🎧🍌 Ryan Hoover on Growth Flywheels, Building Communities, Helping Founders, LP Investing in Micro Funds
Why every community needs utility, unpacking Product Hunt's early growth flywheel, investing in consumer health, and why human behavior will never change
Ryan has probably helped more founders launch their products than anyone else on Earth.
In this latest episode of The Peel, Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover open sources the growth flywheel that propelled it to become one of the most important places in technology.
Ryan talks about how it first started an email list, how he built and scaled a community around the product, how online communities have changed over time, how we’re thinking about software in the age of AI (tech will change, human behavior won’t), and how status has changed in Silicon Valley.
We also talk about starting Weekend Fund to invest in other founders, his first 400x investment, investing in consumer health, and why he started investing in other funds.
Thanks to @andreasklinger, @FarzaTV, and @vedikaja_in for their help brainstorming topics for Ryan.
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Timestamps to jump in:
5:52 Helping founders with software
15:36 Early ideas for Product Hunt in 2013
19:14 Starting as a social email list
26:26 Product Hunt’s growth flywheel
31:15 AI won’t change human behavior
34:12 An audience is not a community
36:42 Why every community needs utility
38:52 Communities have shifted towards group chats
40:10 How AI changes building products
49:35 Importance of craft
52:30 Starting Weekend Fund, Ryan’s 400x investment
56:57 Weekend Fund’s software experiments
59:26 What makes Ryan’s investing unique
1:02:16 Why Ryan has a small fund
1:07:41 Peptides, GLP-1’s, Ketamine
1:18:57 Why Ryan started investing in funds
1:20:53 Ways LPs can add value for GPs
1:23:05 How status has changed in Silicon Valley
1:31:37 Backing founders with secrets, why failing is hard
Referenced:
Wayve (self-driving cars)
Find Ryan on X / Twitter and LinkedIn.
👉 Stream on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple
Transcript
Find transcripts of all prior episodes here.
Turner Novak:
Ryan, welcome to the show.
Ryan Hoover:
Hey, buddy. How's it going?
Turner Novak:
I'm doing pretty good. For people who don't know, we're in New York right now. It's literally like 94 degrees.
Ryan Hoover:
It's hot.
Turner Novak:
But it feels like it's probably 120 or something.
Ryan Hoover:
East Coast humidity, man.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
I was sweating balls getting here. I don't know if you can tell anymore, I think I've dried up a little bit, but...
Ryan Hoover:
I was hugging the AC in the taxi on the way here. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
You took a taxi?
Ryan Hoover:
I did.
Turner Novak:
What? You go out on the street and wave it down?
Ryan Hoover:
Well, it's through Uber. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
But it gave you a taxi?
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, exactly. I don't know what the deal is with some sort of partnership.
Turner Novak:
Actually, I hate when that happens. I'm so mad when a taxi shows up, I'm like, "Dude, I wanted just a nice car."
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. I don't know, for me, I'm still UberX. I haven't made it to the luxury Uber Black default status.
Turner Novak:
That's true, or Waymo.
Ryan Hoover:
Waymo. Yeah, yeah. I love Waymo, it's the best. It's infinitely better.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, it's usually quite a bit of a wait. Usually, I'm in SF, it's like 13, 16 minutes versus Uber's two-minute ETA. You got to plan. You're like, "All right, I need to leave in 20 minutes. I'll book the Waymo."
Ryan Hoover:
It's nice. You can choose your own music, it's a nice car. Well, it is a $200,000 car, I think. I don't know, Jaguars are not cheap.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, we don't have those in New York. Not yet.
Turner Novak:
Hopefully, though. Man, we are getting way off-topic really quickly, but I think Tesla is now launching in San Francisco and they're in Austin.
Ryan Hoover:
In SF, really?
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I think there's actually one... I don't know if it'll come out before or after this episode. Michael Dempsey Compound, he's an investor company called Waze. They also have a self-driving car that's in New York, I believe.
Ryan Hoover:
Okay.
Turner Novak:
I think it's a self-driving service of some kind.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
People can fact check this. I don't know much about it, but it's in New York.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, I want make personal helicopters. Just pick me up, like a crane from one of those toy machine things. Just pick me up from the sky and then drop me off on a rooftop somewhere.
Turner Novak:
That seems really safe.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, I'll back that. If any founders are building this, let me know.
Turner Novak:
All right. Yeah, that's the one. If you get one takeaway from this, that's the thing. I did want to actually start, so Andreas Klinger, our mutual friend, when I told him that we were doing this, he's like, "You got to ask him about..." You are probably the single person that has helped the most founders launch and get their product out there. How do you help a founder with their product?
Ryan Hoover:
I don't know if I'll take that credit, software is so powerful. This is actually a total tangent, but that's where I'll make this short. This is what I love about software when it comes to helping people. You can make a piece of software and it can exist while you sleep and help people while you sleep, and when I die, hopefully, the product can still be around. That's why I love building products and everything, but yeah, how do I help founders?
Turner Novak:
Or how could someone help a founder? What do you think that you were able to do so well in terms of just helping so many people?
Ryan Hoover:
Well, with product specifically, there's a whole story there we can go into if you want, but yeah, part of it was just like I wanted this to exist and I noticed this trend of, "Many people are building and launching products," but they had no audience at all. I just wanted it to discover cool new things and it sort of spiraled from there, and even today, I'm an investor, and typical investor is adding value by meeting and making instructions, and everything. We do that, but I think more and more about products and software is more interesting to me to invest my time, because then we can hopefully help the portfolio and other founders in ways well beyond my time. I think a lot more about that. When it comes to meeting with founders, there's different ways, like, "How can I be helpful?" Is this such a cliche?
Turner Novak:
It's become a meme at this point.
Ryan Hoover:
It is a meme. People are well-meaning, they genuinely want to be helpful. As much shit as people give VCs, but sometimes they don't know how to. I don't know, the way I try to... When I'm speaking with a founder, like a portfolio founder, a lot of times, it's sharing just my experience and perspective and frameworks or ways of thinking about things, but not necessarily answers. I don't know, they're knee-deep into their company, they have way more data than I do. They know the answer way better than I do, but I can hopefully give them little nudges to think about maybe other things related to my product experience or community building, or something like that.
Turner Novak:
Have you found any just common pitfalls or mistakes when you're trying to help someone with their product? Is it overreaching or is it not caring enough or caring too much? Giving them bad advice?
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, Some people just give advice on things they don't know anything about. This is actually one reason why... Not to talk our own book, but we raised from 380 LPs, most of them are operators and founders who are... They're designers, they're data scientists, engineers. My background's product and community building and marketing, and anything outside of that, I'm probably not the best person to ask, so that's why we raised from so many LPs, was like, "Okay, if we have a founder who has a question around data science or enterprise sales strategies, that's when we connect them with an LP of ours." That's how we've approached it, is try to be, I think, hopefully self-aware in what we can help with directly and, when we can, it's make introductions to people that know what they're talking about. That's how we think about it.
Turner Novak:
Why do you care so much about helping people? Why is it so important to you?
Ryan Hoover:
It gives me purpose. I don't know.
Turner Novak:
Wow, there's a soundbite for the internet.
Ryan Hoover:
Well, I don't know. Maybe the question is, actually, do I even care? No, I do. It feels good to help people. You get that warm fuzzy feeling when you genuinely help someone, especially a founder who's... Founders go through a lot of shit, they get told no all the time. If they're building something meaningful, almost certainly a lot of people don't believe in the idea, it's probably non-contrarian, fundraising is terrible. Well, not for everybody. Sometimes it's really easy and it's a slam dunk. For most people, it's not easy. I don't know, maybe for this founder subset, I have a bias towards supporting and helping those types of people. I have an even stronger bias towards really young people who don't have maybe as much support or experience. Example, actually, and I wouldn't say I helped him in at all, but there's this guy, his name is... I'm forgetting, it starts with an S. I have to put in the show notes or something.
He DMs me on Twitter. He's like, "Hey, Ryan, I'm 10 years old. I'm launching this product in a couple days on Product Hunt. I'd love your feedback." At first, I was like, "This is not a 10-year-old, this is a 36-year-old man in San Francisco just trying to pretend he's a 10-year-old, so he can get more attention."
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Ryan Hoover:
Because saying you're a 10-year-old building and launching something on Twitter will get you way more attention than just being a normal person.
Turner Novak:
Really?
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, for sure.
Turner Novak:
Is it because people, they're like, "I'm going to support this kid."
Ryan Hoover:
Exactly. Yeah. They feel like, "I want to support this guy."
Turner Novak:
I remember when I was 10.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, I was in all kinds of things. Yeah, I was doing all... No, I wasn't. I was managing gumball machines, actually, so not very impactful.
Turner Novak:
I was watching SpongeBob SquarePants when I was 10 in fifth grade.
Ryan Hoover:
Nice.
Turner Novak:
I can't even remember what I was doing.
Ryan Hoover:
Nice. Well, you got some culture. You got some culture in you.
Turner Novak:
I guess.
Ryan Hoover:
It's valuable.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, the humor lens maybe. The humor's still there. I don't know, the sense of humor is still there.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, totally. Then he DMs me and I'm like, "This is definitely not a 10-year-old," and so I messaged back kindly and I'm like, "Maybe he's a 10-year-old," but I'm like, "Assumed he wasn't." I'm like, "Just let me know when you launch," and so a few days later, sends me a link on Product Hunt, he's like, "Hey, I launched this thing," and I'm like, "Awesome," and I was like, "To be honest, are you actually 10?" I was just curious what he would say, and then he posts on Twitter a video of himself, which by the way, feels a little weird. I'm a 38-year-old man and this 10-year-old is sending me a video on Twitter.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, that could be like...
Ryan Hoover:
In the DMs.
Turner Novak:
You got to be careful with that.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. I was like, "Okay." Anyway, it was him. It might've been a deep fake, it could have been a deep fake for sure, but it looked legit, and it was a 10-year-old and he was saying, "Hey, Product Hunt, I launched my thing," and I was like, "This is actually a 10-year-old."
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Ryan Hoover:
I don't know how I got into the story, but anyway.
Turner Novak:
Well, supporting him.
