Geek Ventures

I am looking for amazing immigrant founders building US companies. Pitch me at http://geek.vc/pitch.

Track record: 100+ angel investments over 10 years.
I have invested at pre-seed/seed in unicorns: Instacart , PandaDoc, People.ai, Chainalysis, Airbyte, Jeeves.

15 exits, including Instacart, Caper, Airbyte, Volumetric, Acquired.io, Sayana, OnSpecta.

Managing Partner

Empire Angels

Since 2012, I'm investing in early stage startups that solve old problems in new ways. 

My angel investment profile is at http://angel.co/mahaniok.

Angel Investor / Advisor

Grid AI | PyTorch Lightning

Lightning AI (fka Grid AI) builds AI dev tools to make machine learning easy and accessible for everyone. 

Lightning AI is backed by $58M+ from Coatue, Index Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures and Firstminute. See https://techcrunch.com/2022/06/16/grid-ai-rebrands-as-lightning-ai-raises-40m-to-build-ai-dev-tools/

As a VP of Engineering, I built the team responsible for grid.ai, necessary processes, engineering culture, and top standards.

Vice President Of Engineering

WeWork

Led WeWork Virtual Selling (self serve) & WeWork Referrals projects, 30+ people overall.
 
WeWork Virtual Selling: Crucial project for the company: enabling virtual selling of offices, zero sales touches (first in the industry), on wework.com. Launched in Q4, provided significant top and bottom-line business impact on the company. 

WeWork Referrals: Technology and B2B portal for real estate brokers. High business impact.

Engineering Leader

Facebook

Facebook Local (Recommendations, personalization): 
- New Facebook Local Exploration product (see https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/08/helping-people-connect-with-local-businesses/). Mobile (iOS + Android), backend, search, ranking, ML. 
- Local Search within main Facebook Search, across platforms and languages.
- Food Ordering on Facebook (https://techcrunch.com/2016/10/19/facebook-utility).

Facebook News (Machine Learning):
- Classification of public content / news (https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2019/05/more-personalized-experiences/). 
- News Ranking.

Engineering Manager

Google

2014-2015: Google Maps "Explore"
* Backend & ranking for personalized restaurant recommendations: https://techcrunch.com/2015/09/02/google-maps-adds-curated-restaurant-recommendations-in-nyc-san-francisco-and-london/

2013-2014: Doubleclick Bid Manager 
* Data analysis pipelines that significantly improved performance of video ads by providing better predictions.
* Improved targeting capabilities for video ads.
* Integration with multiple video ad exchanges.

November 2012 - September 2013: Google Maps/Search personalization infrastructure
* Building personalization infrastructure for Maps, Search and other products. This infrastructure powers Google Maps: https://maps.googleblog.com/2013/05/meet-new-google-maps-map-for-every.html

June 2011 - November 2012: Google Offers.
* Ranking, signals, data processing and classification projects.

October 2010 - June 2011: Play Store new features 
* Data analysis, ranking
* Launched Related Apps in Dec 2010, Top Apps per country in May 2011.

May 2007 - September 2010: Improving search engine ranking algorithm.
* Signals analysis, ranking algorithms
* Backend systems 

Algorithm/experimentation/backend work in C++/Python.

Various small participation in other Google projects. Among them, improved Google Translate for Belarusian.

Senior Software Engineer

Avest

I've worked on the electronic document software.
Projects included software for electronic document authentication (which included signature, encryption, certificate infrastructure), and firmware for a hardware electronic signing key.

Technologies:
* C/C99/ARM firmware
* C/C++/Delphi Windows software
* PHP/C# Web projects

Software Developer

I am a managing partner at Geek Ventures, a venture capital firm that focuses on supporting immigrant founders building US tech companies. 

Companies I have backed at pre-seed and seed include unicorns such as Instacart, PandaDoc, People.ai, Chainalysis, Airbyte, and Jeeves, among other 100+ companies. I am passionate about finding and empowering talented entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds and helping them achieve their vision and impact. I am always looking for amazing founders from everywhere on Earth who solve old problems in new ways. You can pitch me at http://geek-ventures.com/pitch.

If you don't follow crypto, you might have missed a colossal day yesterday. The largest liquidation event in history. $19B liquidated in one day.
Hundreds of thousands of people lost everything. Many accounts of $10-20-50M were wiped out.

