Furqan Rydhan

Furqan Rydhan is the founder of Founders, Inc., a venture studio and investment fund based at Fort Mason in San Francisco, and the CEO and co-founder of thirdweb, a Web3 developer platform.¹⁹¹ He was previously the founding CTO of AppLovin, which went public in April 2021 at a valuation exceeding $28 billion and has since surpassed $100 billion in market capitalization.⁸¹⁴ Before that, he was CTO of Bebo and Monkey Inferno under Shaan Puri, where he helped build the esports tournament platform that Amazon's Twitch acquired for up to $25 million in 2019.⁹

Early career

Rydhan got his first job at a dot-com company at age 15.¹² At 17, in 2002, he founded Case-Mod.com, an e-commerce company that he ran for five years.²³ He later described it as his first real company: "my first job was at a dot-com when I was like in my teenage years. I was 15 and I built an e-commerce company."¹²

Between 2007 and 2009, Rydhan founded LiveRSVP, an event technology startup, while simultaneously working as a product manager at Cirago International (2007-2008).² He then joined ReputationDefender (now Reputation.com) as a senior software engineer and R&D team member from 2009 to 2010.²³

AppLovin (2010-2013)

In 2010, Rydhan became the founding CTO of AppLovin, a mobile advertising and app-monetization platform co-founded by Adam Foroughi, John Krystynak, and Andrew Karam.¹²⁰ He held the CTO role for three years, from 2010 to 2013, building the company's technical infrastructure during its earliest stage.²³

AppLovin went public on the Nasdaq on April 15, 2021, raising $2 billion at a valuation of $28.64 billion.⁸ The company grew to over 410 million daily active users on its platform.⁸ By late 2024, AppLovin's market capitalization had exceeded $100 billion, making Rydhan's early technical work the foundation of one of the largest mobile technology companies in the world.¹⁴

On the My First Million podcast in May 2021, host Shaan Puri introduced Rydhan as someone who "previously co-founded AppLovin -- a $20B+ company that recently went public," and the two discussed Rydhan's decision-making process for choosing which projects to work on.¹⁰ Rydhan returned for episode 653 in November 2024, billed as "$100B Founder Breaks Down The Biggest AI Business Opportunities," where he and Puri discussed Adam Foroughi's execution at AppLovin and the emerging AI landscape.¹¹

Monkey Inferno and Bebo (2013-2019)

After leaving AppLovin in 2013, Rydhan joined Monkey Inferno, the startup studio and incubator founded by Michael and Xochi Birch, as CTO.² Shaan Puri was running Monkey Inferno as CEO, and Rydhan worked under him.¹⁰ The studio operated a roughly 20-person team building products with the Birches' capital.⁹

In 2015, Rydhan's role shifted to CTO and co-founder of the reconstituted Bebo, which was pivoting from its earlier experiments (including the group video app Blab, which had attracted 3.9 million users before shutting down in 2016) toward esports tournament software.²⁹ In its final form, Bebo provided tools for organizing and running gaming leagues and tournaments, with streams running on Twitch while Bebo handled scheduling, brackets, and community management.⁹

In June 2019, Amazon's Twitch acquired Bebo for up to $25 million, beating bids from Discord and Facebook, which had reportedly offered $20 million.⁹ The acquisition included roughly ten employees and all intellectual property.⁹ TechCrunch described Rydhan at the time as "Bebo's CTO, who was also previously CTO of AppLovin."⁹

thirdweb (2020-present)

After the Twitch acquisition, Rydhan co-founded thirdweb with Jake Loo, a former Bebo founding engineer, and Steven Bartlett, the founder of Social Chain and host of the Diary of a CEO podcast.⁵⁷ Loo had begun building side projects with blockchain technology after Twitch and connected with Rydhan and Bartlett.⁷ "We knew that builders would want to build in this space and that they would need a tool," Rydhan told TechCrunch. "We started with a base set of ideas, and over the course of a year, built out Thirdweb and now have hundreds of customers integrating SDKs. Like the way Stripe made it easy to plug in, our code is similar, but we wrote it to give to everyone."⁵

Thirdweb launched publicly in September 2021 with free, no-code tools for building NFT drops, DAOs, token marketplaces, and Web3 games.⁵ In December 2021, the company closed a $5 million seed round from Gary Vaynerchuk, Mark Cuban, Christian Angermayer, and others.⁵ On August 24, 2022, thirdweb announced a $24 million Series A at a $160 million valuation, led by Haun Ventures, with Coinbase Ventures, Shopify, and Polygon participating.⁶²³ The round brought total funding to $29 million.²²