Ryan Hoover:
Well, yeah, I was just like... It was so cool. I was like, "This guy, he's..." I think having support when you're trying something new and building something new, especially in public like that on Twitter, on Product Hunt, I don't know, it takes some guts, and it's anxiety-inducing too for a lot of people. Those types of people, I love to support, even if it's just literally a tweet. Those can actually, I think, be quite meaningful and give people a nudge to continue to build or explore or share what they're working on.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, because I think the default is basically just people don't care. You make something and no one gives a shit. When you're posting something on the internet, there's the upside and the downside. The downside is that no one cares, no one sees it, and you spent some time, whatever, but the upside is almost unbounded. It's unlimited. You post the video, the 10-year-old, it's a good product and people use it, and Obama or the President, Trump, sees it and invites him to the White House and he gets acquired by Google, because it's such a good product. Just an insane, unimaginable situation that can happen just because you put yourself out there. Sometimes all it takes is just somebody saying like, "Yeah, do it. This is a good idea, go for it." Invest your time, invest your... Get over that hump inside of your head," or that, "What if people don't like it?" That can be really hard to do that first time and just having somebody to just say, "Yeah, you can do it. I support you. Here's a like or a reply to boosting the algorithm. It's pretty easy to do.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, yeah. Actually, question for you, I don't don't know if I'm okay to ask you questions.
Turner Novak:
You have one per episode.
Ryan Hoover:
One?
Turner Novak:
You can ask me anything you want.
Ryan Hoover:
Juicy then. Is there a moment in time or a person who comes to mind where gave you that nudge or that support that tipped you into a different career or anything, really? Just something that comes to mind.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Actually, there's a friend in college, I was in the investment club, just joined it because I was like, "Investing, seems fun, seems cool." Ended up falling in love with investing, and that's basically what I do now. There was someone who was the president of the club who was graduating and there needs to be a new person to run for president, and I didn't even think about it. It wasn't even something I had considered, and he's like, "You should go." His name's Luan, is his name. He's like, "Dude, you should run for president. You'd be a good president of the club," because I just cared a lot, didn't miss a meeting, was like...
I met some people, I was friends with everyone in the club. I guess I was really the perfect person to be president, but I wasn't even thinking about that, and I probably wouldn't have unless he told me that I should. I don't know. I think just that probably changed the trajectory of just the kinds of stuff that I was doing and interested in. You realize, "Maybe I could be a leader. I don't know." That's probably a big one for me, and there's probably been tons of other examples, whether a founder gives you allocation in their company, because they like you and they care about you and that makes you look good, or an LP that maybe gave you money or another investor who introduces you to a founder, does you a favor giving you the allocation in the company.
You try to do the same for other people, and for me, yeah, a lot of people follow me on the internet, you have a platform, how do you help people? Help them out. You want to keep it interesting for people, I don't want to have a bad podcast guest, but also, you come on, we're going to talk about interesting stuff, people will like it, but then hopefully you'll look good too and you benefit from it. Yeah, I don't know. The way you think about building software, I almost think about it as helping with content and media in a way. Maybe I should do software, too. Maybe that's something I-
Ryan Hoover:
You just vibe into it, man.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Ryan Hoover:
Just close your eyes and just vibe into it.
Turner Novak:
When you started Product Hunt, how did it start? Because I don't think it was what it is today, right? Didn't it start as an email that you sent?
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, yeah, it was an email list.
Turner Novak:
Okay. How did that come about? Because I know you were trying to get a job, too, originally.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, yeah. I was working at a company for about three-ish years and I felt like I... It grew from six people to maybe 100 or so before I left. I was starting to feel like I wasn't learning as much and, I don't know, just felt like it was time to leave, so I put in notice, worked part-time. I was actually really fortunate to do that, because they were like, "All right, we'll cut your salary in half, work 20 hours a week. Give you time to tinker."
Turner Novak:
That's awesome. Yeah, most people don't get that.
Ryan Hoover:
No, no. I don't know why more people don't do that. It's difficult in a lot of companies and there's many reasons why it is a terrible idea for both parties sometimes, but for me, it was great, so I was like, "Okay, I have more runway to explore." I applied at Medium at the time, it was 2013.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, they were a pretty hot company at the time. Yeah.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, and I also just loved the general direction of like, "How do you help more people tell their story?" Was great. Ended up interviewing like Evan, a few people, and then they're like, "We don't know where you would fit." They were only hiring engineers, basically. I don't remember, but they had a unique culture. It was like no... I forget the word that they used to describe it, but it was like, "Everyone could work on anything," and it was all engineers for the most part. Maybe some designers, but no PMs. That was my background, product management. No marketers. Anyway, applied there, applied another company called MessageMe, like a group messaging or messaging platform.
Turner Novak:
MessageMe, you say? Was that Arjun's company?
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, yeah.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, we had a conversation, we're loose friends. Yeah, we both didn't pursue the conversation further. Where else did I apply? Bebo, Sean Puri, and Furkan's company.
Turner Novak:
Nice, okay.
Ryan Hoover:
I did a whole presentation and everything and they're like-
Turner Novak:
Was Bebo a live-streaming thing?
Ryan Hoover:
It was a lot of things. They were not working on the live-streaming stuff when I was there. I forget what they were building. They were basically a studio just building a lot of different consumer social products. Yeah, ended up getting rejected by them. Anyway, ultimately, built Product Hunt as a little side project. I just wanted a list of cool new products, particularly apps back then, because this was 2013, mobile was just taking off.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, we were in the heyday. There was some pretty cool stuff that was coming out, there was funding going to it, so people had money to play around with stuff.
Ryan Hoover:
There was funding, it was post social network movies, there's a lot of cultural, mainstream appeal in startups and tech and being a founder. Also, mobile was now at a mature, but still early state where you could do a lot of really cool things. I think AI is similar, I think, today to 2013 with mobile, in the sense that, two years ago, AI and LLMs and everything, they were available and we are all tinkering with them, but they were not that great. Now we're at the point where they're mature enough to actually do some really cool stuff. Mobile was like that too back in 2013. I forget the exact timeline, but even bundled subscription payments I think was around that time, too. If you think about the amount of opportunity that came with just that single feature in mobile-
Turner Novak:
Wait, bundled subscriptions?
Ryan Hoover:
Or being able to pay for subscriptions versus one-off transactions. It changed-
Turner Novak:
Pay on your phone, within the app store, whatever.
Ryan Hoover:
Exactly. It used to be just one-off... Everything was 99 cents, $2.99, it was all one-off.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, it was transaction-based.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Ryan Hoover:
Stuff like that unlocked a whole new category of opportunities for people to explore and obviously built massive businesses. Yeah, built this email list and then shared it with some friends, and I found it useful and more people started sharing it, and then yeah, turned it into a website.
Turner Novak:
Was it a daily email, like, "Check out these new products that launched today"?
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, so it was actually using this tool called Linky Dink, which is no longer around. It was this studio based in Makeshift. Oh, my gosh, it's so long ago now, I'm forgetting the name. Anyway, team in Europe is building... In London, I think they were based. We're building a lot of different cool products, and one of them was Linky Dink, which is a tool where you could collaboratively create email lists or email newsletters, essentially.
Turner Novak:
Okay.
Ryan Hoover:
I could invite other friends and say, "Hey, share a link," and what it'll do is aggregate all the links that we put together and then, in the morning the next day, it'll send it out to everybody. That's how it started. Actually, it wasn't me curating the products, it was me and some friends, essentially. That was the MVP. Took 20, 30 minutes to set up, shared it on Twitter, and then that gave me enough confidence to realize, "Okay, there's something here to explore."
Turner Novak:
Was it just because people were interested and they were just subscribing and they were reading it? People were probably submitting too. Did you get new people come in and want to submit their stuff?
Ryan Hoover:
Sometimes, yeah. Some people are like, "I want this cool app that I found or I use, I would love to share it with people that are subscribing." We ultimately didn't have that many subscribers. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was sub 1,000. It was just in the hundreds, so it wasn't like there was a ton of demand or a ton of interest in the email list.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Ryan Hoover:
But to our point earlier about getting some nudges of confidence, I got nudges of confidence not only from some of the just organic growth, but also people are saying, "I like that email, I read it every morning." Like random people that I don't even know were just like, "This is cool," and I was like, "People like it. All right, cool. Let me explore it further."
Turner Novak:
Then you turned into a website at one point.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
How did you decide that this should be a website versus newsletter? What was that whole process getting it going?
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, so the email was a great start, but pretty limited. Of course, you can't interact, there's a lot of things you can't do. Of course, email-
Turner Novak:
You can't change it. You send in, "This is the list-"
Ryan Hoover:
Better not have a typo.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Ryan Hoover:
I pinged my buddy Nathan Bashaw, Boss Jazz is his name now, but he and I had worked on an email-based project in the past called Startup Edition. I pinged him and I was like, "Hey, I'm working on this thing, do you want to work on it together?" It was like Thanksgiving and he's like, "Yeah, Thanksgiving break's coming up, let's hack on it together." He's a really talented product designer-engineer hybrid. Very few people that have that unique skill set. We just collaborated for about a week or so and built the MVP and then launched that, and we modeled it after Linky Dink a little bit, because Linky Dink was designed as a daily email, so that's sort of how the daily leaderboard of Product Hunt came about. It's like, "Okay, let's replicate the email experience, but let's put it online," and then, of course, we'll add comments and we'll add upvotes, because there was no curation mechanism beyond just people submitting.
Turner Novak:
Someone could submit a bad product that should not get a lot of votes and not as many people see versus a good one, a lot of people will see it.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, exactly. Give also people who are reading some ability to interact and communicate, and then, of course, we looked at Reddit and Smart... A lot of it was like, "Okay, we're not going to re-invent wheel. What behaviors and actions and language do people already understand? Upvotes, people understand what that is, especially people in tech, so we're not going to invite a new verb. We just said, "Okay, upvotes."
Turner Novak:
Dude, you recommend that. When somebody's thinking through product design, take things that people are familiar with and borrow, and you don't have to reinvent the wheel.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, sometimes people get too cute, I think, and they're like, "Let's come with this new language or this really creative UX," and sometimes that works, but sometimes people just don't understand or it's difficult to communicate. I don't know. It's very contextual in how you choose what words to use, but yeah, for us, upvotes is really easy. There's also other decisions around language that was like, "Okay, well what do we call the people that made this thing? Are they builders? Are they founders? Well, no, some are founders, but we don't want to make this limited to just founders. We want to celebrate anyone who was involved in this project or this company. We want to celebrate them all," and so we're like, "All right, makers." Makers sounds like general enough. It's also very flat, we didn't want to do hierarchy, we didn't want founders and VPs. That's not the vibe that we're looking.
Turner Novak:
Director, senior PM. Yeah.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. If you're a CEO or you're just a customer support person working on a project, you are a maker of that product. That's how we saw it.
Turner Novak:
Nice. What's the scale of Product Hunt today? It's like millions of people that use it, view it. I don't know, what did it get to at some point? It got pretty big, right?
