Shawn Dimantha
Founder of Hydra Ventures
Shawn Dimantha
Founder of Hydra Ventures
San Francisco, California
Overview
Work Experience
Product Management
2019 - Current
2021 - present: YouTube - ML insights, GenAI creator tools & data infra for world's largest creator economy 2019 - 2021: Verily Life Sciences - ML insights in digital health & medical devices
Product Management
2021
ML driven data insights & GenAI creator tools at exascale growing and powering the world's largest creator economy + infra, data engineering and more
Co-Founder
2022
Hydra Ventures (https://hydraventures.xyz) is a $10M+ AUM fund to create and invest in emerging tech-focused investment DAOs & communities building the future of computing. I co-founded Hydra with 1kx, MCV, and Thing3 after exploring the next phase of growth for investment DAOs. Hydra has 70+ members across tier 1 crypto investment organizations like 1kx, Collab+Currency, Consensys Mesh, NEAR, Polygon, Seed Club Ventures, Syndicate, ID Theory, CMT Digital, and KR1 among others. We invest in and incubate investment communities in emerging tech areas like zero-knowledge proofs (Zero), decentralized science (Beaker), generative AI (Metropolis), AI art (Cyborg), on-chain art (Assembly), decentralized compute (Urbit, Octu Ventures), decentralized social (Social Graph Ventures), and ecosystems (Cambrian Collective with NEAR + decentralized AI) among other areas. You can read more about Hydra's origins via our initial whitepaper & announcement: https://github.com/metacartel/hydra-DAO/blob/main/Whitepaper.pdf https://twitter.com/HydraVentures_/status/1531613266748837889 My 5 min explainer at the 2022 Berkeley Zero-Knowledge Proof workshop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct6H5GcnA0A&t=14756 My venture DAO explainer: bit.ly/venturedaos
Angel & Venture Investor
2018
I invest across multiple sectors with an overweight focus on AI/ML, crypto/web3 and biotech. Select investments below: AI/ML: Databricks, MindPortal, Sundial, WOMBO, Woebot Health, stealth startups Through Hydra/Metropolis: Common Sense Machines (CSM), MultiON, Glif, Scenario, Chirper, Anima, Magick, Bittensor, Inference Labs, Open Souls, Payman, Pika Labs, Prime Intellect, BasedAI, Giza, Altera, RPS AI Biotech / TechBio / digital health: Convoke, Cambrian Biopharma, Eight Sleep, Enveda Biosciences, Evernow, Mighty Health, Octant Bio, Pheiron, Woebot Health, stealth startups Through Hydra/Beaker (DeSci): AthenaDAO, CerebrumDAO, CryoDAO, HairDAO, LabDAO, Molecule, ResearchHub, ValleyDAO, Vitalia Crypto / web3: Animoca Brands, buildspace, Ceramic, Dapper Labs, Fan Controlled Football, Flip.art, GoSats, Karma, Layer3, POAP, Skylock, SolStar Through Hydra/Zero: Lagrange Labs, RISC Zero, stealth ZKP startups Consumer / social: Discord, Commaful, Snackpass, Badaboom, Haus Alternative investing platforms: Allocations.com, Angellist Fintech / SaaS: InsurGrid, Vendease Africa, AbstractOps +many more!
AI Founder Fellow
2023 - 2023
Inception Studio is a non-profit accelerator built for the most experienced world-class entrepreneurs and builders at the earliest stages of starting their next AI company. I was part of cohort 5 and explored ideas in AI x biology and AI x generative media.
