Ihar Mahaniok

Fund: Geek Ventures

Thesis: Immigrant VCs Investing in Immigrants

Fund size: $23 million

How he’s making the world a better place: Mahaniok believes talent is distributed equally all over the world and wants to give brilliant immigrant founders their shot.

Ihar Mahaniok’s story starts out like so many tech geniuses. A young boy with access to a computer back in Belarus. A twelve-year-old who learned to code, and the world opened up before his eyes. A computer science major in college was his ticket to a dream job at Google as a software engineer. 

He went to tech conferences, mixed and mingled with other engineers and founders. 

He made good money as an engineer as his career grew, and he worked at companies like Facebook and other hot AI startups. 

He started to angel invest. Five of his investments became unicorns, including Instacart, which went public in 2023 for an initial valuation of $10 billion. 

In 2021, he was between jobs, so he thought about building a startup himself. But after such a storied run at so many top companies, his bar was too high, he says. He couldn’t come up with an idea that merited the next ten years or more of his life. 

Finally, he realized the answer was right in front of him: Building his own venture fund. “Some people who liked coinvesting with me wanted me to take their money and invest,” he says. “A friend did VC Lab and said I should take a look. I was surprised when I got accepted.” 

He was? Really? The guy who invested in five unicorns? 

Even by VC Lab standards, Mahaniok made rapid progress. Within a month, he developed a fund thesis of backing immigrant founders, he named his fund Geek Ventures, he built a fundraising deck, and he was out pitching. 

“I was surprised at how fast I was able to get commitments and get to a first close,” he says. “Our target fund size was $10 million, and my first close of $6 million only took me a month or two months to close. I was surprised too. It was not just me; it was the environment. 2021 was way easier to raise. We increased the size to $15 million, and the markets turned so much harder in 2022 that going from that $6 million to $15 million was hard work. But I was eventually able to overshoot my goal and ended up with a $23 million fund size.” 

Despite a lot of people being too scared to put any money into the ecosystem in 2022, Mahaniok says his angel track record and the tactics and relentless focus he learned at VC Lab won out in the end. 

He knew he’d found his perfect startup in Geek Ventures. “This is something I want to do for the rest of my life,” he says. 

Some might think that his stellar investing track record and tenure at companies like Google and Facebook could have landed him a job at traditional VC firms. But Mahaniok says that’s not the case. That’s right: Even a guy who invested in Instacart’s seed round wasn’t a shoo-in at a traditional venture fund. This is what we’re talking about when we say the industry needs more opportunities, and the roles are way too narrowly defined. 

Mahaniok had been interested in joining a firm since about 2015, but just couldn’t find a way in. He didn’t have the financial degrees or MBAs to become an associate or principal, and anyway, as an engineer, he was making five times their salaries. That was going to be hard to walk away from. And he didn’t have the founder/CEO experience to be a general partner.  

“I just didn’t see a path to a traditional venture firm, and by 2021, my track record as an angel fund was so good that it didn’t even make sense for me to join a firm,” he says. “In 2025, there are just not enough roles in VC at all levels. The openings are so few, it’s often a better choice to start your own $1 million fund than try to find a job. Even today, I met with a guy looking for an associate job, and I was like, ‘It might be easier to raise your own million or half a million fund than get a job as an associate.’” 

Mahaniok not only thinks there needs to be more jobs, but, like Decile Group, believes there needs to be 10,000-20,000 more venture firms worldwide. Smaller firms have a crucial role in bridging the gap between traditional funds and geographies and demographics that have been neglected by the industry for far too long– like his focus on immigrant founders. 

“Ten years ago, there were no $1 million venture funds, and now I know several VCs running $1 million venture funds successfully,” he says. “This is extremely helpful to the ecosystem, because these VCs write similar check sizes to angels but are so much better at helping founders get ready for their first big rounds. I firmly believe that talent is evenly distributed, while opportunity is not. There is talent everywhere, in the middle of nowhere, in a village, or somewhere in a poor neighborhood. There is entrepreneurial talent there, but they don’t have the right network to raise capital.”

It took just a matter of months after starting VC Lab for Mahaniok to do his first close. His track record was the biggest reason why LPs were compelled, but he credits the speed of the whole process to what he learned at VC Lab. 

It taught him the basics and kept him from making mistakes. He didn’t know the difference between being an angel and being a VC– and he needed to. If you make a mistake as an angel, you are the only one you are impacting. Managing other people’s money is a whole different responsibility. 

“VC Lab is why it took me just a couple months to go from, ‘Here’s an idea for a VC fund’ to ‘Here’s a venture fund that’s actually operational, ” he says. “I know some people who didn’t go through VC Lab, and it takes them years to go from an idea to an actual VC fund. There are legal questions, organizational questions, and questions about portfolio construction. These things never occur to you as an angel. You find a great company and you look at how much you have in your wallet that day, and you invest.”

Mahaniok was so impressed, he signed up to be a client of Decile Group, which he calls the ideal mix between handholding, white glove service, and automation. 

“There are these boutique admin firms that take $100,000 and support half a dozen firms, but Decile Group can support a half-million-dollar fund size,” he says. “I liked it so much that I invested in the company, and I recommend it to other VCs.”