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. I left 2020 and I'm still in Slack, I still talk to Rajiv, the CEO, and help here and there. I don't know the exact numbers off the top of my head, but I did look recently and... What is it? I know there are over 250,000 makers minimum per year that launch from product every year. I might be off by a scale of 2X on that. I just did some rough napkin math the other day. Don't quote me, but it's at least 250,000, and I was like, "Wow, that's a lot of people who are building."
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Ryan Hoover:
Then, of that, say 100,000 or so products every single year. It's a lot. What was interesting is, going back to the very beginning, people who were skeptical of products, they're like, "There are not enough products being launched every day, there's not enough interesting things out there," and I was like, "I don't know man, I think there's a lot out there and I think it's going to grow." You fast-forward to today, it feels like there are more founders. I don't know if that's true or not but there's definitely more people building and launching products especially with vibe coding tools and everything. And so, in terms of scale, yeah, I know the numbers are what I'm able to share so I can't really speak on behalf of companies entirely but it's-
Turner Novak:
It sounds like 100, a couple hundred a day they get launched on there based on napkin mapping, the numbers that you just napkin math.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
So, maybe we're off by a little bit more even from the funky math that we're doing. But yeah, it sounds like, if you're interested in understanding what's going on and what people are doing, following, you'll see a lot of cool stuff.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, it's really, I've always discovered, like a fire hose. If you want a fire hose of what people are building and what trends are emerging, that's Product Hunt and it's very nerdy, it's very geeky, it's what I wanted to exist and I still visit every morning and check it out.
Turner Novak:
I still see you commenting on something. And there'll be a pretty esoteric random product and I'll see you commenting on it, I was like ... You just really care about what people are working on.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, I don't know, it's fun, I'm curious too, I'm like, "Oh, this is"... I like the weird stuff. On the investing side, we invest actually more in B2B than we do in consumer but, as a consumer or person, I'm fascinated by consumer and ... And also, human psychology, it applies to interacting with software is also always fascinating so, yeah.
Turner Novak:
I want to talk about that a little bit more later but, because we're talking about Product Hunt, what was the reason that it grew and got so big? So, you went from email list, less than 1,000 people to almost a 1,000 products being launched a day. What was the big thing that propelled Product Hunt back in the day and is it still relevant today?
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so there's a bunch of ... I break it into two categories. One is the actual product design and flywheel, that's one category. And then there's a lot of, let's say, accoutrements that we sprinkled on top of that.
Turner Novak:
What is that? Accoutrements?
Ryan Hoover:
Accoutrements, the things that you put out that make everything look a little bit better and a little fancier. Maybe that's the wrong terminology or the wrong word to use in this context but-
Turner Novak:
Is it sprinkles or ...
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. So, example ... Well, I'll describe the flywheel first and then maybe my metaphor will make sense. So, the flywheel is pretty simple actually in hindsight, it's, okay, a maker launches on Product Hunt, founder company, they share it with the audience, some of those people are coming into the site, they sign up and some of those people are makers too and they're like, "Oh, cool, this site, I can get some users and get some feedback, I'm going to launch my product there too." So, they launch and then they share it with their audience and so more and more people come through. And so, if you look at that flywheel, that's how I try to think about products, especially social related product design is how do you build these flywheels where, the more people engage, the more it either grows or drives more engagement back to the site.
So, with that flywheel, you can break it down now and be like, "Okay, well, there's a lot of things we can do to either speed up that spin or increase conversion." So, an example could be ... Increased conversion rate could be how do we get more people that care about this maker or this company or this founder, how do we get more people to basically be re-engaged in a way that's valuable for them So, what we did in the beginning is we used Twitter as the authentication, that was the only way you could sign up for Product Hunt.
Turner Novak:
I'm pretty sure my account is linked to my Twitter.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, probably. It's the same for me.
Turner Novak:
It's the only thing that's linked to my Twitter. I don't really sign up with Twitter on most sites but I do with Product Hunt.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, yeah. It used to be more of a default, I think, back then and now, for a bunch of reasons, it's not. But yeah, we use Twitter because we're like, "Okay, we can replicate the graph, everybody on tech is already on Twitter." So, when someone signs up, let's say on maker signs up, we know who they follow and who follows them and now we can actually start to replicate that graph and we have their emails as well. So, if you're launching a product and I follow you on Twitter and, therefore, I'm on Product Hunt, I can get an email when you launch a product to say, "Hey, Turner just launched this new thing." And I want to see that, that was one of the highest engaging emails from an open and click-through rate that we ever introduced because people want ... They do genuinely care about what people are building and launching and most people don't launch very often, it's pretty infrequent.
Turner Novak:
Once a year maybe.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Or maybe if ... There's some people that'll do monthly or weekly launch projects, they're building stuff, they're spending a month and they launch product a day or whatever. But those are fun too, they want people to see those.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, yeah. So, that's an example of an accoutrement, it's, okay, we replicate the graph and now we send these emails that are engaging, that drive more traffic, that drive more support, things like that, we ... Then there's other things that we did when it came to ... Part of it was community building, part of it was growth stuff. We reached out to the people who, let's say, in the top 10, had the top 10 up votes for that day. We're like, "Hey, awesome, congrats. It's cool, you made that, do you want to write about your experience launching and building your product?
We'll cross-promote it on the newsletter, we'll cross-promote it on social," and a very, very high number of founders and makers will be like, "Oh, yeah, of course." I'll spend, in some cases, probably an hour or three hours writing a blog post and they would write it on their own blog or medium or wherever they wanted to publish, that was really important because we're like, "We don't want to host this information, we want them to share it with their audience and also in a way that feels more authentic than on our company blog."
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Because it feels like, if they're posting it on their own channel, it's their own excitement, it's not a corporate thing, it's personal from Turner's blog talking about how great Product Hunt is and how beneficial and teaching other people how to do it too.
Ryan Hoover:
Exactly, yeah. We were giving them permission to promote themselves to promote us so it was really a win-win.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And it became normal, it was just part of everyone ... Just everyone did it.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, we had hundreds of people write these blog posts. And then, from a strategic perspective it's, okay, now we got some good backlinks so SEO improved.
Turner Novak:
Oh, yeah.
Ryan Hoover:
And so, there's a lot of things like that that we implemented to just grow and also build a committee where it was, okay, here's a place to celebrate makers and builders and people shipping.
Turner Novak:
Do you think is that general growth flywheel still a good framework or is it different in today's day and age? How would you approach that if you had to try the same thing today? And then you might not need to have an answer to this but what kind of questions would you ask or go through?
Ryan Hoover:
Well, a lot of it's changing with how people are building products and what you can build today. I hate to say the words AI but it's so much of our conversations about AI for good reason. But there's still some fundamental things about humans, I suppose, that doesn't really change. So, a little bit of a tangent but I worked with Nir a little bit on his book Hooked which I'd been following his blog for a long time, he's basically taking all these psychology studies and trying to dissect what makes products really compelling, why Snapchat and Facebook and all these and Tinder, what's the aspects of the design of these products that made them so compelling and engaging for people.
And so, I've always been really interested in psychology and human psychology because that's the thing that won't change. Technology and everything is going to change dramatically but how people think and what they're motivated by is not going to change. And so, when it comes to now AI, the way that you build software and products is going to change dramatically but the fundamental goals or how people think won't. And so, things like status, we're still going to care about status as humans. There's an element of the human connection, that's why flywheel is still ... The flywheel of product is just as relevant today as it ever will be in this AI future because it's still about people supporting and, ultimately, gaining some level of status among this audience or community.
So, I don't know, I don't think those types of dynamics change all that much but it's an interesting topic to marinate on a little bit more.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Well, it's what we were talking a little bit about before we started recording. I've been thinking a lot about what are some things that AI can't touch or will never take away and it's positioning more for that kind of a thing. In terms of content, AI will generate some content, whatever, you just have to accept that is going to happen and that is the world we're going to be in but AI can't go host a comedy show like I hosted a comedy show last night.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, yeah. That was fun last night. It was really fun.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And you were there and we just talked for a little bit there. AI won't be able to do that. Maybe it will, I don't know. Maybe we do VR comedy shows but you don't get that in person hanging out so it feels like the ... You almost want to do a barbell strategy where it's AI is going to change things, how does it change, how do you fit into that world, figuring out where it's going to go but then also what is it not going to change and making sure that you also understand that world. And whether you're building a product, company or you're an investor or you're working at a company, making sure that you're positioned in the right kind of way and you like it and you enjoy what you're doing
Ryan Hoover:
I think that's, yeah, fundamental to everything. Anything that's sustainable I suppose but, yeah.
Turner Novak:
When you talk about the community that you build a product on, so if you ... How do you build a community? I don't know how to tee this up in a fun way but building community. Everyone talks about community, what is it? Is it a buzzword? Does it actually benefit things?
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, different definitions. I think I categorize it more in, okay, community is something that attracts a certain audience of people that want to associate themselves with it and it's more about ... When it comes to community, there's a big difference between an audience and a community and people mix them up. Your Twitter followers are probably not a community, I'm guessing, that's an audience in most cases because community is about other people in that ecosystem connecting with each other and helping each other in some way or providing some sort of value in some way. And so, it's more about the connections within your ecosystem or within your community than you as the leader, let's say, or the megaphone distributing information or anything.
So, the best communities are you, as a leader, you're a really good party host and you welcome everyone in and you make sure the environment is good and everyone's welcome and that's what you do but, at the end of the day, you're not the one hanging out with everybody and talking to everybody at once, they're talking to each other at a house party and hopefully having a good time. And so, yeah, a lot of people, yeah, community is a buzzword, it can be extremely valuable because it's, one, can increase word of mouth. If you're a part of a community and you really care about it, if you're a part of CrossFit, especially back in its peak ... What is the joke? How do you know someone is a CrossFitter or whatever, it's-
Turner Novak:
Right, they'll tell you.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, yeah. And so, it can help increase word of mouth and increase engagement/retention because people want to be a part of that community not maybe some other community that they have less association with. Also, it just creates more ... All things being equal, it creates more, to use a sterile term, enterprise value. Two companies, let's take two SaaS companies, I don't know enough about Sketch versus Figma to know if this is the right comparison but let's just use those two. Figma invested a lot in community and events, your point about bringing people together in person, and let's assume that Sketch built as good of a product. Figma having a better community is just going to be way more valuable than Sketch and I think it applies to any kind of SaaS company. That doesn't mean your typical FinTech B2B SaaS company should have a community or invest in it but-
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Our mortgage servicing software has the best community, yeah.
Ryan Hoover:
I just love mortgages.
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Ryan Hoover:
It's so exciting. But it can be valuable and so ... I don't know, I think ... Last thing I'll say on that is I think about utility too. People don't want to join a community, they're not like, "Oh," waking up in the morning, "I need to be part of a community."
