Niv Dror has raised $3 million for his debut venture capital fund, called Shrug Capital.
Why it matters: Dror has spent the past two years as head of marketing for AngelList (via its 2016 purchase of Product Hunt), and AngelList has become a burgeoning launchpad for small venture funds.
Dror, who is leaving AngelList to focus full-time on Shrug, says that he’s investing in founders working on “things that I’m excited to talk about for more than an hour to a non-tech audience. "So far, that’s been mostly consumer startups, such as HQ Trivia, Superhuman, Atoms, Molly, and Breaker.
Dror is following in the footsteps of Product Hunt founder Ryan Hoover who also raised his own small fund last year.
A-list investors: Dror has been able to attract the who’s who of Silicon Valley as investors into his fund, including Banister, Chris and Crystal Sacca, Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Amity Ventures, Social Capital, David Sacks, Keith Rabois, and Kevin Rose.
1 fun thing: Dror named his firm Shrug Capital after the ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ emoticon, which is tattooed on his wrist.
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Amazon is an iceberg: People only see what's above the surface. Meanwhile, underneath, the company just keeps expanding.
Why you'll hear about this again: This has proven true time and time again. When people thought of Amazon as a bookstore, it was already on its way to being an e-commerce giant. When all people saw was an e-commerce giant, Amazon was well on its way to being a marketplace and web services provider.
Amazon Prime — with its expansion into video and music services and its moves into brick and mortar — has been similarly underestimated, though people have at least learned to fear what the company might be up to next.
Here are a couple of new data points suggesting how huge the Amazon iceberg has grown — and where it's headed:
Go deeper: Axios business editor Dan Primack and I went back and forth about Amazon's size and strength in a video earlier this year.
