Geek Ventures' Ihar Mahaniok: Seed Investor Behind Tech Unicorns
Jan 20, 2025•1 hr 8 min
Episode description
Ihar Mahaniok, Founder and Managing Partner, is an immigrant engineering leader turned investor. Ihar grew up in Belarus, where he studied Computer Science. He has over 20 years of experience building code, ML models and engineering teams for startups and conglomerates, including Google & Meta. As an angel investor, Ihar invested in 150+ startups. Companies he has backed at seed include unicorns such as Instacart, PandaDoc, People.ai, Airbyte, and Jeeves.
- Evaluates technical talent and engineering culture as an investor
- Emerging ML/AI opportunities
- Key lessons and challenges moving from engineering to investing