Today, I am thrilled to be chatting with Ryan Hoover. Ryan is the founder of the Weekend Fund, where he invests in your next favorite thing. Before starting the Weekend Fund, Ryan was the founder of Product Hunt, which as many of our listeners know, is the place to discover your next favorite thing. LPs in current Weekend Fund II include Mark Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Chris Sacca, Steven Sofsky, Troy Carter, Minnie Ingersoll and many other luminaries. Ryan, thank you for coming on the show today.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Minnie. Appreciate it.

I was thinking that we'd start with Product Hunt because I think, Product Hunt and Weekend Fund probably have a lot of similar DNA and, you know, hundreds of thousands of products have launched on product hunt.

And I thought, I’d just ask you to give us the basics there.

Yeah, so, the quick summary of Product Hunt is it started about just over seven years ago, started off as a side project. I'm kind of a nerd and a weirdo that loves to discover new technologies, new products, and, you know, play with new apps, not to use them, but just out of curiosity, and so Product Hunt started off as an email list in the beginning and grew into a website with a community of people now around the world.

Launching their products, whether it's like a teenager in the middle of nowhere launching their first app, to zoom launching their new like apps platform. So it really ranges, from, any makers to big giant companies

And do different products launch in different ways. Like, can you just share your perspective on launches?

Yeah. I mean, the people like to think about launching usually as like this one-time thing but I see startups as like a series of launches really. And your first launch might be 10 friends or 10 people in your target demo. Like. Here's this thing that I'm working on, what do you think, and then, from there, maybe you scale it up to more people and eventually you reach the public, but then even after that. You know, you're, you're still always working on the product. And so you're always launching and trying new ideas.

when people do launch, though, people tend to over-focus on like the vanity metrics of it. Historically people are like, oh, I want to get in tech crunch or, Oh, I want to be top of proton. And I. want to like, see my Google analytics, chart spike up and

I won't like, knock anyone for celebrating those like vanity metrics innocence, but like, I talked to a lot of portfolio companies about this, um, you know, advising and like when they launch how they launch.

And, um, and we just, the first question I always ask is like, why, what is the purpose of the launch? Like, what is your goal?

And what should those goals be? And do you have tools you can recommend to achieve those goals?

Yeah, I think the categories of goals are, um, and they can be multiple at the same time, but usually it's a user acquisition is one goal, uh, to launch, like I want to acquire users. Another one is, um, recruiting. And then, um, the other is around fundraising. I'd say those are, I guess the fourth one is sometimes like business and BD kind of partnerships and like serendipity that can come from, you know, launching and being something on product 10 or in the press.

Um, but usually it's within like one or two of those kinds of categories. And so once, once I sort of understood like, okay, what the goal is, then the question is, okay, where are the, where are the users for that particular goal? So if it's user acquisition, and you're launching, let's say, um, You know, and at four 13 year old, kids, let's say you probably tech is probably not the place where you like are going to get a lot of like user adoption.

Um, and then find those channels and then we'll work with them on the messaging and outreach to, to press, if they're doing kind of a press strategy.

I feel like you had great success with the press at product tent. Do you have particular advice for founders around using the press?

Yeah. I mean, the, we actually focused a lot on press in the beginning at product hunt, which I generally don't advise, uh, meaning I, I think a lot of founders focus too much on press and kind of going back to the band, the metrics concept, lumped we'll do it for the wrong reasons. but with product 10, it's different in that the people that read the tech press of the same people that would use products have in early days.

And so. We focused a lot on that. And the way that we did that was, one just frankly, building good relationships with relationships, with a lot of good, um, reporters and technology. And we did that by helping them, trying to help them at least. And, and so one specific tactic tactic sounds transactional, but one specific thing we did was over time, I got to know some of these reporters.

I knew what they were interested in and when I saw something that was related to their area of focus, whether it was consumer social or healthcare or whatnot, I would just DM them on Twitter and say, um, Hey Sarah, here's, here's this product just launched your product. And it looks really interesting.