Turner Novak:
Yeah. It's like podcasts, people don't wake up and say I want to listen to more podcasts, it's I don't want to join another community.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
So, how do you start a community? Do you need to find utility, a reason for it to exist?
Ryan Hoover:
I think so, I think that's a good way to start. There's different ways to start a community but it's, okay, what's the end goal, what's my motivation as a community member, what am I trying to gain here. In Product hunt, there's many motivations but, if you're a builder or maker or founder, you're trying to gain, get users, trying to get feedback, you're trying to ... I hate to say it but you're trying to earn some sort of status in the status game and so that's the hook let's say. Maybe that's how you start being a part of a community because you're like, "Oh, I can get users here, let me go check it out," and then that pulls you into, hopefully, a higher engagement and maybe you go to our events. We hosted tons and tons, hundreds of community events which, by the way, most of them were led by the committee. I didn't go to most of them, I went to four of them, maybe five.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, I feel like it was a big deal when you ... There's one that you did that you went to a year or two ago. I was going to try to go because you were going, I wasn't in SF that day.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, yeah.
Turner Novak:
But I remember it was a huge deal.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, we had some fun ones, we had some ... Yeah, in the beginning, we had some wrapped around two blocks lines and everything.
Turner Novak:
Oh, wow, that's cool.
Ryan Hoover:
It was epic.
Turner Novak:
Has anything changed about building community since you did it in '14, '15, '16 versus in 2025?
Ryan Hoover:
That's a really good point, I haven't asked myself that question.
Turner Novak:
Is it more digital? Is there less that happens offline, more that happens online or maybe the opposite?
Ryan Hoover:
I don't know the answer to that one. You got me stumped, man.
Turner Novak:
So, what would you do today? If there's something that you were really passionate about, you were trying to start a community on today, is there anything like that?
Ryan Hoover:
Something that I'm passionate about?
Turner Novak:
Yeah. If you were to say like, "I'm going to start a community. What would you do?"
Ryan Hoover:
Oh, yeah. If I was to start a community, I'm not going to do this but ... Well, actually ... Okay, I have an answer actually based on my own experience and my anecdotal experience. Communities have actually gone a lot more towards smaller group chats. Greg Isenberg, actually, a friend of mine, he built a company called Islands that was really focused on that thesis, I think 2016 or '17. And I don't know about you but the most engaging ... People wouldn't really call them communities but you get a lot of the same benefits or value of these communities. I'm a part of one which is maybe 30 or 40 people who are always ... It's all about health stuff. So, people are sharing the peptides that they're using, they're sharing their latest gadgets that they're buying to work out or whatever and it's just a small private group and those types of things are really ... That's actually most compelling to me and you see this across many different categories. I have one, just some LPs that we just invest in funds and so it's just focused on that.
And so, I think communities have shifted increasingly to just group chats and part of it's also the nature of, I think, how social media has evolved. We went through a whole ... We've just gone through a lot of changes since 2013, it's gotten a lot more political, it's gotten a lot more just dangerous to share everything on the internet and so people have receded into more private channels for a lot of things.
Turner Novak:
How do you think, we talked a little bit about this, but how do you think AI has changed how, not just building communities, but building products? Obviously, building a product today, quite a bit different than 10 years ago.
Ryan Hoover:
So, if you think about it like, okay, building a product, the high level steps are I have an idea now I have to translate this idea into a piece of software and then I have to get feedback and then iterate on that and now we've collapsed that in a number of ways. One, you can just write the software so much faster, infinitely faster but, two, the fewer people are required to write that software. So, you have marketers and PMs and designers and basically non-software engineers vibing their way into their ideas and, yeah, right now, a lot of those products are maybe not production ready, maybe they're not even good but it'll get better and better and better. And the fact that this is collapsing and you eliminate the entire communication challenge. When I have an idea and you translate to somebody else, not only does it take time, but it's also just always things missing.
And so, if I am an accountant, an accountant knows exactly what problem they have and how they want to solve it and, if they can just do it themselves without translating that to somebody else, it's actually a huge, huge opportunity for them and just speeds up the process entirely. And theoretically, once co-gen is to a point where it's as good as a senior engineer, theoretically, it's actually going to be much smarter and better to build that way. Now, this is dependent on what you're building, there's certain categories of things that are going to require very sophisticated experienced engineers but there's a number of categories that could just be vibed into existence by anyone. There's also some thesis, I don't know where I stand on this yet, but people also talk about the personalization of software too and ... Okay, well, why do I just use Evernote when ... I want Evernote but I want it to have these features and so I'm just going to build it myself and I'm going to remix it and ...
We're investors in a company called Adaptive that is in that category and you can remix apps and change them and do it all just with natural language which, if you can speak English, then you can code. So, that's really cool. So, I think a series of things that are changing. One is the longer term view of software building is going to be collapsed and much faster to build those ideas. But in the short term, a lot of these things can be really good for MVPs and testing and it's, okay, maybe it's not production ready, maybe it's missing a lot of things, maybe it doesn't have the skirty that you need to sell it to customers but you can at least test it. So, instead of a PM coming with an idea, working with a designer, creating this clumsy Figma click through walkable prototype, you just have the PM just be like, "All right, guys, this afternoon I'm going to work on this thing and we're going to test it out and see how it feels and then from there you can iterate."
So, I think that's really cool and ... Yeah. I don't know. What do you think? What does this look like, do you think, in the next few years? How do you think it'll change?
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I think there's the old adage of things happen ... Fewer things happen in one year and more things happen in 10 years. We over predict the next year and we under predict 10 years so, I don't know. One for me it's self-driving cars. I've always been like, "They're never going to be here, they're always going to be 10 years away." And then suddenly it's like, "Oh, wow, they're actually here, it actually works." And we hit the hype wave and it's they're not ready yet and then you forget about it and then it's, oh, but now eight years later or whatever, 10 years, I don't know what the actual timeframe is, but it's, oh, now they are actually here and they do work pretty well. So, it's the same thing with AI, I go through these phases where you try some of the products and it still sucks. It's, oh, this is so useful but it's like an intern where you can't trust the intern to push it to production but it's, oh, it's actually doing something so you discount it a little bit.
And then suddenly I ... I went through that with ChatGPT, it was this isn't good enough at a lot of these things, I would try ... Probably about six, seven, eight months ago, I tried it again for some things I used to try it for and I was like, "Oh, this actually works really well now." So, it's probably some combination of we're going to ... It's not actually going to go as fast as we think over the next short term but, in 10 years, maybe it is better, I don't know.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, yeah. Well, this is a topic that my partner on the fund, Vedika, she and I have been talking about this recently is so there's a bunch of ... So, what's so fascinating about AI is, if you compare it to Cloud computing or Cloud hosting more specifically, when we moved to the Cloud, when we started creating all these SaaS products, you'd sign up on AWS and throw your product up there and it was pretty binary, it served your software and that was it. And yeah, it got cheaper and, yeah, it got maybe a little faster but it was pretty stable. Whereas, with AI it's similar in the sense it's infrastructure and a bunch of companies are using it at the foundational level whether it's OpenAIs, Models, Anthropic or others or even self-hosted like Llama and things like that, but that's just going to get better and better and better. And so, there's-
Turner Novak:
And the cost is coming down too.
Ryan Hoover:
And the cost is coming down so you have ... I hope I can share this. We're investors in Rosebud which is a journaling app so you talk to it and it gives you feedback and it helps you journal and build a habit there. And in the beginning they charged, I think, it was $5-ish a month, it was their base subscription. The challenge was their power users were costing them money. Every single time they would use the app, they were making calls to, I think it was OpenAI at the time, I'm not sure exactly what they're using now and that's a problem when you're getting $5 a month and it's costing you 20 theoretically. I don't know exactly how much they were in the hole there but, obviously, the obvious assumption was that it's going to get cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and it's going to decrease from $20 to $1 or less.
And so, that's one thing that I think founders have to consider too is, okay, where is the market heading, where's the technology heading. You have to make some bets, I think it's consensus that's going to get cheaper so maybe that's the most novel insight per se but what are the other things that are going to be unlocked just at the foundational level without you doing anything else. And maybe an example for me is, a year ago, I was using OpenAI deep research, early version of it and I was trying to just do an analysis. Okay, give me an analysis about this market. I'm looking at this company, I want it to do, basically, analyst level diligence for me and it just wasn't good, it missed a bunch of companies, I was like, "Ugh, this isn't really useful." But it will get to the point where it is incredibly useful and so you have to, I guess, be prepared for that or assume, I think, that it's going to be better than you could even imagine in the coming months or years.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. One thing I try to get in the habit of doing is just retrying some of those things. Just generally with image generation, I'd say it was a pretty very easy down the fairway example where, 2022, Dall-E, some of them they were laughably bad.
Ryan Hoover:
Six fingers, four fingers.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, and the Will Smith eating spaghetti and it's like ...
Ryan Hoover:
That was great. That was art, that was peak art.
Turner Novak:
That was cultural. It became meme, right, because it was so bad.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, it was so bad, so good.
Turner Novak:
But then now it's suddenly, oh, it actually does get the fingers. And if you're not really paying attention to it, you might miss that stuff so you got to always watch and just see how they're going. So, that's actually one of the things that made me start using ChatGPT way more was when the image gen came out and I was like, "Oh, this actually ... This is really good." I think this was probably six months ago maybe when OpenAI, when ChatGPT had the native image gen.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
I think the interesting thing when you talk about ... So, the product is getting better, the costs are coming down, if you're using the newest, latest models though, they're still expensive. So, that's, I feel like, a tricky part of this is the product is better but, the cost that was coming down, it goes back up.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, yeah.
Turner Novak:
And then I also think a lot of these companies are going to have to raise prices or massively increase usage and adoption of AI in order to make the financial models make sense which is how people are investing in these companies when they get that big. So, I don't know, I don't know how it's all going to land but I think, I would say, in 10 years, it'll work itself out.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, it's going to be incredible.
Turner Novak:
The products will be better, they'll probably be cheaper so it's ... But between then and now, I don't actually know. Does the floor fall out in six months? Do we keep running for three years? I don't know.
Ryan Hoover:
Well, it's not going to get any worse.
Turner Novak:
You're saying the products get worse?
Ryan Hoover:
The foundational models.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, yeah, they're going to keep getting better.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, yeah. So, we're at the worst point that it will ever be right now. And even if it never got any better, we're still at the exploratory phase, we're still early 2011 in mobile when it's, okay, we have all these tools and this new ... We discovered new land essentially is the way I describe it but we're still in the fog of war. I don't know if you played StarCraft or-
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Ryan Hoover:
Where you're like, "Okay, we discovered this new world and we have this plot of land. We know what's here but we have no idea what's over there."
