’s never run payroll or a business.
We’re changing that.
Today, we’re launching Emet, our AI lab for model evaluation and training, and Pangaea, our first family of models for global work.
On real payroll tasks, the best AI model fully solves only 49%. Close enough to look right. Wrong enough to break a paycheck.
At Emet, in-country experts define what getting it right looks like. We turn that into public benchmarks and training data, and score every model against them. Ours included.
Pangaea is the first proof. Built on open-weight models and trained with Emet, it gets close to top-model accuracy, up to 3x faster, at a fraction of the cost.
@deel and the payroll teams that joined us bring decades of experience running payroll, HR, and compliance across 150+ countries. Knowledge the internet doesn’t have.
Emet puts it to work for every AI model, not just ours.
Cofounder of Foursquare on its recent acquisition:
"I was heartbroken by this ending"
Appreciate the retro, @dens.
teendrama.substack.com/p/som…
Rahul’s one of the good ones. Would hire again!
SMBs are so far from adopting AI.
I thought the explosion of consumer agent calls and texts would pull SMBs into adoption over the next few years. But many don't even have basic online booking.
(I'm attempting to pay someone to train our dog)
Every AI cold email:
Hi, Ryan!
I saw your podcast interview from 2016—you talked about your morning routine at Philz Coffee and investments in Deel, Mindbloom, and Passport.
Well, we're building Instinct for cats.