Here's why I think it's cool. If you want to connect with the founder, let me know. And I'll just make that intro really easily. The founder love that cause they're like, Oh great. I would love to talk to Sarah at tech crunch and um, you know, I'd love to get more visibility. Um, and for them they were like, Oh good.

Here's Ryan's not selling me. He has no direct like incentive to like pump this company. Um, and yet this is relevant to what I'm into. So. We did that a lot in the beginning, and I think it helps build trust. But then what reporters would also do is link back to product hunt. So in the early days it would be, you know, here's this new product, here's a story.

Um, we found this on product hunt. Here's a link to product hunt And so I just think building those, those connections relationships and trying to be like authentic and helpful is really helpful.

That makes sense? Do you have thoughts on community building and lessons you learned from product hunt on what works and what you look for in communities

.  A lot of people talk about coming into the building as like this warm fuzzy thing. And then a lot of people don't really tie it back to like the business goals, which generally come off a little bit more sterile, but the reality is community is a vehicle or a way to increase word of mouth to, increase your, your brand, the value of your brand, um, as well.

Ultimately those things decrease CAC. they create more of a defensible moat in the, in a marketplace. You know, if you take two companies and really competitive environments and you have one that has a really strong community of people who are like self-organizing and helping each other, and. Uh, you know, spreading the word about your company, you're going to do a much better job than the other.

And so, um, yeah, I thought a lot about community and that's ultimately what product hunt is like the, you know, I'm proud of the product and, you know, even the technical side of things, but that's not like where the risk is and that's not where the main value is. It's really this, this central hub that we built to bring people together and help each other.

And, and so the other thing I'll say about community too, is a lot of people, they often mix up like audience with community. They look at an audience they're like, look at my community and it's like, well, if your audience is only listening to your broadcast, not interacting with each other. or especially not creating any kind of content, like that's not really a community.

And so a big, a big difference between audience and community is people that have to interact with each other fundamentally, like they have to communicate whether it's, you know, directly or indirectly, it could be something like, uh, like Cora has a community of people who are sharing answers to questions.

And that's creating a lot of content, which is valuable for each other. And, you know, ultimately, uh, community is super powerful because you, as whether a content creator or company, you don't have to always create that content. You don't have to like service everybody over time, the community services itself.

And that can be really, really powerful.

interesting. So that's, that's not just how many followers I have, I guess. Um,

Yeah, but, but I will say like an audience's good stepping stone towards a community. It's a lot easier to build the community. If you start with an audience, because over time you can essentially segue that, that audience into a community. And I think a really good example of this is, um, Lenny risky as a newsletter.

On substance that he started writing a year, maybe year and a half ago. And he he's built a really good following. It's a paid newsletter. He's doing really well. And then, you know, maybe it was six months ago, he expanded into a community. So people that are paying subscribers to his newsletter can join his Slack.

And what that's enabled is, you know, really it's increased retention because people now get the newsletter, but they also get a lot of value from participating in the community. And furthermore inside that Slack group, which, which I'm actually in, they, they can help each other as well. And they can also create content that then, you know, helps the newsletter like is, is fed into the newsletter as well.

And so in some ways the community is the strongest asset that I think Lenny has built, uh, beyond just like the email lists that he's created.

Do you have advice for someone who wants to build community or maybe someone trying to build product hunt for podcasts, or just generally learn from what you've built?

Yeah. early in the product, end days, we saw a lot of product hunt for X, meaning like product for music product, for like health foods product for somebody else could have the product come from podcasts at some point, too. And, uh, And yeah, you see people kind of riffing on different patterns or trends, like right now in clubhouse, we're seeing a number of people, also building clubhouses for X, like clubhouse for, sports conversations or clubhouse for like a gen Z younger audience, um, with like more creativity and like self-expression.