By September 2023, the platform had 50,000 active developers and 5 million active end users interacting with products built on its tools.¹² On the Web3 Galaxy Brain podcast that November, host Nicholas described Rydhan's "years of experience" as lending him "a mature perspective on startup cycles and the development of web infrastructure."¹²

At a Pragma San Francisco fireside chat in October 2024, Rydhan discussed how thirdweb "evolved from hacking prototypes in 2019 to creating a full-stack platform" covering front-end tools, back-end services, and on-chain capabilities.¹³ In January 2025, thirdweb launched Nebula, an AI model for interacting with blockchain data across 2,500+ EVM blockchains.²⁵

Jake Loo stepped down as CTO in early 2026 after more than four years, during which the team had grown to over 50 people before contracting to approximately 15.²¹¹⁵ Rydhan continues as CEO.¹⁹

Founders, Inc. (2020-present)

Rydhan founded Founders, Inc. in 2020, the same year he co-founded thirdweb.²⁴ The venture studio operates from a 42,000-square-foot campus at Fort Mason in San Francisco, a National Historic Landmark that also houses cultural nonprofits and arts organizations.¹⁷²⁴

Founders, Inc. writes checks of $100,000 to $250,000 in exchange for 4-7% equity, targeting founders working in emerging technology areas including AI, AR/VR, hardware, Web3, and developer tools.¹⁶ The fund has invested in more than 100 companies over three years.¹⁷ Notable portfolio companies include thirdweb, LiveKit, Sync Labs, and Shapes.¹⁷

The campus provides founders with dedicated desk space, a hardware lab, a media recording studio, a gym, daily lunches, one-on-one office hours, and community events.¹⁶ Rydhan has described the concept as the space he "dreamed of having when I was 18 -- just tinkering, exploring, and building things with friends, fueled by curiosity and passion."¹⁷ The campus previously hosted buildspace's Nights and Weekends program before buildspace wound down in 2024.¹⁵

On the f.inc website, Rydhan distinguishes the model from both venture capital and accelerators: "The only similarity between a VC and us is that we both write checks. But the similarities stop there," the site reads, emphasizing long-term relationships rather than time-bound cohorts.¹⁶ Unlike traditional accelerators, founders can remain at the campus indefinitely, and some return after completing other programs like Y Combinator.¹⁶

The team includes general partner Hubert Thieblot, COO Mike Shin, creative director Stavan Patel, and several others in founder experience, operations, and investment roles.¹⁸

Investing

Rydhan is an active angel investor. His Crunchbase profile lists nine portfolio companies, including The Clearing Company, Pally, Orb, OthersideAI, CrowdPad, Atom, Cypherock, Afriex, and Plotdrive.⁴ According to NFX Signal, his personal investment range is $5,000 to $50,000 with a sweet spot of $25,000, and he is ranked on sector lists for Web3/Blockchain and Web3/Crypto investing at both the seed and pre-seed stages.² This is separate from the larger checks Founders, Inc. writes through its fund.

The Bebo Tree

Rydhan's career is a central branch of what the Founders, Inc. wiki calls the Bebo tree -- the network of founders and companies that emerged from the original Bebo social network. His path from AppLovin founding CTO (2010) to Monkey Inferno CTO (2013) to Bebo CTO (2015) to thirdweb co-founder and Founders, Inc. founder (2020) traces directly through the Bebo organization chart.⁹² He worked alongside Shaan Puri at Monkey Inferno and Bebo for six years, reconnected with Jake Loo from the Bebo engineering team to co-found thirdweb, and brought in Steven Bartlett as the third co-founder.⁵⁷ Founders, Inc. then became an investor in thirdweb, closing the loop between the venture studio and the Web3 platform.¹⁵

References

1. Furqan Rydhan — Personal Website(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
2. Furqan Rydhan's Investing Profile — NFX Signal(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
3. Furqan Rydhan — Wellfound(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
4. Furqan Rydhan — Co-Founder @ thirdweb — Crunchbase Person Profile(accessed Apr 18, 2026)
5. Gary Vaynerchuk, Mark Cuban back web3 project tool Thirdweb — TechCrunch