![]() Working as a cohesive team Openbox’s Technical, Analysis and Customer experts have collaborated to offer customers a means to break away from traditional ways of working, transformed delivery methods to ensure market leading customer experiences with cutting edge architecture, and ultimately saved over £3million to date. They are well versed in working with businesses who suffer from “analysis paralysis” and entrenched thinking that can lead to poor responsiveness to the market, and ultimately a lack of agility. Hyper is a $60M early-stage fund co-founded by Josh Buckley, Product Hunt’s CEO along with writer, founder and designer Dustin Curtis.Openbox are Customer Experience and Solution Architecture specialists, with an impeccable track record for delivery in complex Financial environments. 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 CEO along with writer, founder and designer Dustin Curtis. Malika Cantor as Partner and GM and Ashton Brown as Head of Program. The fund launches today and is self-described as ‘inspired by the Product Hunt community’. 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 will exist as a ‘sister company’ to Product Hunt (though it’s going to technically own it). 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. 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. It’s hard to argue with the overall assumption that the Hyper team is working under - capital is majorly commoditized. Frankly, sometimes that’s all you want from an investor whose value add is more of a thorn in your side than anything. But, especially at the early stage there are a few funds and firms that offer a strong value outside of writing checks in the form of, say, hiring, sales introductions or board members that have relevant operational experience. Where Hyper differs, says Buckley, is that they see distribution as the biggest value add for a nascent startup at the stages where the firm hopes to invest. Product Hunt is one opportunity that he points to as an example. I’ll let the Hyper team’s words spell out what they say is its thesis: It’s an established launch pad to an audience of extreme early adopters that can provide a seed of a real user base - Hyper itself is launching via a post on the platform. Hyper works with early-stage companies at three key junctures in a startup’s journey: Hyper believes that every company (B2B or B2C) needs access to distribution channels to find customers, users, and talented employees to join their teams.Initial customer acquisition and validation (often at the pre-Seed stage).First product/company launch and hiring (often at the Seed stage).Scaling customer acquisition and fundraising (before the Series A)įounders who go through the program will remain a part of the tight-knit Hyper founder community long past their Series A.PRODUCT HUNT BUCKLEY HYPER 300K HUNTPANZARINOTECHCRUNCH SERIES Over the past few months, Buckley says that Product Hunt has grown headcount by around 50% in part to boost its ability to act as an enhanced distribution channel.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. ![]() 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. PRODUCT HUNT BUCKLEY HYPER 300K HUNTPANZARINOTECHCRUNCH SERIESĪ 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.
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