And, and so you see these kind of trends and I think. Most of the products. And in fact, all of the product for X products never really worked. The model of like this daily leaderboard to discover new things, doesn't really work for a lot of things.

Like one, it has to be a type of thing that you want to discover on a daily basis, like frequently. too, you also have to hit some sort of like critical mass of users where. You know, there is some level of curation, three certain products. They have to be very targeted to like a very specific audience.

So it can't be like super general. Uh, an example of that is like product hunt for video games is too broad. It has to be like product for mobile video games or ask to be like, or even maybe more narrow than that. and so I think a lot of people just kind of like didn't fully understand the dynamics, like the subtleties of like why product hunt works.

The way it does for like tech and products and try to apply that model to these other verticals. so it's, I think understanding like why something works is really, really helpful and important because once you understand why product works, then you may realize actually no, that I wouldn't model my idea off after product and the way that, like system, or community inter-operates

any other lessons learned that you now look for when you're investing or big product or feature unlocks that you had.

To be honest, it, there's a bunch of features that we launched that were like helpful, but fundamentally the core feature and The core value that people come to is that, that homepage, frankly. So we, yeah, we have search and we have like collections and we have, uh, comments are more advanced and we have even like badging kind of systems, all these other things, but like, technically if you've probably removed all of those things, 80%, 90% of products and value would still be a list of products and like a conversation with the maker.

And that's actually, I think true for a lot of products. If you look at like Twitter is a good example, I think where. Tutors added a ton of things, but if you took away almost everything and just kept it to, uh, you know, even just 140 character like tweets, um, with like no gifts, no images, no live video, no spaces, none of that stuff.

It would still be almost as equally as beneficial or valuable for people. And I think this is where it gets to like consumer products generally tend to be. There's usually like one single thing that they do really, really well. And there's a bunch of stuff around in the peripheral that like maybe the power users like and use, but fundamentally in the majority of the, the, the user base is like using that one single thing.

And that's where I think a lot of founders make the mistake of, they have an idea and then they build the first version and it doesn't really take off. So they add more features. They add more features and they add more features. And then. Then now they have like a ton of things to manage, but furthermore, the user doesn't even know what to focus on because now you have all these things.

And so, anyway, I think the older I get, the more I realized for consumer products, how important it is to have like that singular focus, like what is a singular primary mode of interaction. And then just iterate on that, that single piece, rather than adding a bunch of things.

Hmm. So if it doesn't take off at first, keep iterating on that one thing.

I think so or change, like, will you go back to clubhouse too? Um, cause before clubhouse there is talk show. And did you ever play with talk show or do you know much about it? Okay. So it's actually quite similar to clubhouse. It was a, basically an easier way to do a podcast. So instead of, you know, scheduling a call and jumping on zoom, like we are right now, you could actually go on talk show and you can invite me and it could be kind of impromptu, but it would actually, record the audio through the phone.

And then it would also allow listeners to listen at the same time and ask questions. And so you had like, traditional kind of podcast recording with like this live audience kind of interaction. And I used it a few times. It didn't really grab me. It wasn't super compelling, but fast forward, Paul and the team ended up changing the directions.

And it's very similar to talks about clubhouses wildly different, because it's all about, you know, these rooms that you can jump into. And it's about live conversation. It's not about scheduling a podcast. It's really just about serendipitous conversations. and I think that's a really good example of how they were able to like, take little bits of talk, show that worked and then flip the, not only the framing of, of the entire experience, but also the product experience itself.

So let's talk about the weekend fund and I imagine that some of what you've learned about launching products, and helping products grow and building community is stuff that you're evaluating it at weekend fund.

Yeah, we, so we invest, uh, broadly, so we'll invest similar to product. Uh, we invest in most things, um, or we're open-minded to invest in those things from consumer to B, to B we, we tend to avoid hard sciences, I think the way that we view our investments are. Really often based on like two different, lenses you might call them.

