StarZero All shows Try the podcast clipper →

Ryan Hoover

Founder and General Partner, Weekend Fund · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderinvestorexecutiveauthor@rrhoover ↗LinkedIn ↗ryanhoover.me ↗Wikipedia ↗

Ryan Hoover is the founder and former CEO of Product Hunt, which was acquired by AngelList in 2016. He currently leads Weekend Fund, an early-stage venture capital firm investing in pre-seed and seed startups.

17statements → 6claims → 3claims resolved → 67%fully supported → 3.94/5average certainty → 1.53/5average debate potential → 4.5/5argument clarity · the sources → 22said about them ↓

2 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 3 not checkable as stated how the 6 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 5 assertions · 2 opinions · 9 insights · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 6 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved, and 3 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Ryan argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Hoover: Original Product Hunt app was built in 5 days
“The first version was really a Ruby on Rails app that Nathan, my buddy, he built it over like a five-day Thanksgiving holiday”
Ryan Hoover Dec 11, 2015 ▶ 6:27 20 VC FF 026: Ryan Hoover, Founder @ ProductHunt on Relationship Building, Habit Forming and The Vision for ProductHunt

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
none yet certainty 3
75% certainty 4
100% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

Argument clarity: do they answer the question? how? →

4.5 / 5 directness 4.8 · coherence 4.8 · precision 4.3 · compression 3.9

answered every one of 16 assessed questions directly

This is a score against a rubric. It is not a rank. Every host question → answer exchange is scored with names hidden on directness, coherence, precision and compression, 1–5 each, on meaning alone: disfluencies are ignored, and only raw unedited episodes count. This is the score that measures thought. Every scored exchange, scores shown → · The rubric and its checks →

How they sound: speaking style how? →

277 words/min while actually speaking · 21.7 um and uh per 1k words

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 4,612 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 0/10
pushed back at the host 0/10
setup questions received 90%