Turner Novak:
With just being able to create software so quickly, some people maybe call this taste, I feel like you think a bit more about craft. How important is craft in building products now when anyone can do it?
Ryan Hoover:
I guess it depends how you define craft, perhaps. I don't know. Taste has become almost like a hotly debated term. Yeah, I don't know. For me, I think about it, product building is back to the basics, who are you building it for, what is their goal and then, within that, I try to think about how do you think of it as a system? And this depends on what you're building. I personally love building software that multiple people interact with, that has human-to-human interactions. Like Product Hunt is an ecosystem of humans. If you think about Product Hunt almost 12 years old now, and if we did nothing, if we just left it and didn't add any new features of any kind, it would still just spin. Like the flywheel keeps spinning. I mean, it could stop.
Turner Novak:
Eventually, a hundred years in the future, maybe.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. And I guess, what I mean is more like the fact that software development and software has changed. So many people have built competitors and clones of Product Hunt and it just hasn't worked because it has this brand and it has this flywheel and it has this network and it just keeps spinning. And so I like to think about systems in that way. And then how do you understand the incentives of multiple different people? AngelList is also a really fascinating one too. So Product Hunt was acquired by AngelList. I sit on for four years afterwards, and I was mostly focused on the Product Hunt stuff, but occasionally worked on a couple of AngelList projects. AngelList also has a really interesting social... I don't want to say social network because that implies a lot of things, but a network of people. You have LPs and you have GPs and you have founders, and you have all these different nodes within a network, and they all have their own incentives, but how do you create a system that allows all of those people to help each other in a way?
Anyway, in abstract, I love those problems. I love exploring those systems because it's really fun to play with. And when you work with multiple people, that's when you can also build in growth flywheels and engagement flywheels in ways that is just not entirely software driven. I think if you're building a purely software driven product, there's lots of ways to create moats, so it's not always people driven. But if you have a people aspect to it, like a network aspect to it, it's just far more defensible and sustainable, I think, from competitors or just being unique in the market.
Turner Novak:
And humans still exist. We still make decisions about what we want, and we have emotions, so I feel like-
Ryan Hoover:
We have feelings.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Like a product might make you feel a certain way or want to do a certain thing. So yeah, I mean, humans won't go away. Maybe at some point the robots will completely take over, albeit bionic, but... Well, you mentioned something, you mentioned AngelList. So, Product Hunt was acquired by AngelList, and then is that when you started Weekend Fund?
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, yeah, it was right after the end 2016 acquired, started a Weekend Fund in middle of 2017.
Turner Novak:
And AngelList is basically a place for, like you said, people who run a small fund, people investing in funds, so you started Weekend Fund as to dogfood AngelList basically. Yeah.
Ryan Hoover:
Kind of, little bit. Yeah. So they'd been primarily SPV focused and they were introducing funds, so a way for them to basically all... You're on AngelList today, right?
Turner Novak:
Yep. Yeah, I still use AngelList for Banana.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. Yeah. So you know how it is. It's like everything in one, and so they're like, "All right, we're going to introduce funds." I was like, "Okay, maybe I'll raise a million dollars. Maybe I'll convince people to give me 1 million to invest in early stage companies." I was still CEO of Product Hunt, so I'm still running that. I ended up raising 3 million.
Turner Novak:
Oh, oversubscribed. Yeah.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. Way oversubscribed by 3x, killer, right? It's hilarious. Actually, to think about $3 million is like the smallest fund.
Turner Novak:
It's like a single pre-seed check nowadays.
Ryan Hoover:
I know. It's true, it's true. Yeah, it's so small, but at the time, very few founders were raising funds while they were operating a company. There's also stigma around it too. It was like, "Oh, okay, if you're investing or if you're raising a fund as a founder, especially a CEO, you're not seriously focusing on your company." And maybe there's some truth to that sometimes, but for me, I was like, well, I'm dogfooding, and I'm part of AngelList. AngelList culturally is very pro. Everyone should invest. Everyone who works at AngelList is encouraged to invest in companies. So yeah, started that fund and deployed it over two years into 40 something companies.
Turner Novak:
Nice. What was your stake in the ground of here's why it should exist? What I do, what I stand for?
Ryan Hoover:
I mean, you made a joke about, we don't need another podcast in this world. We don't need another fund in this world either. There's some truth to that, maybe. For me, honestly, it wasn't like I just wanted to invest. And I was like, this is so aligned with what I've been doing. I wake up in the morning talking to founders and seeing what's new. And I hadn't been investing at all to date because I was so focused. I didn't want signaling issues of being an independent company, a CEO of Product Hunt or any potential community backlash if they're thinking that I pumping-
Turner Novak:
Product Hunt is supporting. Yeah.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. So we instrumented some rules too at the company where we're like, all right, if you have any stake in any company, you cannot hunt them. Like it's just a baseline, like you can't post them on Products Hunt and things like that. But yeah, for me, I just wanted to try it, honestly. And yeah, it was also a way to see if I was good at it. Also, a way to make money. I wasn't taking any management fees at the time, because also if you do the math on a $3 million fund, it's like, Okay, it's a rounding error." But I'm actually glad I didn't because... Well, that fund will do well. So I'd much rather have the management fees deployed into companies we've backed.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. How did it go? What's the current stats on the fund?
Ryan Hoover:
Current stat. I mean, we invested in the seed round of deal, which... I mean, you know how venture is, it's like power law, depending on how you value it, deals on paper like a 10 x fund returner alone.
Turner Novak:
That's single position, 10 x return the fund?
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, yeah. Not the company, but the fund. I think individually like 400 x or something like that, I forget.
Turner Novak:
Nice. And I think I remember you tweeted something about how you completely returned that fund to investors. Am I remembering that, right?
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, yeah. I think it was about 18, almost 24 months ago. Venture market shifted at a ton since '21, and we had an opportunity to sell. We sold 15% of our position in deal to return the first fund. And in hindsight, it's like, "Well, shoot," if I held...
Turner Novak:
It'd be worth even more.
Ryan Hoover:
It would've been able to sell today for more than 2x that minimum. But also, I felt good about it because it was like, all right, LPs, were not getting any distributions then. Also, puts us in the clear, gets into carry. So now, okay, anything beyond that now finally get paid in carry. Just nice.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Finally paying off, not taking those masterpiece.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, yeah, I know. So yeah, that was great. But yeah, it's funny how venture is so parallel. We know it intellectually, the power law, but then when you see it, you're like, "Oh, man, just one company can make all the difference."
Turner Novak:
And you do a lot of experiments. I think that's your thing is you're always trying different things. What are some of the ones that you've done? Maybe the ones that work best, didn't work?
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, yeah. We're always tinkering. You're a beta user in a project we're working on. Thanks for kicking the tires. It's been really fun.
Turner Novak:
It's interesting, it's helpful.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, hopefully, hopefully. So, yeah, it's really fun. I mean, some of the projects we worked on, we built this tool called Rolodexter, and... So on Twitter, the thesis was like, shoot, there's a bunch of people that follow me, follow you on Twitter. And a lot of times portfolio companies like, "Hey, does anybody have an introduction to ramp or to whoever?" And in some cases we're like, "Oh yeah, I know somebody at ramp." But in many cases, more people know of us than we know of them. And so the theory is like, okay, if they follow me on Twitter, that's a good signal that I could probably DM them and they're probably going to at least pay attention and read my DM. And so we built a tool to be able to search through all of my almost 300,000 Twitter followers. Let's say half of them are fake, but still it's a ton of people who are in tech.
And now we can search and we use it for portfolio like B2B outreach. Like they send us a list of, here are the 50 companies that we want to reach out to. We search for them on Rolodexter, and then I start DMing and making introductions. It's also been useful for other things like diligence if we're trying to find some random accountants, let's say, to give us feedback in the accounting space. I can just search accounting counts that follow me on Twitter. And so that's been really useful. Given into some friendly investors and some founders too to be like, "Hey, you have a Twitter following, search your followers and use this if it's useful."
Turner Novak:
Was this thing you showed me a little bit a couple of months ago or is this an older, older one?
Ryan Hoover:
It's been a while. Yeah. It's been almost a couple of years since we've been using it.
Turner Novak:
Oh, got it. Okay.
Ryan Hoover:
I'll send you a new link to your followers too if it's useful.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, it could be useful. I mean, I definitely do that. I'll just notice like, "Oh, this person's like whoever." That's interesting like just DM them, see if they want to chat.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's also my rant against CRMs is like, "No one needs no CRM." I actually think a better angle of CRMs is like, "Who knows you, not who do you know." So I think there's a version of Rolodexter that could be more productized, much better than what it's now. It's super janky. It barely works, but that's actually why I'm so impressed by it because it barely works and it's extremely valuable for me.
Turner Novak:
Interesting. Okay. And so, what do you think that you do differently than other investors? You do a ton of Zoom meetings, right? You do a ton of...
Ryan Hoover:
There's different ways to play the game, I guess. Everything from your fun size. Are you a collaborative small investor, writing small checks? Are you leading deals? Are you someone who likes to hop on jets and meet founders in person? Or do you just live on Zoom and your PJs like I do every day. I had to shower to come meet you, man. Okay. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Man, that's a huge act.
Ryan Hoover:
I know. I had to shower and take a taxi.
Turner Novak:
And sweat from the taxi.
Ryan Hoover:
I know. Yeah, so I don't know. Honestly, I want to do what I want to do. I know it sounds super selfish, but also I think it's sustainable. I also want to do what I think I'm better suited for. So one reason why, even if we could raise a $200 million fund, let's assume we could, I wouldn't want to because now you have to lead deals. You have to sharp elbow, you can't be as collaborative with people. You honestly probably have to do more flying and meeting in person, schmoozing, and...
Turner Novak:
You're not a schmoozer?
Ryan Hoover:
I mean, I don't like transactional conversations. And I'll be honest, there's parts of investing I don't like. I know this is a transactional conversation when I'm speaking to a founder, you want money, I have money. Hopefully, we can build a relationship as well. But there's an element of that that irks me because I'm like, "I don't like that." I don't like rejecting people either because who am I to say your idea is not going to work? So, there's parts of that I don't like. There's parts of the investor to investor networking where it's like, "Hey, let's catch up."