Uh, one is, we like to invest in companies that are capitalizing on a consumer behavior shift of sorts. So essentially what is different in the world? How are people changing their lifestyle or changing their preferences now today, something in a way that, that didn't exist before and how are they capitalizing on that?

And so one example you could say, like remote distributed working is like a huge, huge shift. There's so many different things that has impacted, and we find it really, really interesting to think about like, and meet founders who are, uh, observing and having some sort of insight into those shifts that, um, that, that are really built for the future. Um,

do you think a lot of that is intuition and vision, or do you, um, do you yourself or do. Founders often look at like data on how lifestyle

Yeah, I think the thing that gives us the highest conviction is when we meet a founder and we learn some things that maybe are counterintuitive or surprising for us.  If they truly understand the space and have a good perspective of the future.

I think sometimes really good ideas can be very subjective, especially in. Consumer social, where you don't really have metrics to back certain things up. But we, we like to see somebody who's capitalizing on that sort of consumer behavior shift.

other shift though, is that's like one, one big shift. The other is technology shifts. And whether that's things like AirPods or, you know, smart speakers, basically what technology is available today. That's allowing founders to build something new. That was impossible before.

And the, the beauty is that whenever there is an interface change or big shift in technology, it essentially opens up, uh, opportunities for early stage companies to compete with these incumbents whether it's. Today, it might be audio and invoices being one category. I'm still really excited about VR, even though a lot of people are really pessimistic.

So with VR or anything else, how do you know if it's something that's hot versus a big disruptive trend?

Yeah, I think that's the billion dollar question that a lot of investors try to figure out, um, especially when you have it product and it's, it's actually interesting. And that we see these trends kind of emerge over the years. Like there was a time when. Uh, remember secret the, the secret app?

It was really hot

Yeah, extremely hot, but it is always interesting to see these apps like that blow up. This is 2015 or six, maybe 14, actually. And when that happened, we saw a lot of other products launch on pH that were all about anonymous sharing or ephemerality or similar types of themes. And.

What we ultimately found is none of those really took off. I mean, I guess whisper did. Okay. I don't know where they're at right now and maybe blind is doing okay. But some people are betting that like the future of, of social is going to be more, uh, femoral and more anonymous and it didn't really happen.

Um, I know, think, and. You know, then there's there's chat bot rise. So then there's a whole moment where a bunch of chat bots would be launching on product end. Cause everyone's like the future. Like there's no more interface. It's always going to be texts. It's going to be a chat bot that you interface with.

And, there are some, some good examples. I think companies that have been successful there, but it hasn't fundamentally changed the way that people interface with technology all that much. and so anyway, to your question, I think that's the big, big question is trying to figure that out. And I think it's a very contextual decision.

I don't think there's like a formula. You can put things through to say like, this is, you know, a trend versus a fad. but I think the way that we tend to look at it is fundamentally humans have certain desires and like needs. And a lot of those desires are shifted and shaped by a reduction of friction.

And so going back to the interface shift we had, at one point we had desktop computers that would dial up on the internet and that took forever and it was really slow, but we use that because that's all we had. And then eventually we got broadband and that was faster and it was easier and less friction for us to, you know, check our emails and then we got laptops.

And then we got phones and these things sit in our pockets. And I think this isn't within arm's reach for like, I think in 90 plus percent of people's day, even when they're sleeping.

so these are closer. And then, you know, next thing is we have AirPods, which, um, you know, are now in your ear. You don't have to actually pick them up to engage with them. And then soon we're going to have, you know, some AR kind of experiences that are like literally in front of your face. And then eventually we're going to have interlink and things that are in your brain.

And so what I'm getting at is like, Technology basically has inevitable future of like reducing friction to engage. And as this friction is reduced, it will shift people's engagement towards that because people are fundamentally trying to, to accomplish a goal, but do so with the least amount of effort or the least amount of work.

that's kind of one frame or lens. I think that we look at things as like what needs to solving fundamentally for the human. And is it some dramatically more efficient way to achieve that particular goal?