Everything Ryan Hoover said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion
Hoover doubts a single person can run Twitter and Square simultaneously
“I don't know how he can do it. I don't know. I just don't know how anyone can run two companies, especially two massive prominent companies as a single person.”
Ryan Hoover Dec 11, 2015 ▶ 20:27 20 VC FF 026: Ryan Hoover, Founder @ ProductHunt on Relationship Building, Habit Forming and The Vision for ProductHunt
Prediction Partly held up
Hoover: Product Hunt will expand to all passion categories within 5 years
“In five years, you'll see Product Hunt turn into a community and a site for all kinds of people and all kinds of things. And it will be a place where you can find all kinds of things from You know, whatever you're most passionate about, and you can find like-m…”
Ryan Hoover Dec 11, 2015 ▶ 29:25 20 VC FF 026: Ryan Hoover, Founder @ ProductHunt on Relationship Building, Habit Forming and The Vision for ProductHunt
Insight
Hoover: Building online communities requires extensive manual outreach initially
“To make a community work, to build something like this, you need to really focus on the people in the beginning and do a lot of frankly manual, like labor, manual things to get it going.”
Ryan Hoover Dec 11, 2015 ▶ 3:51 20 VC FF 026: Ryan Hoover, Founder @ ProductHunt on Relationship Building, Habit Forming and The Vision for ProductHunt
Insight
Hoover: Online communities must continually grow or they will die
“When you build a community, you have to not only seed it with the right kind of culture that you want, but then you have to make sure it grows, and you have to keep growing, otherwise it just dies. A lot of communities start, but they don't grow, and then they…”
Ryan Hoover Dec 11, 2015 ▶ 5:15 20 VC FF 026: Ryan Hoover, Founder @ ProductHunt on Relationship Building, Habit Forming and The Vision for ProductHunt
Insight
Hoover: Changing community platforms without warning upsets users
“Communities are kind of like a home, and when you move the furniture around, whether it's better or not, people are like, whoa, you moved the furniture, why didn't you ask me?”
Ryan Hoover Dec 11, 2015 ▶ 7:46 20 VC FF 026: Ryan Hoover, Founder @ ProductHunt on Relationship Building, Habit Forming and The Vision for ProductHunt
Insight
Hoover: Product teams should act on user patterns, not individual feedback
“Like, we're going to look for patterns, and we're going to make changes, but there will inevitably be people that say, oh, like, this button shouldn't be here, and we're not going to move it just because they say this button shouldn't be here. Like, not all th…”
Ryan Hoover Dec 11, 2015 ▶ 9:50 20 VC FF 026: Ryan Hoover, Founder @ ProductHunt on Relationship Building, Habit Forming and The Vision for ProductHunt
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hoover: Product Hunt grew 50% month-over-month leading into YC
“Leading into, to the YC interview, we were growing 50% month over month”
Ryan Hoover Dec 11, 2015 ▶ 23:09 20 VC FF 026: Ryan Hoover, Founder @ ProductHunt on Relationship Building, Habit Forming and The Vision for ProductHunt
Insight
Ryan Hoover: A CEO's job is to hire themselves out of a job
“As a CEO role, your kind of ultimate job is to hire yourself out of a job in many ways”
Ryan Hoover Dec 11, 2015 ▶ 26:39 20 VC FF 026: Ryan Hoover, Founder @ ProductHunt on Relationship Building, Habit Forming and The Vision for ProductHunt
Insight
Hoover: Tech founders overlook game design psychology
“There's a wealth of information there that most kind of tech entrepreneurs, like anyone building a website or app, they don't really think as much about some of these things that game designers think about all the time.”
Ryan Hoover Dec 11, 2015 ▶ 28:51 20 VC FF 026: Ryan Hoover, Founder @ ProductHunt on Relationship Building, Habit Forming and The Vision for ProductHunt
Assertion Supported
Hoover: Original Product Hunt app was built in 5 days
“The first version was really a Ruby on Rails app that Nathan, my buddy, he built it over like a five-day Thanksgiving holiday”
Ryan Hoover Dec 11, 2015 ▶ 6:27 20 VC FF 026: Ryan Hoover, Founder @ ProductHunt on Relationship Building, Habit Forming and The Vision for ProductHunt
Insight
Hoover: User testing is essential but emotionally painful for creators
“User testing is the most, one of the most insightful things, but also painful things to watch. Because you see them using this thing that you spent all this time building, and you're like, this is beautiful.”
Ryan Hoover Dec 11, 2015 ▶ 8:48 20 VC FF 026: Ryan Hoover, Founder @ ProductHunt on Relationship Building, Habit Forming and The Vision for ProductHunt
Assertion Supported
Hoover: Product Hunt email digest has hundreds of thousands of subscribers
“There's the email digest, which hundreds of thousands of people subscribe to.”
Ryan Hoover Dec 11, 2015 ▶ 14:21 20 VC FF 026: Ryan Hoover, Founder @ ProductHunt on Relationship Building, Habit Forming and The Vision for ProductHunt
Opinion
Hoover: Twitter is critical for Product Hunt and one of his most important products
“It's probably one of the most important products in my life. Actually without Twitter, I don't even know where I'd be, which is kind of a weird statement to make, but it's such a serendipity machine and has allowed me to meet a lot of people, and of course it'…”
Ryan Hoover Dec 11, 2015 ▶ 18:05 20 VC FF 026: Ryan Hoover, Founder @ ProductHunt on Relationship Building, Habit Forming and The Vision for ProductHunt
Insight
Hoover: Tagging authors and adding takes when sharing links builds authentic connections
“One small, small difference that most people don't do is they usually share articles, but they rarely tag the author. And so just one small thing, I would share like maybe 10 articles a day, and I would always tag the author just to give them a hat tip and be …”
Ryan Hoover Dec 11, 2015 ▶ 18:40 20 VC FF 026: Ryan Hoover, Founder @ ProductHunt on Relationship Building, Habit Forming and The Vision for ProductHunt
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hoover: Investors approached Product Hunt first during early fundraising
“Investors started approaching me before I never actually approached investors in the beginning.”
Ryan Hoover Dec 11, 2015 ▶ 23:58 20 VC FF 026: Ryan Hoover, Founder @ ProductHunt on Relationship Building, Habit Forming and The Vision for ProductHunt
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Hoover: Betaworks' Matt was a daily Product Hunt user before investing
“Matt, for example, he was a super early user, Matt at beta works. And when we started, when I started talking to him, like he already understood the value of it and he was a user and consumed it daily himself.”
Ryan Hoover Dec 11, 2015 ▶ 24:28 20 VC FF 026: Ryan Hoover, Founder @ ProductHunt on Relationship Building, Habit Forming and The Vision for ProductHunt
Insight
Hoover: Hosting 6-10 person brunches is an effective, underutilized networking tactic
“Small brunches with, you know, six to 10 people. A lot of them, people in, in entrepreneurship or startups or whatnot. And those have been fantastic because it's a great way to build a really small but, like, very intimate relationship in some ways with people…”
Ryan Hoover Dec 11, 2015 ▶ 21:46 20 VC FF 026: Ryan Hoover, Founder @ ProductHunt on Relationship Building, Habit Forming and The Vision for ProductHunt

The other half of the tape: Ryan Hoover's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 21 times in 8 episodes on 20VC. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 11Matt Hartman 9Sahil Lavingia 1

Statements about Ryan Hoover, by other people (1)

Assertion Not checkable as stated
Betaworks used Twitter network analysis to identify Product Hunt's Ryan Hoover
“I remember when we first started talking to Ryan from product time, one of the things that we had done was this network analysis with our data. I had sat down with our data scientists and started mapping out the networks of this on Twitter. Because it's so pub…”
Matt Hartman Oct 12, 2015 ▶ 11:06 20 VC 078: BETAWORKS WEEK: Matt Hartman, Director of Seed Investments @ Betaworks

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0082153201520162017201820192020202120222023episodesmentions
023201520162017201820192020202120222023episodes it came up in
0041.583201520162017201820192020202120222023episodesmentions per episode
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2020 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
2019 2 mentions in 1 episode
2016 1 mention in 1 episode
2015 14 mentions in 2 episodes 7 per episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20 VC FF 026: Ryan Hoover, Founder @ ProductHunt on Relationship Building, Habit Forming a Dec 11, 2015 20m
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.

Try the podcast clipper Learn more