Sometimes it's really energizing and intellectually stimulating, but also I just feel like it's so transactional. You want me to just tell you what companies you should be investing in? I want that too, don't get me wrong, but there's some social dynamics of investing that I don't like. And so for that reason, I try to live on Zoom, stay small, try to spend more time building things like Rolodexter, like products that give us leverage, that allow us to help in ways that don't require me to talk to people. I know that sounds like so robotic, but-
Turner Novak:
But it's like, if you think about adding value or whatever, you're doing it in your sleep. You don't actually do the work personally, it's just the things that you built are benefiting your network and the companies you invested in.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, that's the hope. Honestly, probably never charged for it, and it might not be used more than by 400 people. And that actually be success for me. If it's useful for 400 investors, that'd be great.
Turner Novak:
What have you learned over the past eight years of investing?
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Nine years, 10. I don't-
Ryan Hoover:
Just over eight, I guess.
Turner Novak:
Oh, wow.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. What have I learned?
Turner Novak:
Or anything you've evolved on?
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. I continually oscillate between... We're very much a generalist, both myself and Vedika. And what I mean by that is we're not super thesis driven, even though we have certain categories that we're interested in. And that's partly because everything's changing and we don't want to block herself also into a certain niche, let's say, and miss out on this really cool idea in a space that we haven't thought of or explored personally. I think that's the right strategy for us. I do oscillate between how valuation sensitive we should be and things like that. Because obviously, in hindsight you look back on the misses and like, "Oh, we passed because it was 30 mil post and it was pre-launched, and then it becomes a multi-billion dollar company." And of course, I wish I would've invested in that. But at that time, in that moment with the information we had, was it the right decision and just wrong outcome? I don't know.
Yeah, I don't know. I'm constantly questioning a lot of these things. And also thinking through even fun model, there's arguments to be made that we'd actually be making more investments, spreading wider bets. Because today we have so much activity and things are moving so quickly. And there's so much noise in really compelling spaces with multiple companies competing for the same thing. So, the end of the day is smart as I think I might be. It's like, I don't really know when it's this early, when we're asking precede first round. I don't really, really know if it's going to be successful. Anyway, we're not really answering your question, but this is actively something I'm thinking about right now is how do we think... Where is our bar and what does our fund model look like in the next fund, and how do we want to change the game we're playing and what's also working well? What do we want continue doing, which continue building more products, keep the fund small? Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Why is a small fund important? Do you want a bigger fund because it's cooler or you get more money, like why not?
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. I mean, it's appealing. I mean, if you could already do the math on management fees just on a $200 million fund with a small team is you're instantly wealthy. That's cool. Yeah, for me it's more like the game I want to play is I want to be collaborative and I want to be able to share deal flow. I want to be able to have other shared deal flow back with me. Well, so that's one thing. That's a selfish side. In raising a big fund and leading is the right strategy and the right choice for some founders, for sure. But I also think a founder in their very first round, theoretically get a lot more value by having, let's say, 20 investors on their cap table for the same amount of equity as one lead investor in most cases.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. And it might be someone who is a lead investor in 20 other companies, and will give you just as much time as one of 20. So if you get 20 of those people, you'll get in theory so much more. Version one, it might be somebody who's like, "I'm going to give you eight hours a day, six days a week." You could also get that.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. I think my position is if I put my founder hat on, the only scenario if I was to raise a round and... Let's say a first round, let's say, I'm raising $3 million. Only scenario where I'd take a two and a half million dollars check, like a majority of the round from a lead would be if I had a strong relationship with them and they were exceptional in an area that I extremely needed deep help with, and I had extremely high confidence in that. But in most cases, I don't think that's true. In most cases, I don't think most lead investors can do that for most companies. And so most founders say, okay, well, here's two and a half million dollars. They're offering it right now. I don't have to do a bunch more meetings with a bunch more investors, I'll just take the check. And I don't blame them. Maybe that's the right decision for them. But for me, I'd much rather have 20, 30, honestly maybe 40 investors, whether AngelList and small funds supporting me. And then, it's my responsibility to put them to work.
Turner Novak:
So from that frame of thinking, having a fund strategy that requires you to get 20% ownership means you're not going to be getting the best founders from your view. Like the best founders will probably...
Ryan Hoover:
No, I don't think that's necessarily true because I think great founders are taking money from lead checks like that. I guess, I'm speaking more from my position of what I would do as a founder. And maybe what I would do is not the norm, and therefore I shouldn't use that as a bias towards my fund strategy, but I don't want to sell a product I don't believe in. To be honest, if I'm leading around writing a $2 million check and squeezing out a lot of the other people, I don't know if I'm going to be as valuable as 20 other highly credible other people who are around the table. As great as I think I might be, I just don't think I'm going to be as helpful. So, I don't want to put myself in that position and play that game.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, there's a lot of cases where I'm second, third, fourth-largest check and they're like, great ROI, great value for the check. But it's like, if I would've done the $3 million check instead of the 250K or a 100K check, I don't think the ROI would be there to the same extent. So it's like, it's nice just being third-biggest check. The founder can rely on you, you do some stuff, you're not over promising, under delivering.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, yeah. I don't know, there's so many investors too. That's actually one benefit right now is there's so many people AngelList investing, so many people with funds. There's a lot of people that you can bring around the table that could be helpful in a variety of different ways.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. So in terms of the things you're investing in right now, you have seem to be doing a lot in consumer health. I know that maybe VC101 is consumer's bad. So why are you investing in consumer health?
Ryan Hoover:
Mostly because I'm just getting older. That's part of it.
Turner Novak:
After 38 you're like, yeah, awesome for this...
Ryan Hoover:
I'm trying to invest in my future survival.
Turner Novak:
Do you selfishly invest? Like when you're investing, it's like, what am I personally interested in?
Ryan Hoover:
Some of that, yeah. Yeah. I just find it way more fun. I mean, we invest in... No offense, and I won't name them. But no offense to some of the portfolio companies, I don't really care about the particular... Care is the wrong word. I don't find it particularly intellectually interesting, let's say, a particular category that we may invest in, but I think it's going to be a great business. And I believe in the team and the founder, that's okay too.
But when I meet a founder and I'm like, "Whoa, I love this space. I could be your customer." I feel so much more drawn to support. And I think I'll hopefully be more helpful, especially on the product side. So yeah, in the health stuff, some of it's I'm getting older, I've been exploring. Also, I had some knee issues a few years ago, so that led me down like the whole peptide rabbit hole, and I was like, "Oh, this is interesting. We have this technology that you can basically give your body instructions to do things and fix itself." I'm like, "That's cool."
Turner Novak:
Wait, so what is that?
Ryan Hoover:
So peptides, it's GLP1 are a peptide as an example. So I know nothing about science or biotech, to set the record straight.
Turner Novak:
Okay. It's just like a classic tech bro on a podcast.
Ryan Hoover:
Exactly.
Turner Novak:
We're just telling people things we know nothing about.
Ryan Hoover:
No. I just inject myself with needles every night and things seem to be okay. But the way I describe it is it's almost like telling your body, giving it little instructions to be like, "Okay, do this, produce this, or heal this." And the first thing that I started using was BPC 157, which is really well known in certain circles as reducing inflammation and just helping with muscle repair and recovery and injuries generally. And then I've explored some others too. There's this one that I experimented with that was quite interesting. It's called Melanotan. Have you heard of it?
Turner Novak:
Melanotan? Wait, is it different than melatonin?
Ryan Hoover:
Not the thing you take to sleep, but Melanotan.
Turner Novak:
Melanotan. Okay.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, I believe I'm pronouncing it correctly.
Turner Novak:
Melatonin, Melanotan. Okay.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, yeah. It's a strange word, but yeah, it's wild. You can take it in many different ways, but usually you inject it. And it tells your body to produce more melanin to get more tan. I use that an example of a peptide, because it's immediate. Within the first day, first 24 hours, your skin will get more tan.
Turner Novak:
What?
Ryan Hoover:
And if you want to... Yeah.
Turner Novak:
I'm going to check this out with my pasty white. I'm the whitest person you can imagine.
Ryan Hoover:
I'd be curious, what do I do for you.
Turner Novak:
Interesting.
Ryan Hoover:
And you can go too far though too. If you Google this, there are people who go from white to black and they look, of course, really strange.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Interesting.
Ryan Hoover:
The downside though, I took it for a little while because I was just curious. I was like, I would like to be more tan, but I don't want skin damage or sun damage. The only problem is moles or any blemishes will also get darker. And so the net result can actually be net negative because you might look more, less smooth in complexion. But anyway, that's a good example because it's like, "Wow, I can just inject myself with this and instantly it's going to change my entire skin tone."
Turner Novak:
Interesting. And it's like to the point, your body just whatever hormones or whatever your RNA is coding and saying like, "Oh, Turner, have a big nose, or be cross-eyed or make a sixth finger”.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, I don't know if we can go that far. Well, maybe, I don't know. Yeah.
Turner Novak:
Yeah, maybe. But it's basically like, "Oh, produce more metabolism or metabolitize. I don't know if that's word, the food faster, break it down faster.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like little programs, little instructions.
Turner Novak:
Interesting.
Ryan Hoover:
So anyway, that's just one of many different health things that I've explored. And I'm looking at companies in the peptide space right now because GLP1 of course are massive. And that's also opening people's eyes now to this whole other world of peptides for other types of improvements.
Turner Novak:
So, why are they good investments? Because I think VC101 will just say consumers really hard. You should do B2B SaaS. There's a spreadsheet. Why is consumer attract? Are there even attractive returns in consumer?
Ryan Hoover:
Consumer broadly?
Turner Novak:
Yeah.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. I mean, most of our investments are probably 80% have been B2B in nature, or B2B2C partially because historically that seems to be a clear path to revenue and clear path to success. So as much as I love the next consumer social play, we've passed on a majority of those. But you got to be open-minded too, and things change, culture changes. Technology, of course, is changing. We have a lot of shifts happening right now. When it comes to consumer health in particular, we have one GLP1. They're opening people's eyes to almost a different way to approach their health. It's not just like, here's the food pyramid and here's what your general practitioner says to do, and here the basics.
But it's things like that that are opening people's eyes to like, "Oh, there's a whole world of things that you could be doing off insurance, in many cases." It's also acclimating people to injecting themselves with needles. We're investors in a company called Mindbloom, which is I think the largest at-home ketamine provider for therapy. And they do a lot of really good work. Lozenges was their default application. They ship you some lozenges that you'd put in your mouth.
Turner Novak:
That sounds way better than a needle.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. But here's where I was surprised, they introduced injectable. So you can inject ketamine yourself at home. And I initially thought, "Oh, people are not going to want to do that." It's scary.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I hate needles, personally.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. Well, I think most people do. I think they're getting over that though because... I mean, in the case of GLP1's, people are like, "I want to look better. Okay, fine. I'll figure out this out."
