When Ryan Hoover introduced me, Josh Buckley, as Product Hunt’s new CEO a few months ago, he teased a big vision for the future. I’m incredibly excited to finally be able to share some of that vision with you today.

Say hello to Hyper, a new kind of early-stage venture firm inspired by the awesome community of makers and early adopters at Product Hunt. Hyper’s investments are about a lot more than just money — we provide startups with the things they need most in today’s tech ecosystem: a great mentorship program, a helpful community, and unique distribution partnerships, among other things we’ll announce later this year. And what makes Hyper really interesting is how we plan to reinvest our fund profits back into the ecosystem.

We’re going to invest in a small number of startups four times per year, with the first group starting our 8-week founder program on September 10th. Applications for Hyper’s Fall season are open as of today, so if you’re a startup founder, or if you’re thinking of starting a company, you should apply now.

Read more about the Hyper team and how it works, and let us know what you think. We're excited to see what the tech community (like TechCrunch) and Product Hunt community are saying about our launch so far:

"Congrats! Brilliant move for the Product Hunt community 🙌" - Ben Lang

"Congrats to you Josh & whole PH team. Excited to see this one. Applying it right away :)" - Dheeraj Mehndiratta

Stay tuned for more announcements in the coming weeks. We have some exciting news that I can’t wait to share with you.

• Check out: Square Banking, i.e. Square just launched a small business banking arm.
• Read: Our Maker Story with Vidya Madhavan, the maker of Schmooze. We talked about the meme-dating app for Gen Z, "meme officers," and over-glorified product journeys.
• Contribute: Who's your favorite founder and why?
• Discover: If you run an eCommerce store, check out this launch of Rutter 2.0, a universal API for orders, customer data, and checkout functions.
• Time Travel: To 2018. Three years ago today, we met Brex. Today, its latest valuation is $7.4 billion.
• Play: Find Kanye in a pool of coffee beans.