What happened? After Trump announced new tariffs on imports from China, all crypto coins went down, and overleveraged bullish positions started being liquidated, creating a cascade event. Ethereum was $4750 before the crash, during the crash some wrapped versions went as low as $430 (rebounded back to $3800 now).

Twitter and reddit are full of people posting that they lost all their money yesterday - sometimes hundreds of thousands $, sometimes millions $ (see screenshot of a guy losing $44M - all his money, now probably back to living with parents).

These people are almost exclusively young Gen Z men who thought that the only way to achieve anything in life is to "risk everything" all the time. Because they don't feel they can afford to live if they just do non-risky things.

First suicides started happening. Kostya Kudo, 32-year old Ukrainian crypto fund manager in Kyiv, killed himself yesterday in his Lamborghini after losing $60M.

On this background of hundreds of thousands of people being wiped out, $19B lost in liquidations, it's especially galling to see one guy making $192M on insider trade; someone in the inner circle knew about the tariff announcement, shorted about $1B of crypto, and exited the trade at the right time.

This is why it's important to invest in something that actually has real life value and not to use leverage.

Check on your Gen Z relatives - are they ok?

Ihar Mahaniok

Managing Partner at Geek Ventures. Two 100x exits. Investor in early stage tech companies that change the world. Seed investor in a Decacorn.

Last week in NYC, we brought together 70 founders and investors to tackle one question: how do you build unicorns without losing your purpose?

The audience spoke for itself - founders with $20M+ raised, investors behind Instacart, Shazam, Sana, and Acorns, GPs with dozens of exits, VCs with over $500M AUM.

With Yael Shemer (TULU), Tahira Dosani (ResilienceVC), Lesya Arnold (A-Players) on stage, the conversation cut deep into what it really takes to scale with intention.

Events like this remind me why we do what we do at Geek Ventures - to back founders who build companies that last and matter.

Thank you to A-Players for co-hosting, and to our partners Perkins Coie, Justworks, and American Venture Fest for making it possible - and to everyone who joined us for an evening.

Happy to share that tomorrow I’ll be taking part in a panel discussion during #SFTechWeek!

Backing Global Talent: What Foreign Founders and U.S. Investors Need to Know

The session will bring together immigrant founders, cross-border investors, and immigration experts to discuss how visas, compliance, and funding structures shape the journey of building global startups in the U.S.

I’m honored to join an incredible group of speakers:
Eugene Malobrodsky (One Way Ventures),
Michael Serotte (Serotte Law Firm, LLC),
Mariana Antcheva (Pilot.com),
Bolun Li (Zogo),
Vinit Bhansali (Takshil Venture Partners),
moderated by Christina Chen (GoElite Inc.).

Learn more about the event here: https://lnkd.in/e4ZGtAun?

Great to take part in the panel “Backing Global Talent: What Foreign Founders and U.S. Investors Need to Know” during #SFTechWeek, alongside Eugene Malobrodsky (One Way Ventures) and Bolun Li (Zogo), moderated by Christina Chen (GoElite Inc.).

We talked about what it really takes for international founders to build in the U.S. - and how a global perspective can be one of the biggest advantages.

Big thanks to everyone who joined and contributed to the conversation!

Doubling America’s Compute Capacity and eliminating energy waste in data centers using AI autopilot software

We got the most stacked VC panel at #SFTechWeek during our Bagels & Breakthroughs event: https://lnkd.in/e4BJG56e

A founder-first brunch bringing together 50–75 early-stage founders and top VCs for candid conversations, bagels, and meaningful connections.

🎤 Panel: Building Conviction in Venture Investing

Featuring:
KP Reddy — Founder & GP, Shadow Ventures
Wesley Yiu — Partner, Alumni Ventures
Sarah Romanko — Investor, Geek Ventures
Karen Sheffield, MBA — Founder & MP, Pachamama Ventures
Dave Goldblatt — GP, Vibe Capital
Diana K. — Investment Partner, Suffolk Technologies

Part of TECH WEEK by a16z | Co-hosted by FLUIX AI, Oppos Inc., and Boxsy
 
🥯 Sponsored by J.P. Morgan
☕ Sponsored by UBS Global Wealth Management
👉 Don’t miss it — https://lnkd.in/e4BJG56e

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