Turner Novak:
Like if you're a heroin addict, you will inject yourself. You need it.
Ryan Hoover:
You'd put anything. Yeah. Yeah. You'll-
Turner Novak:
So if there's value from the needle, you will do it.
Ryan Hoover:
Totally. I don't know the stats yet, but from the information that Dylan, the CEO, has told me, people prefer the injections over the lozenges, even though the administration method is more uncomfortable for, I would think, most people. Anyway, the other thing about health stuff it's like, there's a ton of, we have all this data. I go to function health and get my blood work done all the time. And we have AI now to interpret all this information. There's so much material and ingredients to do really cool things for people's health. And then health is like, if you're not healthy, nothing else matters. It's a huge, ridiculously large market. Anyway, that's why I'm excited about it.
Turner Novak:
You tell me with AI, it's like, you get all your stats and puts in AI. It's like, "Oh, by the way, you probably have diabetes," and you're like, "Whoa, I did not know I had diabetes." I mean, the doctor might have not even picked that up because I didn't mention the things where you can pick anything that you might like. "Oh, you might have cancer right now based on the readout. Oh, this is good to know."
Ryan Hoover:
Oh, yeah. Do you ever get floaters in your eyes like little dots that float around?
Turner Novak:
No.
Ryan Hoover:
Okay.
Turner Novak:
I don't. So you're just looking at something and there's a black dot that's floating around around?
Ryan Hoover:
Kind of. Yeah, it's not uncommon.
Turner Novak:
Okay. I've never got that.
Ryan Hoover:
I do have it. It sucks. Even if I pay attention, I can see one sometimes.
Turner Novak:
Oh, actually I did get that when I was a kid. When I would close my eyes, I would see light designs sort of, but I had a bunch of eye surgery when I was younger. It might've been related to scarring just because I was born and I have strabismus. You basically have two cross-eyed eyes and I've just gotten... It's basically one of your eye muscles is way stronger than the other and it just messes things up. I think one's way stronger than it should be. One is way weaker. I don't know exactly. I've had five surgeries when I was younger between two weeks old and then seven.
Ryan Hoover:
Two weeks? You had surgery in two weeks?
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I had eye surgery when I was two weeks old.
Ryan Hoover:
Wow.
Turner Novak:
They notice something or something.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, that's scary.
Turner Novak:
I actually don't know how you do that on a two-year-old, but that's what my parents told me.
Ryan Hoover:
Wow. You don't remember it?
Turner Novak:
No. I think I have some flashes if I really dig hard enough. I could see that. So what's it? The eye floaters?
Ryan Hoover:
Well, so I had the eye floaters. I know that's not a big deal. People have them. It's fine. Benign. But then I was in New York walking around and I was like... It looks like a little hazier in the distance. And then of course I go to Chat and I start asking, "Hey, I got these floaters and sometimes it looks a little hazy." And they're like, "It could be these four things," and then the four things was like, "If it's this, you need to see a doctor now, today because he might go blind."
And I'm like, "Oh god." So anyway, the point is there is an element of the self-directed health stuff which spirals people into scary potential issues, but they don't have that. Then the reverse, which is you have no information, then all of a sudden you're blind.
Turner Novak:
And also, I mean, healthcare is like 20% of GDP, something like that. I mean, I think a lot of it's actually just old people just-
Ryan Hoover:
End of life. Last six months of their life is a huge portion of costs.
Turner Novak:
And if you think about somebody's compensation when you get paid at work, you've got a salary, there's taxes, health insurance, and health coverage is depending on how much money you make and all that stuff. It can be 15, 30% of your compensation is the premium that your employer is paying for your healthcare coverage. So it's a pretty massive market. Maybe housing is a big expense that people make food. Everyone buys food. The cost of being healthy or staying alive in some capacity, it's like an extremely high share of wallet.
Ryan Hoover:
It is highly more variable than housing and food too. Food can only go up so much. And housing, if you're rich, you can of course go up infinitely, but health is like no matter how wealthy you are, it can go up a lot.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I'm definitely someone, I do not pay a lot of money in my health. I don't go to the doctor ever, but I do, do other things. You work out and you eat in a certain way. Is that healthcare, like eating healthy, eating vegetables and things that are good for you versus McDonald's. Is that a healthcare thing? I don't know. You're thinking self-directed consumer that goes in your body kind of health related. So
Ryan Hoover:
I mean, it absolutely is. It's a portfolio plug because I think it's my duty as an investor. We're investors in Truemed, which helps consumers use their FSH and HSA funds to Peloton and AG1 and those types of things.
Turner Novak:
Oh, nice. I realize that's what they did. That's cool.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. It's really cool. Because I mean it's really encouraging consumers to use... Well, one, use their funds. Sometimes people just don't even use them. And two, it's a pain in the ass. It's not like you can just easily buy a Peloton bike using this. You have to get a doctor's note effectively. So they've bundled this entire process into the checkout flow of Peloton and some other companies like that. So it's pretty cool.
Turner Novak:
Speaking about investing, you've also, on Twitter, you talked about you're investing in funds. You said you invested in 30 funds that you're an LPN. Why are you investing in funds? What's the interest there?
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. I guess it started organically when... I think Andreas who you mentioned at the beginning of the podcast, former CTO of Product Hunt and friend. He's one of the first ones actually back in 2017 or '18. I mean part of it was just to support friends. Some of it was, I want to say to make money, but the honest truth is my checks are so small that a 10K check, 10X, if it's an amazing fund in 10 years is not going to do much for me financially. But I do also try to invest in funds I think I'll do well.
And then some of it's just to... sometimes it's been deal flow a little bit. It's not the primary motivation, but getting LP updates, and this goes back to why we're a small fund. It's like, "Okay. Well, if I was a lead fund having to write $2 million checks, if I get an LP update and there's this company that I'm like, 'Oh, that's really cool,' can I get an intro?" It's pretty unlikely that they'll be able to take a $2 million check after they've closed around, but they might take a 200K check.
And so I don't don't know. It's just kind of been fun too. I don't know. Half the things I do are just because they seem fun. For better or worse. I don't know.
Turner Novak:
I feel like too many people just optimize for making the most amount of money or getting the most social status or whatever from things. But then ultimately, did you actually enjoy doing that thing?
Ryan Hoover:
yeah.
Turner Novak:
Sure, you made a bunch of money, but you seem miserable. And you only live once, right? YOLO? So it's like, "Sure, making money is important," but do you actually like your life?
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
That's a big thing. It's like, "Are you enjoying it?"
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. There's a Porter Robinson song called Get Your Wish. That's all about that.
Turner Novak:
Oh, is it?
Ryan Hoover:
I'll leave it at that. But go to Spotify, go to YouTube, listen to the song.
Turner Novak:
In terms of investing in funds, what are ways that LPs can actually help GPs? Can they add value in some way?
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. I think the number one thing they could do is just do their capital calls. That's the number one thing. That's the baseline actually. That should be par for the course. We've had surprisingly very few issues compared to how many LPs we have. Over 350 LPs. But we have had a few LPs. One in particular just decided not to do their capital call and just said like, "I'm not doing it." And I'm like, "That's not how it goes. You made a commitment." So anyway, it's fine. It was a really, really small amount, relatively speaking.
Turner Novak:
Do you just adjust it out of the fund to just reduce the commitment kind of a thing?
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, we can just do that. I think in this particular case, it's like 0.2% of the fund or something. It's so small.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. That's what I did with 2022 fund. There's going to be LPs that don't have... They don't want to fulfill the commitment, so it's like I'll just reduce it. It's not a big deal.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. It's not a big deal. It's more for me personally, I'm fine with it. It is fine, but you need to approach it with be proactive and be upfront and apologetic. If you're not apologetic as an LP and you're backing out on your commitments, that's not cool and I remember that. So anyway, that's the one thing that LPs can do. I mean otherwise, I think the best thing that LP can do is make introductions to other LPs, I think really? I think so.
Turner Novak:
Why is that such a big deal?
Ryan Hoover:
I mean, fundraising is tough for most people, both as a founder and as a fund manager and the LP class as you know, it's like... I mean, you know a ton of LPs. You have a lot of LPs, but they're in the shadows, relatively speaking. VCs are out there. They're tweeting. They have blogs. They have like, "Here's how to email us and contact us." LPs are just like, "You don't know who's investing as an LP." Oftentimes they're intentionally not trying to be super out there. They want to work through networks.
So that's why I think introductions can be really helpful. And when I invest, I have an email list of LPs that I reach out to and this WhatsApp group, so I try to help there.
Turner Novak:
Talking about being public, you used to write a lot. What's the value of writing?
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. I mean, the beginning... I used to write every day. I published over a hundred blog posts before product in 2012 I think it was, or 2013. And it was really fun. It was a vehicle to explore ideas. Now, I don't write as much, but I still use it as a vehicle to like, "Okay, I have an idea. Is this right if I can't write about it? If I can't dissect the idea into written form, then maybe I don't understand it enough or I don't have a strong enough perspective?"
So I use it for that. I use it also to just throw ideas out there and serendipity happens sometimes. Some of the things I write about now today, it's totally not tech related, it's just personal stuff. I'll put it on the internet and see what happens. So I enjoy it.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. You had a post how status has changed in Silicon Valley in 2024, I think. I think that was the post. So what was the concept of that?
Ryan Hoover:
I don't know. Sometimes the thing gets in my head, I'm like, "Oh, interesting. I hadn't thought about that." And then I was like, "Okay, let me write a post and see what thesis... Or not thesis, but where it goes." It's changed a bit. It's like in 2010 when I first moved to San Francisco, raising money was... I mean, all these things are still all high status to some extent. Raising money is still high status to a large degree, but actually more so today it's like revenue showing off your revenue numbers.
Turner Novak:
Do you have a business versus did you raise money?
Ryan Hoover:
Exactly. Some of it's also credentialing. Credentialing again still matters, but people who are shipping stuff is more high status today because people are actually showing and demoing. And Twitter has also changed quite a bit too in how... Twitter has had a huge influence on tech I think more than people realize. Twitter, a few things changed. One, it became more algorithmic, just like TikTok style. So anyone with a few followers can still get a lot of attention. Two, they prioritize videos. And so videos are fantastic for product demos for a number of categories.
And so those things combine, allow, Twitter in some ways has become the launchpad for companies and startups because it has the tech town hall mindshare. And when an investor, whether they like to admit it or not, when they see some demo with a thousand likes, they instantly, one, have some sort of signal of, "Okay, there's something here maybe." And two, they're like a bunch of other investors probably saw this too. And so it creates more of this momentum to pursue if they have any interest in that company because they know everyone is looking at it.
