Ryan Hoover (Product Hunt / Weekend Fund): “We need more entrepreneurs”

After founding Product Hunt, Ryan Hoover launched Weekend Fund, an early-stage fund investing in startups around the world. The fund started in 2017 and recently closed Weekend Fund 3 with over 350 LPs. STATION F’s team virtually sat down with him to learn more about the fund’s model and ambitions.

How did you decide to create ‘Weekend Fund'?

Back in 2017, I knew I wanted to start investing. I had several options such as angel investing - but I didn't have much money - or becoming a scout for another fund. However, starting my own fund sounded a lot more attractive to me. At that time I was Product Hunt’s CEO and AngelList was introducing their new Venture Funds platform to simplify the legal setup, tax reporting, back office operations, and everything else that goes into running a fund – other than the fun part: Meeting, backing, and supporting founders.

How do you differentiate yourself from others?

We have a broad global network and we see all kinds of companies across consumer and B2B. Most founders know me through Product Hunt, many of whom launched their products on the platform at some point over the last 7+ years. This familiarity makes it easy to build rapport and a connection with founders in the first few minutes of meeting. I’ve also found that founders tend to speak with less guard when sharing their story with someone that’s also gone through the ups and downs of entrepreneurship.

Vedika Jain and I focus our support on areas we have experience in: Product and community. Transparently, the most fun part of investing is jumping on calls with founders to provide feedback and strategize. It’s way more fun to get involved in the operational side of things and serve as an extended team member to the founder.

But of course we’re not experts in everything. This is part of the reason why we raised from several hundred LPs, most of which are operators and founders with deep experience across industries and domains.

You mentioned your network is key. It’s also linked to your unique approach to LPs.

We have a slightly different approach to how we are raising capital. The first fund we raised was $3M with around 40 LPs. Our second fund was $10M with approximately 120 LPs. Our most recent fund includes over 350 LPs. Our goal was to build a large community of operators and founders, many of whom are writing small checks under $10K. They come from notable companies like Google, Facebook, Stripe, Figma, Apple, etc. and know people who are leaving to start their own companies. Other LPs come from early-stage startups with highly relevant experience to support Weekend Fund founders.

Our goal is to find people who are committed and enjoy supporting the portfolio. They often jump on a 30-minute call to help a founder with something they’re an expert in. It’s important to us to keep LPs updated on the fund and the portfolio by sending a comprehensive update every two months, introductions to new portfolio companies, why we invested, and why we’re excited about them. We shared our template here for other fund managers.

Our next challenge is to build upon this foundation to create a community that’s genuinely helpful and scalable as the fund continues to grow. Maryam Mazraei recently joined the fund to double down on our community building strategies.

Back on your investment strategy, are you investing in companies in Europe or in other geographies outside of the US?

Definitely! Most of our investments are in US-based companies but another ~20% are located in India, Europe, Canada, and Brazil. The way we think about entrepreneurship – and that may sound cliché but that’s true – is that talent is everywhere and distributed working will continue to create more economic opportunity worldwide.

We’ve seen huge evolutions in the startup ecosystems around the world and especially in Europe during the past years. What's your take on these changes?

There is criticism that there are too many investors on the market but I think it’s actually a good thing. Entrepreneurship has the potential to dramatically improve quality of life and solve big problems. We need more entrepreneurs.

We have seen so much change in the past 2-3 years. Venture capital will look very different in this next decade.