Okay. So now I've got my AirPods in my ears. I've got my AR on my glasses and I've got smart speakers all over the house. Do you have any thoughts on like how our human interactions change?

Yeah. I mean, I think it's, it's just a new way to interact with technology. And so one fascinating thing is when you meet some kids, some kids now are, accustomed to speaking to, electronics. So it's whether it's a TV or it's like some other device in their home. They started talking to it and it can't listen.

It doesn't actually have a smart speaker inside of it. And that's, that's just interesting. Like, it's just a really good illustration of how quickly human behavior changes based on technology and how it just interfaces with, the human, whether it's touch or voice. so that's an interesting shift, which when you think about like generational shifts, you know, we're, we're.

We have a generation now growing up that is accustomed to talking to two things.

Yeah. I find that really interesting. It's like, I want to pause you and rewind to, like, I feel like I should be able to touch the screen and pause. Like it's like to not just,

yeah. Yeah. Well, and then, and then going back to the friction piece, like Bluetooth headsets, whether it's air pods or others, that, that also is getting the point where the world is starting to look a little bit closer to like her, the movie. Where they wear these headsets, you know, everywhere. And, um, you know, Susie, my partner here, she she's often the AirPods in her hear her ear, even when nothing's playing, she forgets that they're in there.

so anyway, I, I just think it's really interesting. And at the same time there aren't a lot of, massive successes yet. I think clubhouse being the most obvious right now is, is like an audio. Kind of first experience, um, we're investors in a company called voice flow, which building like the web flow for voice apps.

So you can create your own voice app in the browser without code or anything.

Oh voice apps in the browser. I'm sure we're going to see a lot more of that. Uh, any other tips from product tend to, as we move into evaluating products that weekend fund, do you source from product 10?

Um, you know, we, occasionally we do reach out to companies that are on pH, whether they did good or not. Uh, it's not, not as much of like the factor. Um, I think, um, um, folks are really signal of interest among the product and community. And they're not necessarily like a signal of like, this is a great business.

Um, I would say that actually there's no correlation. Um, other than just like, there seems to be some, something interesting about this product. I think it's a very contextual thing too, in terms of what we look for, because, uh, evaluating a B2B product is very different than like a consumer product. I think if it's like a consumer social product, that is when we have to. have a very, let's say high standard for, strong product thinking.

Cause I think it's such a difficult space to, to Excel in. And I, I love talking to founders that have a really strong perspective and nuanced way of thinking about consumers, especially SU social.

Hm. And so that conversation you're asking them a About the user experiences where you're, you're honing in.

Yeah, kind of, um,  like let's take, um, dispose one example. So we're investors in dispo and, for those that don't know, uh, disposed by, um, small team Daniel Lyssa CEO, David doebrick is, uh, an executor as well. And they co-founded the company. And dispose really tapping into an interesting theme that we're seeing right now.

And part of it's going back to this generational and kind of a consumer behavior shift and the app, the way it works is like a disposable camera. Yep. It used to be called David disposable and you open it up and you have a disposable camera with all the installs. It kind of like aesthetic of a disposable camera and you can take a photo, but you can't look at it until 9:00 AM the next day.

And so, um, that that's one aspect to it. The other aspect is you can create these roles, which are basically shared albums with your friends. So let's say you're at a party or you're at a wedding you're you're, um, you know, with friends, you can actually create your own role and take these photos and you won't be able to see him until the next day.

So it creates like this delayed gratification to the next day to see all those photos. But the real key focus for them is creating a culture around, less judgment and to stay in the moment. What do you mean by that? Is. Today, when you take a photo, especially like if you're posting on Instagram, you're, you're looking at this, you're trying to line it up perfectly and you look at the photo and then you deleted or are you like, Oh, that's not good enough.

And you're, you're basically out of the moment, you're now looking at this photo and you're thinking about how others, people on the internet are going to look at it and proceed it. And so with dispo going kind of more back to the question when I spoke with Daniel about it, a lot of the conversation was around like, W, you know, first off, like, why do people need another photo sharing app?

