I’m joining Weekend Fund
Let me tell you why.
In December last year, while working at my day job as a Product Manager at TrueLayer, I spent nights and weekends writing “fantasy” investment memos on startups. I sourced my fantasy “deal-flow” from funding announcements tech media, VC fund portfolio pages, and investors that I respect on Twitter. If a startup that looked interesting got funded, I would write down what I liked/disliked about the company and why I would invest/not invest. The memos covered details about the team, product, market and risks.
The idea was to “reverse engineer” startups investments, even though I didn’t have the capital to deploy myself. As with most careers, employers often look for previous experience, so I “hired myself” and started dressing for a future job in venture capital by doing the work I wanted to do.
Over a few months of writing memos, I started to build up my investor instincts (or at least my memos started to suck less). Of course, I’m aware that I didn’t “see” these deals, “pick” the deals, or have to convince the founders to take my money, all of which is the hard part of investing in startups. I loved my fake it till you make it version of startup investing wanted to do less of faking it, more actually doing it.
A few months in, my friend Harry Stebbings (I am grateful for you, Harry) introduced me to Ryan Hoover as he was searching for a Weekend Fund Chief of Staff. Ryan started Weekend Fund in 2017, shortly after AngelList’s acquisition of Product Hunt. He continues to lead Product Hunt and spends his nights and weekends investing in early stage companies. Sound familiar? 😉
Why I’m excited to work with the Weekend Fund
- I’m excited to work with founders building for the future. Weekend Fund invests in startups that have a unique perspective about the future they’re trying to build. Our investments include a startup building a social network on top of AirPods to a “no code” tool for creating advanced voice applications.
- I’m excited to learn more about platform or behaviour shifts in technology. Weekend Fund’s focus is to invest in companies that are capitalizing on these shifts early (ex. Instagram hit the market just as their smartphones and their poor quality cameras went mainstream). Audio/voice, remote/distributed teams, and synthetic media are a few areas we’re active following.
- I’m excited to learn from and with Ryan. He has built a strong reputation by helping thousands of founders around the world over the years. When Ryan announced the fund in 2017, Kerry at Mashable wrote an article titled, Silicon Valley nice guy Ryan Hoover has a new side hustle. Founders respect, trust and love working with him. So have I in the last month.
- Weekend Fund isn’t your typical VC fund. We don’t have Monday partner meetings to attend before we get back to founders. We’re quick (yet thorough) with due diligence. We are here to help founders, particularly when it comes to product, community building, press and fundraising. It’s Ryan and me for now, and we have a lot of ground to cover.
What I’ll be working on at the Weekend Fund
- Finding, researching and evaluating the best investment opportunities
- Setting up the Weekend Fund Advisor Community to offer on-demand problem solving to companies as they make their way towards product-market fit. More on this coming soon!
- Supporting Weekend Fund portfolio companies as they grow their business (here are some of the companies we are lucky to work with)
- Scaling the support we provide portfolio companies as they grow beyond Ryan, me, and our networks
- Helping with fund operations, administrative housecleaning and scheduling meetings
A little bit more about me
- I grew up in Bangalore, India. My parents run a family business, and did their best to teach us that “starting real businesses selling real products/services causes real improvements in real lives”
- I am lucky to have a day job working as a product manager at Truelayer. We do the necessary work of building financial infrastructure for small startups to the world’s biggest technology companies. We have a lot of work ahead of us, and I’m excited to keep doing it with an amazing team — together. I remain committed in my work at TrueLayer as ever.
- I was also lucky to have spent time at companies like Stripe during periods of explosive growth and funds like like Mithril Capital (college internship) and Kalaari Capital (during a “gap year” in India) on the investing side.
- I spend my days learning about what it takes to build, launch and sell successful technology products, and try to make the best of the 30,000 or so days allocated to me.
Where do I live?
- I live in London and the Weekend Fund mostly lives on the internet.
Lastly, here’s a photo of me out in the world:
I work for Weekend Fund. We back your next favorite thing. If you’re interested in partnering with us, feel free to email me at vedika@weekend.fund.
See you on the internet, and thank you for reading!
Vedika
Thanks Ryan for giving me an opportunity to do work I love at the Weekend Fund and for reading drafts of this.
Thanks Harry for the introduction to Ryan and for looking out for the best opportunities for me.
Thank you to Francesco, our CEO at TrueLayer, for supporting my side and weekends hustle.
Thank you Varadh for reading every one of “fantasy” investment memos, for reading drafts of this and introducing me to Harry.
