---
title: Ryan Hoover
description: Founder of Product Hunt and general partner at Weekend Fund; early-stage investor
category: People
---

# Ryan Hoover

![Ryan Hoover](https://github.com/rrhoover.png)

**Ryan Hoover** is an American entrepreneur and venture investor based in Miami / San Francisco / New York. He is best known as the founder of **Product Hunt**, the daily leaderboard for new technology products, and as the general partner of **Weekend Fund**, an early-stage pre-seed fund. He is active on X as [@rrhoover](https://x.com/rrhoover) with 331,000+ followers.[^x]

## Career

Hoover holds a BS in Entrepreneurship from the University of Oregon (Lundquist College of Business, 2009). He began his career in product and marketing roles at InstantAction and PlayHaven before becoming an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Tradecraft (San Francisco, 2013–2014).[^pitchbook]

He founded **Product Hunt** in November 2013 as a side project — a simple email digest of the day's best new products. It grew into the leading platform for product launches and was **acquired by AngelList in 2016**. Hoover stepped down as CEO in October 2020, handing the reins to Josh Buckley.[^x]

In parallel he launched **Weekend Fund** in 2017, a $10M pre-seed fund investing $100k–$250k per company across B2C and B2B, with particular interest in no/low-code tools, audio tech, and creator tools. The fund is backed by prominent angels and institutional investors.[^signal]

He also writes at ryanhoover.me and has contributed to the book *Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products* by Nir Eyal.[^linkedin]

## Connection to Jan

In April 2025, Jan reached out to Ryan after seeing a tweet about the Weekend Fund, pitching **uithub** as a pre-seed investment opportunity. Ryan responded positively, asking for more detail on traction and long-term vision. Jan replied with a detailed breakdown: three separate viral spikes each generating 100k+ pageviews, steady 500–2,000 DAU between spikes, and a vision for a VSCode-style marketplace with pay-as-you-go context generation for private repos. Jan mentioned a planned Product Hunt launch for uithub v2.[^investor]

## See Also

- [[Jan Wilmake]]
- [[uithub]]
- [[Ben Tossell]]

[^x]: X profile: https://x.com/rrhoover
[^pitchbook]: PitchBook profile: pitchbook.com/profiles/investor/184852-18
[^signal]: Signal NFX profile: signal.nfx.com/investors/ryan-hoover
[^linkedin]: LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/ryanrhoover
[^investor]: Email exchange with Ryan Hoover: `2025/investors/ryan-hoover.md`