Web3/Crypto Founder Fellow (Block 5), DeFi Guild Lead (Blocks 6 & 7)
2022 - 2023
Kernel is a custom web3 educational community building an open, peer-to-peer, lifelong network of awesome humans, one block at a time. Each block accommodates 250 individuals and runs for 8 weeks. It is a unique experience. Kernel is where I explored the initial seed of an idea for Hydra Ventures, with a focus on decentralized venture studios. Some of my initial thinking on venture studios can be found here: https://shawndimantha.substack.com/p/venture-studio-models-continued-the I was a fellow for Block 5 and have subsequently taught the community about venture DAOs (https://bit.ly/venturedaos) and token communities like ⌐◨-◨ NounsDAO (https://bit.ly/nounsdao-overview). I also was a guide to new fellows and co-led our DeFi guild where we engaged with the broader DeFi community including exploring the latest trends with a podcast that I hosted (https://linktr.ee/kerneldefipod), judging hackathons (first NFT Finance Hackathon with 1kx & MacroDAO https://macrohacks.xyz/), and some other projects to be announced. http://kernel.community/en/
Healthcare Advisor
2021 - 2022
SignalFire is the first venture capital firm built from the ground up as a technology company. I advised SignalFire’s digital health portfolio companies on product & go-to-market strategy, and their investment team on healthcare trends and opportunities. I was also a member of SignalFire's inaugural Healthcare Lighthouse cohort of senior executives in telemedicine, hospitals, insurance, brick & mortar clinics, and SaaS consumer tools, among other areas. https://signalfire.com/
Angel Squad Member
2021 - 2022
Investing with Hustle Fund at https://www.hustlefund.vc/angelsquad. Awesome community, learned a lot about upgrading my angel investing skills!
Product Management
2019 - 2021
Verily is Alphabet’s main bet in life sciences and healthcare and is a growth stage startup that spun out of Google X, living at the intersection of technology, data science and healthcare. I was at the company during a period of significant growth and investment ($1.7B across 2 rounds led by Silver Lake) and led our product portfolio in mental and behavioral health. Products and companies I launched / incubated / scaled: - OneFifteen (launching our focus on tech-enabled care for addiction - https://onefifteen.org/) - Onduo (scaling chronic disease management telehealth platform to mental & behavioral health - https://onduo.com/mbh/) - Myalo (incubating a product that derives AI signals from passive smartphone sensors for depression into our health platforms) - Granular Insurance (launching stop-loss insurance - https://granularinsurance.com/) - Verily Patch (expanding use cases for continuous temperature measurement across our portfolio - https://verily.com/solutions/verily-patch/) Other focus areas: behavioral health, mental health, population health management, chronic disease behavior change, medical devices, sensors
Director of Product & Engineering
2016 - 2019
The Center is a startup nonprofit dedicated to making higher quality, more affordable healthcare a reality for all Americans. I was on the senior leadership team and led engineering, product management, and design. I built this team from scratch, recruiting and managing a high-functioning cross-functional team of tech lead / managers, full-stack engineers, product managers and user experience designers. I also was responsible for management & advisory board presentations, including a highlight of demoing our product to Bill Gates (he's a super nice guy!). My team built products to help practice managers and physicians in primary care practices to redesign their workflows for value-based care. The first product we released was PracticeCoach, which is a project management and tracking tool that helps primary care practice managers organize and track all workflow redesign projects in one place along with associated performance measure data. Unlike other project management tools in the quality improvement space, PracticeCoach comes pre-loaded with evidence-based project content and digitizes best practices from behavioral psychology to ensure workflow changes are sustained over time. We also built comprehensive data aggregation tools to take in multiple streams of data from electronic health records (EHRs) and clinical systems in a HIPAA compliant manner. I also served as our HIPAA Security Officer, and am well-versed in HIPAA compliance requirements and how to implement necessary data protections, policies & procedures. Technologies we used include Ruby on Rails, ReactJS, PostgreSQL, Python. Our main data sources included clinical data (EHR), cost of care data (all payer claims), and we generated all sorts of new clinically relevant data at the practice level helping us drive physician behavior change. The Center was founded by Pete Peterson, co-founder of Blackstone and former Secretary of Commerce and Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Education
Investments
Latest Articles
Lean Product Development in Digital Health, Part 1: Choosing a Market
Talks about Healthcare, Lean Product Development and Digital Health