Prologue (holding company for Product Hunt and Hyper)

Shaheed Khan's journey into startup investing began not with venture capital, but with a teenage frustration. At 16, he noticed he couldn't walk 2.5 miles to McDonald's without a driver's license, so he built ViyaTask—a neighbor-to-neighbor task marketplace concept inspired by reading about Peter Thiel's 20 Under 20 Fellowship on TechCrunch. Though ViyaTask failed, it connected him with a network of young founders and taught him a critical lesson: "If I could sell my parents on me not going to college, I can sell anyone."

Years later, Khan met co-founder Vinay at Backplane as an intern doing design work. After stints at Weebly and Uprun Ventures, Khan moved to LA and crashed on Vinay's couch, where he and co-founder Joe began brainstorming startup ideas. They listed seven concepts and picked the first: "a user testing platform with product experts." The product went through two major pivots over nine months—from OpenTest (user testing) to OpenVid—before finding product-market fit. The breakthrough came when a Harvard research lab user unexpectedly began using the extension as a generalized video communication tool rather than for user testing feedback.

After this unexpected pivot, Khan and team threw together a landing page and launched OpenVid on Product Hunt on June 16, 2016. "Within 24 hours we got 3,000 people to download our extension and start using it. By the end of the week, maybe five or 6,000 people had installed the Chrome extension." They had burned through their initial $10,000 loan from Joe's friend and were desperate for capital. Their first investor was a patent lawyer who rented Khan's room on Airbnb—he invested $5K, then doubled down with another $5K. Subsequent angels came in at $25K, $50K, and finally a $200K preceed round in 2015-2017.

Loom's explosive growth wasn't just product-market fit—it was timing. From 2016 to 2018, early adopters in support and product teams used Loom for screen recording and walkthroughs. But the real tailwind came when remote work became mainstream and the pandemic hit. "The market really wasn't ripe for what we were building up until maybe 2018... those trends ended up becoming tailwinds for Loom. It wasn't necessarily the reason why we built Loom." Loom scaled to 14 million users and 200,000 companies, proving that the right product at the right moment can dominate.

With Loom proven successful, Khan turned to venture investing with a novel thesis: capital is abundant, but attention is scarce. He co-founded Prologue, a holding company anchoring Product Hunt and Hyper, a $60M early-stage accelerator. Hyper invests $300K for 5% equity in select founders per cohort (four times per year), providing not just money but hands-on support, mentorship from experienced operators, and distribution access through Product Hunt. At month eight or nine of operation, Khan believes Hyper will grow through founder referrals and network effects. "If you do your job right and do right by your founders, it'll naturally have this network effect," he notes, pointing to Sequoia's scout program as proof that founder-to-founder referrals are the best deal flow.