Zach Waterfield

About

I grew up in Canada 🇨🇦. I went to the University of Waterloo for Computer engineering and worked at a variety of early/growth-stage companies. I've lived in many places like Lima, Porto, San Francisco, Ann Arbor, Toronto, and Vancouver. I love travelling and exploring new places.

Favourite things

• 💻 Building products
• ☕️ Good coffee
• 🗣 Talking to passionate people
• 🛬 Traveling to new places
• 👟 Running
• 🚴‍♂️ Biking
• 🏊 Swimming

What I'm doing these days

• Engineer at PostHog
• Training for my first Ironman 🏊‍♂️ 🚴‍♂️ 🏃
• Investing with Ripple Ventures and Pioneer Fund - focused on devtools, AI and B2B SaaS
• Helping early stage startups and founders
• Building fun side projects like Scramble

Things I've done in the past

• Founder poker game.
• Events / dinners for founders and people in tech
• Founded Zettlor
• Helped source deals with Village Globals and Shaan Puri's fund - investing in 40+ companies
• Built and sold a bit.ly competitor named Toadly
• Investment Club Syndicate - Ian Logan and I run a syndicate on AngelList where we invest in a wide range of companies.
• On Deck - I was an engineering lead at On Deck. On Deck is where the world's top talent comes to connect. Whatever it is you want to do next, our ever-growing community and action-oriented programming will help you get there—fast. If you want to learn something new to up-level your career, launch and scale your big ideas, or make lifelong friends, this is the place for you.
• Kopa - In 2016, I co-founded Kopa, originally called PadPiper, with Jack and Courtney. We founded it on the belief that there is a better way to rent. Housing is such an important piece of our lives, yet it is one of the most stressful to acquire. We built Kopa to be the most streamlined process for renting a home, from searching to paying and moving in. Kopa went through YCombinator in Winter 2019 and has since expanded to over 300 cities in the United States and helped thousands of people find homes. In August 2020, I stepped back from Kopa to work on other things.
• Many more including ventures like WorkOS, Farmlogs, and others.

Find me on the internet

Email: [email protected]

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/zlwaterfield/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/zlwaterfield

How can I help

• Engineering and product strategy - I've been around the block a few times and have a good sense of what works and what doesn't. I'm happy to help you think through your product strategy, engineering strategy, and how to build a great product.
• Fundraising strategy / pitch help / deck review - I've helped over 100 companies with YC prep and reviewed countless decks for founders raising their pre-seed and seed rounds. If you need help building a strategy around your raise, improving your narrative, or just getting a deck review, let me know!
• Early startup operations - I've spent a lot of time both building my startup and helping other founders. There is a lot to manage. I'm happy to help think through those early operations like organizing your team, interviewing early hires, choosing the right services for payroll, bookkeeping, etc.
• Co-founder dynamics - I've been through the ups and downs you go through with your founding team. It can be hard, but there are things you can do to make it easier. I'm happy to walk through strategies I've used that have worked wonders on team morale.