Anand Iyer

Anand Iyer, pronounced “aah-nun iye-er”, building something new. Early Stage Web3/Crypto Investor. ex-CEO Trusted (acq Care). ex-Microsoft. Dad joke enthusiast. Instructor at DeFi MasterClass.

I am a Visiting Partner at Pear Ventures, an early stage pre-seed and seed firm where I focus on blockchain, cryptocurrency and decentralized finance (DeFi) investments. I love teaching and I am currently teaching a course on DeFi.

I was the CEO & Founder of Trusted, a child care marketplace. Trusted was acquired by Care.com in 2018.

Before Trusted, I was the Chief Product Officer & Co-Founder at Threadflip (RIP). Threadflip was a marketplace for women’s apparel. And before that I was CTO & Co-Founder of OnSports (acquired by Yahoo!). OnSports was like Digg meets Twitter, but for sports content. I cut my teeth building and evangelizing products at Microsoft and Cisco Systems. I have a degree in Computer Engineering from Purdue University.

My wife, Shreya, and I are angel investors – we tend to be stage and sector agnostic. Our investments include Airbnb (secondary), Apero Health, Blockstack, BlueJeans (secondary, acquired by Verizon), Glimpse, Metafy, Lexria, Sandbox VR, Smash.gg (acquired by Microsoft),Tesorio, TrustToken, Vahan among others.

My expertise is in early stage company building, and I veer towards consumer and marketplaces. Shreya is an attorney turned talent acquisition specialist and has helped scale Splunk from a couple of hundred to over 6000 employees. We are constantly learning and as we think about our future, our interest has been piquing in climate change, cryptocurrency and longevity related businesses.

We are also Limited Partners in a few early stage venture capital funds: Haystack, Chapter One, Ravikant Capital, Atelier Ventures and Offline Ventures.