Like what, what is your thesis? Like, how do you see the world, you know, in different worlds, he kind of described what I just described. Um, uh, it was their perspective. Uh, and, um, and so, yeah, it's, it's, uh, there's also behaviors too, where people are creating like shared fit and stuff on Instagram. And like, there's, there's always like a merchant behavior that people, um, I think smart founders can like identify and then build for.

And those are the types of things that we try to try to understand that it's like, what's your perspective of the future. And then what evidence do you have that, you know, people really, really want this

Great. Let's stay on those big future trends. I know that no code is one that we both find interesting.

yeah, I've been been following that for a while now. I think what makes me really excited about it, I wrote a blog post about this a few years back is that Dreamweaver was my gateway drug into building software products. And. For those that may be younger, that don't know what dream Weaver has, but it's like, a Wiziwig, desktop app to create a website and put it on the internet.

And so if you don't know HTML and CSS and all those things, you can use Dreamweaver to actually do that. And so I built my first site in, in high school, uh, using Dreamweaver and it just made it more accessible for me to do so. And that was like, when you get a taste of like building something and creating something for the first time, it's like, it's magical.

You're like, Oh my gosh, I can actually do it. And. fast forward to today, uh, you know, no code is sort of this term used for, tools that allow people to create things with without code, essentially. and so voice low I mentioned earlier, that's a, that is a no code tool for creating voice apps.

You open up the browser, you drag and drop and create your own voice experience. There's air table, which people see it as like a spreadsheet, but it's actually a database. And like historically only engineers would create and manage databases. There's a bunch of others. And I love that because it gives it more accessibility. But also it's not just that, Oh, if I'm not an engineer, I use these tools. It's actually great for engineers to use too, because. Like, why would an engineer, why should they be spending their time rewriting code, you know, essentially reinventing the wheel when they could use like a no-code tool to skip a few steps or move faster, or maybe prototype an idea, you know, before they know that people like want this thing.

And so this really ties back to product hunt too. Like,

I am a big fan and supporter of people building just for the sake of it, you don't have to build a company, just build it, build anything.

And I think product 10 is not, I think, but I know product has really this community of people that is intended to support people to build.

And so when you combine like no code, which gives people more access to build and, you know, theoretically there'll be more and more products built because of the no code movement. You also need product hunt too, to give them support and community around that.

And I feel like just like no code is making it easier for non-techies. Uh, just like there's so many tools now for techies to become creators. And so kind of, no matter which way you're coming at it, you're getting hooked on creating. .

There's also, um, the old cliche too, is like, you know, the, the business, the business person, trying to find like a technical co-founder to like build their new startup idea. And now there are people who just build everything in no-code. So they pieced together Zapier and air table. And, maybe they use web flow for their website and a bunch of other things, and they have a product that's fully functioning and they built it in like a weekend.

So, um, yeah, I'm a big fan of people just trying and building and launching and experimenting.

Is it fair? Would I be remiss not to ask you for your own productivity hacks? Like I just feel like you must have the most optimized to do lists of any of us.

You know, honestly not, I don't even use it to do list.

Are you going to your home screen right now?

Yeah, I was looking at

I was. Uh, so I'll, I'll recommend a few, products that, um, as it relates to like productivity and things like that. Vertica who works with me in the fund. We recently switched to front. do you know front the email app?

So, Matilda and team there are from the same Y Combinator batch as us. but up until recently, we haven't actually used front, front is fantastic. I love it.

and it's sort of email collaboration it's I haven't used it, but I know it, but it's sort of a shared inbox of some sort, which is why you can see each other's drafts.

Yeah, well, most people it's designed originally for teams like companies, um, maybe like free pick your support team. but we just find that even for a two person team wildly efficient It's it's great because it's perfect for collaboration. It allows like Vatican in myself to have like inbox chat within particular emails.

