Though the current plans center around small cohorts with a founder program, the ambitions for long term include adding a layer of differentiation that goes beyond fixed checks and partner access.
The program will also offer office hours with experts, an exclusive Product Hunt launch event and a Public Hyper Demo Day and Investor Demo Day to participate in within a year of being in the program. Some of the participants are investors in Hyper, though none of the funds participated themselves The group includes some close to home figures as well, in Product Hunt GM Ashley Higgins and founder Ryan Hoover.
The mentorship component that Hyper hopes to add for founders in the fund is an 8-week founder program that includes individuals from “partners” like Andreessen Horowitz, AngelList, Sequoia Capital, the Twenty Minute VC Podcast and Product Hunt helping founders to solve ‘key challenges’. And the other component which includes the portfolio of Hyper funds (plural theirs) and a founder program that includes mentorship, twice-a-year-events, and other future efforts - eventually. A portfolio of wholly owned companies like Product Hunt (which still counts AngelList as a majority investor and Ravikant on its board) and other new media brands. Hyper itself is trying to establish two lines of business. A mix of media, venture and product figures is probably the right way to go if you want to back yourself into a media empire funded by venture capital returns. It’s a pretty eclectic group, but if you squint you can see the shape of the ambitions that Hyper has reflected in the parties involved. The Hyper concept sounds fresh in combination, if not in components.Ī short list of some of the people involved as advisors, mentors or investors themselves includes Alexis & Serena Williams, Alfred Lin of Sequoia, Garry Tan of Initialized, Harry Stebbings, Jeffrey Katzenberg, Naval Ravikant, Owen van Natta, Ryan Hoover, Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic and Sriram Krishnan of a16z. I had a chat with Buckley, Curtis and Cantor about the new fund and company and the way that they hoped to differentiate Hyper in a world of aggressively service-oriented venture firms. Product Hunt, however, is the first of what the team says will be many companies it will own, create and operate in order to provide ‘direct value’ to its portfolio companies. The fund will exist as a ‘sister company’ to Product Hunt (though it’s going to technically own it). The fund is taking applicants worldwide though notes that some countries present legal complexities for investment. The team will be writing $300k checks for 5% of very early companies in any arena that seems promising to the partnership in a fixed deal structure that mirrors Y-Combinator. The fund is launching as a straight up venture effort, with a bit of gas added by the Product Hunt association. The second cohort will open in November 2021. The applications are planned to open for roughly 4 weeks every quarter and the deadline for this tranche is August 10th, 2021 at midnight PT. The announcement today is the Hyper the fund, and the fact that they’re opening applications to a small cohort of 25 companies. The fund launches today and is self-described as ‘inspired by the Product Hunt community’. Malika Cantor as Partner and GM and Ashton Brown as Head of Program. Two ex-Sequoia operators are part of the team at launch as well. Hyper is a $60M early-stage fund co-founded by Josh Buckley, Product Hunt’s current CEO along with writer, founder and designer Dustin Curtis.
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