# Julian Shapiro

> Julian Shapiro is a Canadian-born entrepreneur, deeptech seed investor, and prolific writer who built a career that spans open-source animation engines, growth marketing agencies, and a Y Combinator-backed startup. He founded Demand Curve, the largest growth marketing education platform for startups, and now runs Julian.capital, a deeptech seed fund writing $500K-$2M checks into robotics, chips, energy, medtech, and biotech. His free handbooks at julian.com - covering writing, startups, fitness, and audio - are read by over a million people annually. He co-hosts the Brains Podcast with Courtland Allen and was previously VP of Marketing at Webflow.

- **Role:** General Partner at Julian Capital
- **Organizations:** Julian Capital, Demand Curve, Bell Curve, Hyper
- **From:** Montreal, Canada
- **Nationality:** Canadian
- **Education:** No formal CS degree noted, Self-taught (started coding at age 12), S19 Batch (Demand Curve), Y Combinator
- **Known for:** Founded Demand Curve (YC S19), which educated tens of thousands of startups in growth marketing including Microsoft, Zendesk, Imperfect Foods, Tovala, and Outschool, Built Velocity.js, one of the most widely used open-source JavaScript animation engines, adopted by Uber, Samsung, WhatsApp, Received the Stripe Open Source Grant for Velocity.js (2016)

## Career timeline

- **2000s** — Started coding in Visual Basic 6 at age 12 after relocating to a city outside Vancouver; began freelancing for local businesses at 14
- **2011** — Founded NameLayer, an algorithmic domain name discovery service analyzing 50,000 domains daily
- **2013** — Built Velocity.js, an open-source JavaScript animation engine adopted by Uber, Samsung, WhatsApp, and thousands of other companies
- **2014** — Sold NameLayer to Techstars
- **2014-2015** — Served as VP of Marketing at Webflow (now valued at $4B+)
- **2015** — Launched julian.com as personal blog and handbook platform; created Libscore open analytics project with Stripe and DigitalOcean
- **2016** — Received Stripe Open Source Grant for Velocity.js
- **2017** — Co-founded Bell Curve marketing agency with Neal O'Grady and Asher King-Abramson; clients include LinkedIn, Ancestry, TechCrunch
- **2019** — Founded Demand Curve (YC S19), the largest growth marketing education platform for startups; began writing growth marketing column at TechCrunch
- **2020s** — Launched the Brains Podcast with Courtland Allen; published handbooks on writing, startups, fitness, and HiFi audio
- **2022-present** — Launched Julian.capital deeptech seed fund; invested in Extropic (chips), Aalo (nuclear), Astro Mechanica (aerospace), Reflex Robotics, and 100+ others

## Achievements

- Founded Demand Curve (YC S19), which educated tens of thousands of startups in growth marketing including Microsoft, Zendesk, Imperfect Foods, Tovala, and Outschool
- Built Velocity.js, one of the most widely used open-source JavaScript animation engines, adopted by Uber, Samsung, WhatsApp
- Received the Stripe Open Source Grant for Velocity.js (2016)
- Julian.capital Fund 1 portfolio achieved 100% Seed to Series A rate; portfolio companies raised $600M+ collectively
- Free handbooks at julian.com read by over 1 million people annually
- VP of Marketing at Webflow during early growth phase (now $4B+ valuation)
- Ran growth at Heap Analytics ($960M+ valuation)
- Sold NameLayer domain service to Techstars (2014)
- Co-hosts Brains Podcast featuring guests like James Clear, Mark Manson, Tim Urban, Shaan Puri
- Profiled in Forbes; TechCrunch growth marketing columnist

## Latest updates

- **2024-12** — Astro Mechanica (aerospace) added to Julian.capital portfolio
- **2025-01** — Becoming (Bio) added to Julian.capital portfolio
- **2024-01** — Julian.capital actively deploying ~1 check per month into deeptech at seed/pre-seed
- **2023-01** — Deep Checks network launched as proprietary CRM of scientist-founders for deeptech deal flow

## Links

- Website: https://www.julian.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julian-shapiro
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/Julian

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/julian-shapiro
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-04-22