Ryan Hoover
Founder and General Partner, Weekend Fund. On 4 shows, 7 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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.
4shows
7appearances
101statements
14resolved
11supported
1contradicted
79%fully supported
34said about them ↓ Everything Ryan Hoover said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Hoover: VCs judge consumer startups on current revenue once monetized
“Ultimately, the challenge is always, especially with consumer kind of focused startup is as soon as you start making money, then VCs will start judging you based on that revenue today. And so strategically, there's some challenges there, which is an unfortunat…”
Hoover: Living in virtual reality worlds will be a good thing
“I think the world where we live in VR is actually a good thing. And I know a lot of people get really scared and nervous about like a future where we all live in like a ready player one or at least like some sort of virtual world like that. I actually think it…”
Hoover: Eventually a majority of people will spend their lives in VR
“I also almost don't see a future where at some point that's where a majority of people spend their lives because we're already pretty close.”
Hoover: More B2B companies do well on Product Hunt than B2C
“Some people, they ask me, hey, like, I don't know, is Product Hunt, like, Do B to B companies do well there? And I'm like, yeah, like probably more B to B companies than B to C companies actually.”
Hoover: A product background is crucial for early-stage startup investing
“Having a product background, I think is one of the most important aspects of early stage startup investing. Meaning oftentimes when you're building a new company, there are a lot of risks and there's a lot of important things to nail, but it all Ultimately com…”
Hoover: Prioritizing dark mode before product-market fit is a red flag
“If a founder is prioritizing dark mode before they have product market fit too, it's like a big red flag for me. That's a little bit of a hot take. Some people are gonna hate me for that, but I don't know. I don't think dark mode matters for like, 99% of peopl…”
Hoover rejected early investor pressure to build a Product Hunt VC fund
“A few different investors and people suggested, Hey, you should start a product hunt fund. You should build a fund on top of product hunt, invest in, use the data in the community and everything to source and find really early stage opportunities. And I was pr…”
Hoover: Product Redesigns Are Often a Trap That Won't Move Metrics
“When you do raise a lot of money and you feel like you have infinite runway you should treat it like you don't. And truthfully, there's some things that, that I prioritized on the team because I wanted it Myself, like some redesign work that we did, which rede…”
Hoover: Visibly awkward public user actions drive word-of-mouth app growth
“And you know, these, there's certain apps that have come around that actually make people do awkward, weird things. And those are the things that inspire word of mouth and get people talking.”
Hoover: ICOs raise more capital with zero equity dilution
“People are launching an ICO instead of going to VCs and You know, the deals that they're getting, it's like it's unheard of. Like you basically are getting way more money and you don't have investors to pay back. Like you own everything. And I mean, there's ju…”
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.”
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…”
Hoover: Behind the confident mask, almost every company is internally chaotic
“Everyone has to wear this unfortunate mask is kind of the way I, what I used to describe it, this mask in Life and business where everything is going great and, you know, you're super confident. There are no problems. You got it all under control. And so the r…”
Hoover: Tech culture defaults to immediately raising venture capital on an idea
“I think people who are in tech, especially are certain bubbles of tech. That's the default. It's like the first thing I do, I have an idea now let's go raise money.”
Hoover: Founders should use a ten-year commitment test before starting
“However, I think it's super important that founders see a line of sight to work on this for, I think my rule of thumb is a decade. Just do you see yourself working on this for a decade? And maybe it's not a decade that you actually work on it. It probably won'…”
Hoover: Startups should avoid innovating on too many operational fronts simultaneously
“When you're building a company, you probably don't want to innovate on too many things. Including like essentially how to build a product and build a team.”
Hoover: Product Hunt might not have needed venture capital if personally funded
“Product isn't the type of company that needs to raise a ton of money. It's also one which is not doesn't have like direct competitors in the sense of like an Uber and Lyft situation where raising is actually like kind of mandatory and you sort of have to build…”
Hoover: Founder CEOs cannot simply give notice and exit easily
“When you're at a company, you can put in two weeks notice, one month notice. You can move on as a founder CEO. You can't like, you really can't. Now you technically can, but you can't, it's really hard to exit.”
Hoover: Product launches are often better for recruiting than customer acquisition
“And a lot of people default to things like customer acquisition. Oh, I want to acquire customers. But sometimes that's actually not, it's not useful. Launch sometimes doesn't help with that. But there are many other reasons why you might want to launch. So cus…”
Hoover: Launch copy resonates better when written like casual conversation than PR speak
“One thing I've noticed among founders and just people in general is they tend to write like a PR person and not like a human and not like, you know, the way that I kind of describe Kind of a frame of writing, maybe your tagline for product or for your launch i…”
Hoover: Product Hunt should not have expanded horizontally beyond tech
“So that's one regret is we should not have tried to expand horizontally. We should have just focused entirely vertically and serve the tech community, you know, better and with more things, which is effectively what we're doing now.”
Hoover: Product Hunt did not monetize until after its AngelList acquisition
“We raised a seed in the series A, we had capital to grow, and we didn't actually try to make money until after we were acquired by AngelList.”
Hoover: Momentum is reflexive and critical in early-stage startups
“Momentum matters so much. And momentum is reflexive in that, you know, high momentum leads to more high momentum, low momentum leads to more low momentum, because there's this energy that, that kind of goes through companies where when there is momentum, when …”
Hoover: In VC, one winner can return 3-5x all other investments combined
“The power law of investing where it's in most people's situation. It's one company is returning. You could invest in a hundred companies. One of those companies is probably gonna return three to five X and the returns of all the others, maybe combined in some …”
The other half of the tape: Ryan Hoover's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 32 times in 14 episodes across the shows. 2 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Harry Stebbings 11Matt Hartman 9Lenny Rachitsky 4Craig Cannon 4Sahil Lavingia 1Nicolas Dessaigne 1Kevin Rose 1Courtland Allen 1
Statements about Ryan Hoover, by other people (2)
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…”
Dessaigne: Algolia founders manually coded Product Hunt's first search integration
“I remember when we implemented Algolia in Product Hunt, you know, Ryan, the founder, that was before Product Hunt became huge, and he didn't have, like, any resource to implement search himself, and so we remembered the Stripe story. We did it. Like, he gave u…”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 21
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 6
Lenny's Podcast 4
the a16z Podcast 1
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2022 4 mentions in 1 episode
2020 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Why the Theory of Pro-Rata is Often False, How Rolling Funds Impact Both Pricing and Competition & The Biggest Lessons from Working with Jack Dorsey with Avlok Kohli, CEO @ AngelList Venture
- 20VC: Sahil Lavingia on Rolling Funds and Their Impact on The Future of Venture, How To Evaluate Market, Team and Product, The Value of Party Rounds & The Pros and Cons of Multi-Stage Funds Investing at Seed
- 20VC: Portfolio Construction, Optimising SPVs, Opportunity Investing "Between Rounds", Being Distribution-Centric Over Product-Centric and Capital Concentration Within Funds With Sumeet Gajri, Chief Strategy Officer @ Carta
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
2019 2 mentions in 1 episode
2018 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2017 3 mentions in 1 episode
2016 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Ryan's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Y COMBINATORLEDGER | Founder and General Partner, Weekend Fund | 2 | 45 | 100% 6/6 | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |
| LENNY'S PODCASTLEDGER | Founder and General Partner, Weekend Fund | 1 | 29 | 50% 1/2 | full record on Lenny's Podcast → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Founder and General Partner, Weekend Fund | 1 | 17 | 67% 2/3 | full record on 20VC → |
| a16zLEDGER | Founder and General Partner, Weekend Fund | 3 | 10 | 67% 2/3 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |