Weekend Fund invests in early-stage startups. If you have questions about the fund, you're in the right place. :)
We're a small distributed team, optimistic about the future.
Meet Ryan Hoover
Ryan is the founder of Weekend Fund. He started his professional career as a product manager in the gaming industry. His fascination with technology and behavioral psychology led him to help write Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products.
In 2013 he founded Product Hunt, inspired by his curiosity and a desire to support early stage makers and founders. The company raised capital from Y Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz, and others before joining AngelList. Shortly after the acquisition he started Weekend Fund.
Meet Vedika Jain
Vedika is a Partner at Weekend Fund. She started her professional career at Stripe in 2015, just as they were experiencing explosive growth. Her love for product as a discipline led her to join TrueLayer in London as their first product manager. The company grew from 8 to over 80 people during her tenure.
Her curiosity led her to spend nights and weekends writing “fantasy” investment memos on startups, before joining Weekend Fund. She now writes real memos (among many other things).
Meet Selene Xu
Selene is a part-time Analyst at Wekeend Fund. She's wrapping up her senior year at Cornell, majoring in Data Science and Literature. She spends most of her time in Upstate New York and SF. Previously, she worked in the ML team at an early stage InsurTech startup Altway Insurance that got acquired by Acrisure.
At Cornell, she was the Event Director of Life Changing Labs, and hosted the largest Cornell entrepreneurship competition. Selene also worked directly with VC firms including NEA, Lightspeed, Foundation Capital, GV, and Dash Fund through Cornell Venture Capital.
Meet Eric Little
Eric is a part-time Analyst at Weekend Fund. He's also the Product Lead for the Payments team at Check, an embedded payroll startup. After graduating from Duke with majors in Economics and Computer Science, he joined Bain Capital’s Private Equity group as an Analyst.
While at Duke, Eric helped to co-found Audacity Labs, a nonprofit with the goal of increasing access to entrepreneurship and tech education for high school students.
We invest in pre-seed and seed stage startups. The earlier the better!
But we also invest between rounds, post-seed and pre-Series A. If you're planning to raise an A soon, we might be able to connect you with the best investors at that stage. Reach out.
Occasionally! We've led SPVs in late stage opportunities where we have high conviction and unique access. When we lead an SPV, we invite our LPs alongside strategic operators and founders that can be particularly helpful as the business scales.
Nope!
We typically invest between $100K and $300K.
We're open-minded!
We invest broadly but we're particularly attracted to companies that are capitalizing on a consumer behavior or technology shift. This includes startups in remote work (like Deel), audio tech (like Voiceflow), vertical labor marketplaces (like Pattern), no code/superpower tools (like Luminai), psychedelic therapy (like Mindbloom), and tools for SMBs (like Beacon).
We've written about some of these themes here, here, and here.
We know how busy founders are and try to be very respectful of their time. For this reason, we avoid asking for agenda-less “coffee meetings” and instead focus our time on specific asks. We see ourselves as a pit crew, ready to support when needed.
We’re most helpful with:
Product – Ryan and Vedika have a background in product management. We enjoy jamming on product strategy and serving as a thought partner to founders, especially in the early days as they're navigating a path toward product/market fit.
Community – This is an area we’re uniquely qualified to help with. Ryan spent seven years building the Product Hunt community – very few investors have that experience. We enjoy helping founders deploy a community building strategy that aligns with their business goals to drive WOM, increase retention, and create a long-lasting brand that people want to be a part of.
Fundraising – Our relatively small check size allows us to remain collaborative with other early-stage investors. When we invest, we often help founders close their round by making introductions to other investors that might be particularly helpful or strategic. When it comes time to raise the next round – typically a Series A – we’re eager to be a partner with them throughout the fundraising process.
We also help with press, recruiting, B2B introductions, and marketing when we can. More details in our Founder Manual.
We don't invest in resumes. We look for founders that have a bias toward action and unique insight into a market, ideally capitalizing on a shift in consumer behavior technology.
You can email the entire team at team@weekend.fund.
We're also reachable at ryan@weekend.fund, vedika@weekend.fund, selene@weekend.fund, and eric@weekend.fund.
Weekend Fund is distributed across Miami, London, Boston, and San Francisco but we live on the internet.
Ryan's on Twitter, LinkedIn, AngelList, Product Hunt, and his personal site.
Vedika's on Twitter, LinkedIn, Product Hunt, and her personal site.
Selene's on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Eric's on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Read more about the fund on TechCrunch and Forbes.
We're thankful to have the support of over 350 LPs, mostly operators and founders, with diverse backgrounds across industries and expertise. Our LPs are an extension of our small team. Here are a few:
We're not currently raising but feel free to drop Ryan an email at ryan@weekend.fund if you're interested in participating in future funds or SPVs.
