The engineer who turned a bar's closing night into a billion-dollar company is now placing bets on the founders who've already been through the fire once - and want to go again, faster.
It was 2011. Walker Williams walked into Evan Stites-Clayton's dorm at Brown University and told him their job marketplace, Jobzel, wasn't going to work. Six months of backend engineering. No traction. Walker had an idea for something else.
A dive bar near campus - FishCo - was being shut down. Walker made a "FREE FISHCO" campaign page on a rough prototype of their new idea: a site where you could sell t-shirts on pre-order, only printing if enough people bought in. The campaign earned $3,000 to $4,000 in a single weekend. More revenue than Jobzel had generated in three months.
That was Teespring's first sale. It came from saving a bar.
From that weekend, Evan and Walker built what would become one of the fastest-growing e-commerce companies in history. Within a year of officially launching in October 2012, they were doing over $500,000 a month. By the time they walked into Y Combinator's Winter 2013 batch, it was $250,000 a month. When they walked out twelve weeks later, it was $1 million a month. By 2014, they hit $1 million a day.
The engine was Facebook - both the algorithm and paid advertising - and a product so frictionless that creators could go from idea to cash in their account without a warehouse, a printer, or any inventory risk. Teespring held the risk. The creators held the profit.
"Not only do they have determination and grit... but they're also riding some kind of wave."
- Evan Stites-Clayton on what separates breakout companies from merely determined onesRaising $65 million at a high valuation sounds like the story ending well. For Evan, it turned out to be the part where the story got complicated.
High valuations create their own physics. To generate a meaningful return for investors - and for founders - the exit has to be even larger than the round implies. The company's infrastructure had been built assuming continuous momentum. When that momentum slowed, the burn rate didn't. There were layoffs. A down round.
The lesson Evan carries into his work at HF0 is counterintuitive: slow down how fast you spend. Make funds last three years, not one. And build customer retention before you build headcount.
The other insight: rapid growth prevented Teespring from understanding why customers came back - or didn't. The Facebook distribution worked so well that the team never had to build loyalty. That's a dangerous comfort to be in.
"Focus resources on core product improvement rather than aggressive scaling."
- Evan Stites-Clayton, reflecting on Teespring's post-growth phaseHF0 is not a typical accelerator. The name stands - informally - for a cohort zero: the idea that before a company has even found its legs, the right environment can compress years of learning into weeks.
The model is built around repeat technical founders. Not first-timers learning the basics. People who have already built something, seen it scale (or fail to scale), and want to go again - this time with the playbook in their pocket and AI-native companies on the whiteboard.
Evan joined as General Partner and CTO in 2022. His role blends the technical and the strategic: he evaluates which founders have the credibility, the grit, and the market insight to build something that can become very large very fast. He also helps them navigate the technology choices that will define their architecture for years.
The terms are notable. HF0 invests $500K for 3% equity. For comparison, Y Combinator - where Evan himself went through as a Teespring co-founder - takes 7%. The math is deliberately founder-friendly.
The residency structure means founders are physically together, building in the same place, creating what Evan describes as the densest founder network in tech. The HF0 portfolio includes companies like Krea and iKHOR - names that are already turning heads in the AI ecosystem.
$500K investment. 3% equity. 12-week residency in San Francisco. Batch-based. Focused exclusively on repeat technical founders building AI-native startups. Demo Days twice per year.
"The level of founders I'm meeting during this HF0 interview season is absolutely world class. So blessed to do this work."
- Evan Stites-Clayton on X, May 2025Evan's Medium bio reads: "poet, dreamer, hacker." Most people in venture capital choose between the first and the third. He holds all three at once.
He has attended retreats organized by the Lucidity Institute - a group dedicated to the science and practice of lucid dreaming. He's hosted his own Lucid Dreaming Workshop on YouTube. He's written about Burning Man in the context of climate economics. He writes essays about both startup failures and the nature of consciousness.
On GitHub, between Teespring commits, you'll find a project called "dreamcatcher" - a lucid dreaming app - alongside newDay Planner. He builds tools for his own inner life the same way he builds tools for founders.
There's a straight line from lucid dreaming to AI companionship. Evan believes digital companions - AI coaches available around the clock across every life role - represent the most underexplored territory in consumer AI. Not robots. Not agents. Presence.
Evan leads lucid dreaming workshops and runs a top-tier AI accelerator. The overlap is not accidental. Both require training your mind to see what others assume is fixed.
Evan's framework for evaluating founders has two variables that must both be present: determination and a wave. "Not only do they have determination and grit," he's said, "but they're also riding some kind of wave." One without the other doesn't get you to scale.
At HF0, the wave is clearly AI. But Evan is specific about where in AI he sees white space. He's pointed to AI digital companions as one of the most underexplored areas: personal coaches that can be available 24/7, that can take on different roles depending on what you need at that moment - friend, advisor, trainer, therapist. The UX isn't there yet. But the underlying capability is approaching it.
His argument for startups over incumbents is tactical, not ideological. Startups win because they have smaller user bases to migrate, leaner teams with lower overhead, and faster shipping cycles. The advantage disappears if you scale too fast. Which is exactly the lesson Teespring taught him the hard way.
HF0's portfolio already includes companies like Krea (AI creative tools), iKHOR, and Recursal - names that signal the program is finding exactly the kind of repeat founders with the technical credibility to build at the frontier.
His GitHub (estitesc) has both Teespring infrastructure commits and a project called "dreamcatcher" - a lucid dreaming app. He also built newDay Planner. He codes for his own life the same way he codes for companies.
Teespring's first product was a t-shirt to save a Providence, Rhode Island dive bar called FishCo. The campaign sold over 400 shirts and earned $2,000. The bar's closure launched a company that would eventually do $1M a day.
HF0's $500K for 3% wasn't set by accident. Evan went through YC at 7% with Teespring. He knows exactly what that dilution costs a founder at exit. HF0's terms are partly an answer to that experience.
His Medium bio says "poet, dreamer, hacker." He's written about Burning Man and climate economics, lucid dreaming retreats, and launch post-mortems. 569 followers. Every category surprising.
He co-founded Teespring with Walker Williams at Brown. Walker is now a Visiting Partner at HF0. They went from dorm room to accelerator to venture fund together - a rare long-running co-founder arc.
He attended retreats organized by the Lucidity Institute - the world's leading lucid dreaming research organization. He subsequently ran his own Lucid Dreaming Workshop on YouTube. He takes both the inner frontier and the AI frontier seriously.
