Todd Goldberg

The Quiet Operator Behind Breakout Startups

Todd Goldberg does not lead rounds. He does not have a partner meeting that takes three weeks to schedule. He DMs back on Twitter at 11pm and shows up to product reviews with notes that founders say feel like they were written by someone who actually used the product, because he did. That's the operating theory behind Todd & Rahul Capital - and it keeps working.

His name appears on cap tables you'd recognize. Mercury. Superhuman. Supabase. Clearbit. ClassDojo. Descript. Hex. Eight Sleep. Clubhouse. The list reads like a "best products of the last five years" roundup, and Goldberg was often in the room before the product had a landing page. He's invested in over 120 startups with partner Rahul Vohra, deploying north of $50 million across two funds. Not bad for someone whose first fund pitch was essentially: "we're product people, and product people want to raise from product people."

The thesis is almost embarrassingly simple. And it has attracted LPs including names that make other VCs nervous to share the same pitch deck: a16z partners, Alexis Ohanian, Justin Kan, Electric Capital. Not just as co-investors - as limited partners writing checks into Todd's fund. That's the tell. When the people who do this for a living put money into your fund, you're doing something right.

A Startup Weekend, a Shared Apartment, and a Ticketmaster Exit

The origin story starts in Tampa, Florida, at a 54-hour hackathon. Todd Goldberg and Karl White met at Startup Weekend, built something they called "EXMO" - a mobile platform to connect people at events - and two years later they formalized it into Eventjoy. The pitch was simple: mobile-first ticketing that didn't make organizers feel like they were using software from 2006.

Y Combinator accepted Eventjoy in Winter 2014. Mountain View in winter, two founders in a shared work-live apartment, minimizing burn with the kind of monastic focus that YC tends to produce. They kept costs near zero and user count climbing. By September 2014 - the same year they entered YC - Ticketmaster had acquired them.

Goldberg became VP at Ticketmaster, scaling Eventjoy inside the corporate behemoth. He stayed long enough to learn what large organizations do slowly, then left in November 2015 to do things fast again.

The Solo Builder Phase

Post-Ticketmaster, Goldberg entered what might charitably be called a prolific experimental phase. He built Framepop - an iOS app that turned phone photos into ready-to-hang framed prints. Apple featured it. He built Cardpop. Apple featured that too. He shipped Mailjoy, a DIY direct mail marketing tool that lets small businesses design, send, and track postcard campaigns without a $50,000 agency retainer. Mailjoy is bootstrapped, profitable, and is considered one of the top direct mail apps in the US.

He also built something called CryptoGoods. He built Blocksignal. He built Amble. He built Activity Walls. In a 2016 Medium post, he counted "nearly a dozen smaller products" and admitted most of them went nowhere interesting. But the habit of building - of starting with an actual problem, writing actual code, and putting something real in front of real users - never left him. It's the thing that makes him useful to founders in a way that most investors aren't.

In 2017, while most people in San Francisco were still calling NFTs "a weird Ethereum thing," Goldberg was reading the ERC-721 specification that would eventually power CryptoKitties. Then he built a gallery tool for it. Not because anyone asked him to. Because he thought it was interesting and building is how he thinks.

Todd & Rahul: The Fund Named After Its Founders

The partnership with Rahul Vohra - founder of Superhuman and previously Rapportive (acquired by LinkedIn) - started the way good partnerships often do: through a mutual investment. Goldberg had backed Partender, a bar inventory platform, through a college friend. Rahul was also involved. They co-invested in Superhuman's seed round. By 2019, Goldberg had launched an AngelList syndicate. Within two months, it had 200+ backers. Rahul called and suggested they make it a real fund.

They raised $7.3 million in roughly four months. Fund II, announced in June 2021, closed at $24 million. Combined with personal angel activity, the total deployed has crossed $50 million across 120+ companies. The fund does not lead rounds. Check sizes run between $300K and $500K at pre-seed, seed, and Series A. The value proposition is not the check - it's the access and the operators' perspective on how to build the product.

Orange = notable breakout companies. Positions are illustrative of publicly reported investments.

Curated: Betting on Digital Art Before the Crash, After the Hype

In 2022, Goldberg co-founded Curated with Andrew Jiang. The pitch was unusual: a $30 million fund dedicated exclusively to buying and holding NFT art for 5 to 10 years. Not flipping. Not speculating. Holding, like you'd hold a Basquiat.

The LPs read like an a16z reunion: Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Andrew Chen, Arianna Simpson, Jon Lai. Also Alexis Ohanian, Justin Kan, Avichal Garg and Curtis Spencer from Electric Capital. These are people with access to every fund in the world. They chose to put money into a crypto art collection managed by two product builders from San Francisco.

The thesis, as Goldberg explained to Sotheby's: collect only what you personally like. Don't let Twitter or the market drive your thinking. Digital art sits at the intersection of fine art and markets, with transparent provenance that physical art can't match. It's a long game. The fund was "mostly deployed" as of 2022 - which means they bought at the top, before the market cratered, which is either a nightmare or a long-term bet depending on your time horizon. Goldberg publicly chose the long-term framing before anyone knew what was coming.

The "Superhuman of X" Framework

In 2019, Goldberg published a blog post titled "The Superhuman of X." It has no viral moment attached to it. It has no famous retweet. It's just - correct. The argument: look for startups that can charge 10x the market rate by being 10x better at the primary use case for the power user. Not all users. The ones whose productivity depends on the tool.

He broke down Superhuman's formula into five pillars: sub-100ms speed, use-case-specific workflows, keyboard-first design, subtle in-product education, and minimalist aesthetics. Then he asked which other verticals could support the same model. The post is still circulating in product circles. It's the kind of writing that makes you want to read more of it - which is exactly how much he's published since.

The Minimalist Who Can't Stop Building

There's a running tension in how Goldberg describes himself. He says he lives minimally - "I seek out new experiences rather than new things to purchase." He ran his first marathon in 2018. He has visited more than 20 countries. He lists weightlifting, high-performance driving, photography, reading, and ramen among his stated interests. He is the person who has somehow read the book you've been meaning to read and also shipped a new product since you last spoke.

He is not loud. His Twitter presence (@toddgoldberg / @toddg777) is the feed of someone who is genuinely curious, not someone performing curiosity for followers. He lists Twitter DM as his preferred contact method for founders. That itself is data. He wants to hear from builders. He is, at his core, still a builder who happened to also become an investor and a collector, rather than an investor who occasionally builds things.