Product Hunt + AngelList✌️😸

We’re joining AngelList.

The startup ecosystem has continued to evolve since Product Hunt started, three years ago.

Increasingly, tech is defining how we live our day and communicate with our friends and family. Technology is more influential than ever before, an extension of how we literally see and experience the world.

It’s become easier for anyone with a computer to help shape this future, thanks to decreasing hardware costs, affordable hosting, open source, free resources, and online education. One person can build something that would require 10 people a decade ago.

It’s a great time to be a maker. 💪

While more accessible than ever before, startups remain filled with roadblocks.

You’ve built something awesome. How do you find an audience?

You need help building your product. Where do you find great talent?

You’re raising money but you don’t know any investors. Where do you start?

We think a lot about these challenges and how Product Hunt and AngelList together can support makers.

Peanut butter and jelly

Over the past six years, AngelList has become indispensable in the tech industry, focused on two very serious challenges for startups: fundraising and recruiting. It’s helped over 1,000 companies raise nearly $500M in funding and matched more than 325,000 candidates with growing companies inside the talented AngelList community.

Product Hunt has become the place where makers launch, a global community of people excited to share what they’ve made and things they love. We’ve seen over 100 million product discoveries and 50,000 startups and makers introduce their baby to the world on Product Hunt. I’m very proud of what we’ve built, together with the community.

We’re both solving complimentary problems and the overlap of our communities is evident.

Work with those you admire

I’ve always been a big fan of AngelList. Before Product Hunt, I would often browse the site, curious to explore what products people were making.

We both exist to support startups and makers. This is core to the culture of Product Hunt and AngelList, and is what drives Naval and me to continue fostering these communities.

Naval Ravikant, the CEO of AngelList, has dedicated much of his life to supporting startups since the early days of Venture Hacks, a blog focused on educating founders on the process of fundraising and building a company. In 2013, he articulated his viewpoint on starting up:

I think you should look at your company as an extension of your life to date. The dots should connect moving forward and that way you’re more likely to stick with it and more likely to [have] proprietary insights.

These words mirror my own beliefs and progression as a founder. Product Hunt is a natural extension of myself, an accumulation of my interest and curiosity in tech; experience building and writing about products; and desire to help makers.

Meeting Naval

Naval’s perspective on life and startups was reinforced the day we met in 2014, six months after Product Hunt was born.

We took a walk nearby AngelList’s old Maiden Lane office in San Francisco. Truthfully, I approached this first meeting with caution, aware that I might be speaking with a future competitor. He was likely doing the same, after all investors were using Product Hunt to source early stage startups. But this isn’t what we built it for. Our focus was and still is product discovery, helping makers reach an audience.

After learning more about his vision for AngelList, it became clear we were heading in complementary but different directions. Shortly after that meeting, Naval offered to invest in Product Hunt, aligned with our vision of the future of making.

Still hunting

We remain committed to the vision I shared with Naval when we first met in 2014 — to help makers get discovered and surface great products. Product Hunt will remain an independent platform alongside AngelList. We’ll continue to use excessive emojis, drink Philz, and build in public with our community. 🙌

Together, we can provide so much more value to the tech ecosystem and makers, a place to raise your next round, find great teammates, discover awesome products, and connect with a global community of enthusiastic about the future.

In celebration of this acquisition, we’re hosting a meetup in San Francisco after the new year. It will be fun. Join us. 😸

P.S. Read more about the news on AngelList’s blog.

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