Before
University of Michigan, freestyle rap, and a startup called Rapt that spent about three years failing to find product-market fit.
The move
He met Ryan Hoover through an early Rapt user and asked to help with Hoover's side project, becoming in effect the first employee of Product Hunt. Rather than convert that into an associate seat somewhere, he kept building the infrastructure around venture: Village Global, a networked fund model; On Deck; and Turpentine. Each was a machine that placed him upstream of founders before they raised, which is a structural answer to sourcing rather than a relationship-based one.
The turn
Co-founding Village Global in 2017 was the first vehicle that was actually his. Andreessen Horowitz acquired Turpentine in April 2025 and appointed him a general partner.
Timeline
- Around 2011 founds Rapt
- Around 2013 joins Product Hunt as its first employee
- 2017 co-founds Village Global
- Builds On Deck, then Turpentine
- April 2025 a16z acquires Turpentine and he becomes a general partner
What this route asks
A long tolerance for building things that serve founders before any of it pays, and comfort being adjacent to the industry rather than inside it for years. No verifiable first-person account of how he got in could be found across his own writing and podcast archives, so this case is assembled from third-party reporting.