Turner Novak:
It's addicting to be like, "I was the first, or I'm on the board of that company that everyone knows about."
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, exactly. And also we know how fast things move sometimes where it's like in days rounds are getting done sometimes and preempted. So anyway, it's just interesting to see how Twitter has actually shifted tech significantly and think how-
Turner Novak:
So more so than the press, like a TechCrunch article?
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. It's like social reach. If I think about a press and getting on TechCrunch was seen as high status thing and scarce. Now it's become less so. And Product Hunt has a role in the sense that when we started, actually... Who was it? Someone at YSD. I'm forgetting exactly who. It was like, "Oh, you're actually rethinking press when it comes to product launches." And my belief was always TechCrunch's job is not to promote your company or your startup.
And also they cannot do that for everybody. And so the press is actually not a good vehicle for product launches. And so Product Hunt served a role of like, "Okay, here's a community led approach to create a launch pad for companies." Before that, it was TechCrunch, then it was Product Hunt. In some ways Twitter is the launch pad now. So it's interesting how all this has changed.
Turner Novak:
Does status still matter? Like a status still something that you feel like people are ascribing to? Did I say that right? Aspiring to?
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. I mean, we can say how we don't want care about it. High status people don't talk about how important status is for them, but we all care. I mean, there's fundamental objective benefits to high status. It's like if you're selling a product and you have high status, it might open doors and give you access to more customers. It might be easier to recruit people. There's a lot of benefits to status. Even though I don't like the status games. And now when it comes to status though, I think it's also... If I was to think about, "Okay, if you care about status, how do you get status?"
Well, I would recommend not doing it in ways that are inauthentic. They might work actually in the short term, but then in the long term, either it's not going to be people are going to see through it. For example, if you're chasing a fad, all of a sudden you're like, "I am the person for X," because this is a high status thing. When it's not really your true calling or your too authentic skill or vibe, for lack of a better word. You might actually get a lot of attention today, but in two, three years when that trend changes is that going to be high status? So you-
Turner Novak:
You almost lose some status then when there's a new thing and you try to attach to that new thing and there's another new thing and you try to attach to that. And people are like, "What do you stand for?"
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We see that with venture funds. And I don't blame them too, but when they're super vertically focused in certain categories that are really, really trendy, there's actually business reason to do that sometimes. But then other times it's like, "Okay. Well, what happens when that is out of trend? Do you now pivot the entire fund and rebrand it to something else in this new category?" That's why partially we're generalists and we're open to any idea in any space.
Turner Novak:
That is a big reason for me too. I think if you just look at the data, when you invest in a hot category, the hottest category at the time is probably not a good category to be investing in. Maybe say that's AI today. What's the least sexy category? It's like CPG or something. Should you be investing in CPG? I don't know.
Ryan Hoover:
But do you? Do you invest in CPG?
Turner Novak:
I'm interested and I've made one CPG investment. I would like to more. I think anything can make sense. It's basically our job is we own a chunk of a company that becomes a big business, can do a billion revenue. It's like a public company, whatever. Doesn't need to be AI. Doesn't need to be deep tech. Is it a CPG company? Is it an accounting firm that's enabled by AI? I mean, any of these things could become a publicly traded company.
It's really the founders, the creativity. How fast do they move. Maybe on the market. Certain markets are better than others. In AI, you're seeing super quick adoption, but negative gross margins, tons of competition, CPG maybe like margins less attractive, but it's a bad... Nobody else is there.
It's like if you make a good product it's like... I think the interesting thing about CPG, if you just look at who... You want to compete against bad competitors. So if you look at what is the stereotypical CPG company, it's a big massive corporation. They have a lot of advantages, but they're mostly the shareholders are just passively owned index funds. And the people who all run the company, they don't really have that much stock in it, and they're mostly just getting paid off the income statement.
You get to expense stuff. You have a private jet that's paid for by the company. You're really worried about, do we hit our next earnings and next annual targets so I get my bonus, so I get my 20 million bucks and can keep the kids in private school and keep a couple of the houses that we have? The incentives on that are very different from somebody who like, "I own 60% of the company and I want it to be worth 10 billion. I'm doing these certain things. And so I think that's interesting about CPG, if I were to say that.
CPG is not a category that people are investing a lot in, so the valuations are a little bit more reasonable. So you have a lower entry point. Maybe the outcome isn't as big. Maybe it is. I don't know. But the only thing you can really control as is where you come in at. You're investing its... of a friend who invests in a CPG company at 1 million post.
Ryan Hoover:
Oh, wow.
Turner Novak:
And it's like it's his best investment. The valuation isn't even that high.
Ryan Hoover:
I mean, if that's a hundred mil exit, damn. That's a good return.
Turner Novak:
That's better than anyone who's going to get in SaaS and AI. It's like you just got to be open to that stuff. I mean, there's always pitfalls, all these different categories and you got to make sure you're backing the right founders and stuff like that. There's always ways to make money doing this. Basically people starting companies, building a product, give them some money, help them out, get out of the way. There's not much more you can do.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, that's why I try to understand the secret. What is the secret when I talk to founders, what did you figure it out? And sometimes I'm direct in how I ask it. Sometimes I try to ask it more creative ways, but sometimes I'm like, "What do you see that other people don't?" And just sit back and hear their response. And it's sometimes fascinating. Unfortunately, a lot of times I find a lot of people chasing ideas and spaces without a lot of secrets. I treated this the other day. I was like, I think if I was to raise money for a company... Assuming I need to raise money, but let's just assume that, I would only do it if I had a secret. Like a secret or a traction?
I would wait for one of those to be true first. And I find a lot of founders who don't have a secret and they don't have traction. They might do fine. I don't blame them because many people can raise money, just a pitch deck or less, but I don't know. You don't want to go that path. You don't want to raise venture when I don't think you have either of those two.
Turner Novak:
Why do people do it? Is it a status thing?
Ryan Hoover:
I mean, it's either that or you get a job sometimes. I mean, honestly, sometimes it's like, "Okay, I could get a job or I could be a founder. I want to be a founder and I want to build this thing." Sometimes it's delusion and I'm delusional. Every founder is somewhat delusional. I don't know. I guess I'm just a little bit more cautious on raising capital because I've done it before and I'm like, "I know what it takes to build a company, and I do worry that some founders go that path and then they realize a year or two and they're like, "Shoot, I shouldn't have raised money, or I don't actually want to build this."
Turner Novak:
Wow, that's pretty deep.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. I don't know. It's dark out there. People don't talk about this stuff because you can't. The founders can talk to other founders. They're close friends. But otherwise people don't talk about the difficulty of building.
Turner Novak:
So maybe it's an interesting way to end is there's like, "What is the thing that people don't talk about enough about how hard it is? Why is it so hard? Why is this such a big deal raising too much money?"
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. Well, you can't give it back. You can't just bounce. But once you do it, you commit to something and then you build a team and you tell people to quit their job and join you and then sometimes move across the country. And you have all of this pressure as a founder and people talk about how lonely it is because you can't be a hundred percent honest. You can't be honest with your board. At least I honestly wouldn't advise it. You can't be honest with your team entirely. Maybe you're honest, if you have a husband or wife or partner or something like. You're probably honest with them, I hope.
But otherwise, it's like professionally, you're isolated and you have to... In some ways, you owe it to the team to exude confidence because that's going to affect their ability to be motivated and execute. And inside, you might not feel confident. I've had moments during product time where I was just crying inside while smiling and trying to raise money and do a bunch of things is painful.
Because the inside was the opposite of the outside appearance that I was giving. So anyway, I felt that, and I have a lot of scars in a good way. I even get emotional thinking about some of those days. But I think it's all worth going through. Just know what you're getting into as a founder.
Turner Novak:
So how do you get through it?
Ryan Hoover:
Hopefully really good friends is the number one thing I think. And then also realize at the end of the day, if it all collapses, you're going to be fine. You're going to be able to get a job probably. I think most people, most founders are going to be able to get a job and they're not going to be in the streets. So there's some truths to that where it's like, actually, the worst case scenario is not that bad. It's just like when you have so much of your identity and your time and you commit all these people to do something, it's just so much pressure. That pressure is tough when you've raised money, especially and built a team.
Turner Novak:
Yeah. I can't fully relate. I've never started a company, company, but there's definitely an identity with just my identity like I am. It's like, "Oh, I failed. It didn't work." You want to be successful. Everyone does.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. Totally. And then when things go work... The highs are so high though. They're so great. It's just the lows are tough.
Turner Novak:
I just had a company get acquired and I'm going to do nice. It's not going to return the fund or anything, but it's more than we invested. It was like return a bunch of cash back to LPs. It's like, "Ah, first one in fund two."
Ryan Hoover:
Sick.
Turner Novak:
Pretty cool. It's like, feels good.
Ryan Hoover:
That's great. That's a great feeling. I think the best feeling of that is when I've been able to email LPs and be like, "Here's money back." That's great.
Turner Novak:
Because I've been asking for it. So it's like, "Here's your money back."
Ryan Hoover:
"I promised I was going to give you your money back, hopefully more than you get me."
Turner Novak:
Yeah. Well, that's a great way to end it. We're all happy. We have all made a bunch of money and returned capital LPs.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah, just give us 15 years.
Turner Novak:
Can people follow you, find you anywhere? What should they do?
Ryan Hoover:
Twitter. Yeah, I'm on Twitter, Hoover. ryanhoover.me is my website with blog posts from a decade ago.
Turner Novak:
Weekend.fund.
Ryan Hoover:
Weekend.fund.
Turner Novak:
The website.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah. What else am I on? I don't really have a TikTok. I do technically. You could find it, if you search. You'll find some embarrassing TikTok videos, but maybe I shouldn't have said that.
Turner Novak:
Signature Block. Do you guys still write Signature Block?
Ryan Hoover:
We haven't. I mean, it's still there. We intentionally also focus on evergreen content, so if you're investing or thinking about building a fund, signatureblock.co has a bunch of content on there.
Turner Novak:
Nice.
Ryan Hoover:
You've contributed to it.
Turner Novak:
I think I have. It think I've read every post too. They're all good. It's like, "How to raise your fund or how to do investor updates. How to actually add value to portfolio companies," I think was maybe one of them.
Ryan Hoover:
Yeah.
Turner Novak:
It was a lot of fun. I got to catch my flight in about an hour and 45 minutes.
Ryan Hoover:
Oh, shit.
Turner Novak:
But no, I should be good. This is a lot of fun. Thanks for doing it.
Ryan Hoover:
Dude, good seeing you.
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i'm impressed that Ryan's haircut and hairline hasn't changed in over a decade.