Hi, I am Anand Iyer. Pronounced “aah-nun iye-er”.
I am the Managing Partner of an early stage blockchain infrastructure fund, Canonical Crypto and Venture Partner at Lightspeed. I mostly focus on “picks and shovels” of crypto infrastructure, and I have a special affinity for developer tools.
Previously I was a Visiting Partner at Pear Ventures, an early stage pre-seed and seed firm where I focused on cryptocurrency and decentralized finance (DeFi) investments. I am currently teaching a course on DeFi.
Before I was fully red-pilled, I was the CEO & Founder of Trusted, a child care marketplace. Trusted was acquired by Care.com in 2018. Before Trusted, I was the Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder at Threadflip, a marketplace for women’s apparel. And before that I was CTO & Co-Founder of OnSports (acquired by Yahoo!). OnSports was like Digg meets Twitter, but for sports content.
I cut my teeth building products and evangelizing Developer Platforms at Microsoft. I have a degree in Computer Engineering from Purdue University. I occasionally write on Medium, Twitter, and Farcaster.
My wife, Shreya, and I are angel investors – we tend to be stage and sector agnostic. Our crypto investments include The Graph , Mercurial Finance, Blockstack, Trusttoken, Betdex, Burrata, TRM Labs, Syndica, Luma (Glow Wallet)
Our non-crypto investments include Airbnb (secondary), Apero Health, BlueJeans (secondary, acquired by Verizon), Glimpse, Metafy, Otter, Lexria, Sandbox VR, Smash.gg (acquired by Microsoft),Tesorio, Vahan among others.
You can read our investment decision framework here. Also, check out our AngelList profile here: https://angel.co/ai
My expertise is in early stage company building, and I veer towards consumer and marketplaces. Shreya is an attorney turned talent acquisition specialist and has helped scale Splunk from a couple of hundred to over 6000 employees. We are constantly learning and as we think about our future, our interest has been piquing in climate change, cryptocurrency and longevity related businesses.
We are also Limited Partners in a few early stage venture capital funds: Haystack, Chapter One, Ravikant Capital, Atelier Ventures and Offline Ventures.
My wife, daughter and I live in the San Francisco Bay Area.