So let's say email comes in and instead of like going to Slack to talk about decisions, or like, how do we respond? We chat inside the front. And it just makes it wildly more efficient. Um, the other thing is as shared drafts. So like her, I can like write an email draft and then share it with each other to like, do copy editing or anything like that.

it has a few other features, but it's really good for collaboration.

. So a high recommend that, um, what else do I use? That's uh, Hmm. Uh, I don't, I don't use to do lists.

Um, I kind of assume that if it's important, it'll come back to me and, and I just sort of keep it in my head. I wouldn't recommend that necessarily, but it's just the way I operate.

I totally have the same. And once I had my children, I was like, I don't have time to read the news, but if it's important enough, the news gets to me somehow.

Yeah. I think there's some, some truth to that. And it's like, if it's really important or if it's not important, like why, why take up your, your mind space in a sense? Um, so far it hasn't hurt me. I haven't like dropped the ball on anything big.

It's a very, very Zen approach of yours.

Also it was, you know, when product hunt started, um, started when weekend fund started about four years ago, I was still CEO of product hunt and have been up until about four months ago.

Mm, I'd love to know about that transition. You had all this success with product 10 product tent, and you became really well known. Do you have any advice for founders whose identity is really caught up in the identity of their company?

Yeah. Yeah. It's um, uh, I don't know. I don't, I probably don't actually, um, Yeah. I remember pretty early on 2014. Um, yeah, I remember getting recognized that some club, uh, or DNA lounge, if, if you know where that is in San Francisco, Yeah, it's a fun place to go to. And I remember getting recognized at one time, it was like, Oh, you did product and gynae.

That was the moment I felt really self-conscious. I've, I'm just naturally super self-conscious. but that's when I was like, Oh my gosh, dammit. Now, now I have to think about this when I'm like drinking it out with friends and I, I can't like, you know, fully let go. And, and so anyway, that's, it's definitely something that like aware of, um, But I don't have any good advice other than just like, you gotta deal with it.

Um, I mean, I think some of it is just acknowledging the fact that like, you know, if everything collapsed and it went to zero, like what's the worst that could happen. Like realistically, a lot of people, they put so much stress on themselves. Um, you know, I've always had this sort of a monkey on my back of not only responsibility, but just worry, like worry for the business.

Um, I think that's like a natural thing, but in some ways it's like, well, what if it does go to zero? everything will be okay. Um, so yeah.

Yeah, that's that's good perspective to hear whereas I feel like we covered a lot of ground. I got to ask you a lot of questions. Uh, anything else, any big pieces of the weekend fund that, that we should cover?

Yeah. Um, what else can I say? Um, yeah, I mean, we're, we're investing early stage, um, across consumer B to B. We love audio voice. We love no code. we love tools for remote working. as much as categories that we're excited about, we're also just really excited about like weird wacky, crazy ideas that people are exploring, especially if they do tap into a consumer behavior shift or technology shift.

And my understanding also is that You're not leading rounds, so you could be part of around. So that, that's a great thing for people who've, you know, lined up a lead or something, but they still have a little room for someone who could add a lot of value.

yeah. We're intentionally keeping the fund small for that reason. So we're $10 million fund now, which allows us to write like a hundred to 200 K checks. And, uh, that's great because then we gotta be collaborative and you know, we're not trained to, elbow people out of around and.

Yeah, we can bring in other investors. And I like that game make way more than like trying to lead or try to compete with others.

Well, when I feel like I should wrap up by just saying, like, thank you for everything you've done for entrepreneurs. it's been really impactful in the tech world. And, I feel like you and the weekend fund are great fit for the LA tech community.  

📍 [https://assets-global.website-files.com/63179e8148d09425c400fbab/6386a8b97ea4f49219c87937_1f4cd.svg]

So thanks for coming on the pod today.

Yeah, I moved here a year and a half ago and it's been great. ,

Thanks, Minnie.  

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