Roach Capital lead Fahd Ananta is the latest Shopify alumnus, albeit a distant one, to join San Francisco-based real estate tech firm Opendoor.
“I hate to lose, so I’m going to give this every ounce of my energy and focus.”
Ananta was a product manager at Shopify, but left the company in 2020. He now follows former Shopify COO Kaz Nejatian to Opendoor, after Nejatian was appointed CEO of the proptech company last week. Ananta announced the new job in a post on X, calling it “the biggest bet” of his life.
“I hate to lose, so I’m going to give this every ounce of my energy and focus,” Ananta said.
Opendoor is a tech-enabled platform for buying and selling residential property. Ananta told BetaKit in a text message that he will lead “everything on the buyer side” of the company. He added that he is not permanently relocating from Toronto to San Francisco right now, but didn’t rule it out.
Nejatian had been at Shopify since 2019, but took the reins at Opendoor from interim CEO Shrisha Radhakrishna last week, following a period of GameStop-style trading led by retail investors (and partially fuelled by Canadian hedge fund boss Eric Jackson).
The push resulted in the company’s share price surging more than 400 percent since the beginning of the year. The populism continued as Nejatian took to X this week to announce that Opendoor had parted ways with its external relations agencies and would use the social platform to speak directly to its investors. Even the infamous “pharma bro,” Martin Shkreli, weighed in on the company’s rise.
RELATED: Shopify COO Kaz Nejatian leaves to lead Opendoor
“It’s a really unique experience to be part of [a] business that’s going through a transformation,” Ananta told BetaKit. “I’m all in.”
After founding and selling his own Canadian tech companies, Ananta launched Roach Capital in 2019 as a vehicle to invest his own money. Following some early success, Roach brought in outside limited partners and closed approximately $6.4 million CAD to invest in early-stage internet businesses.
Ananta told BetaKit that Roach’s fund is now fully deployed and that he will continue performing the required administrative and reporting duties.
“This [new risky job] means the end of posting about Roach Capital and all current bets; it doesn’t matter,” Ananta wrote in another post. “If it works, it will be Roach Family Office. If it doesn’t, well, we will worry about that later.”
With files from Madison McLauchlan.
Disclosure: BetaKit majority owner Good Future is the family office of two former Shopify leaders, Arati Sharma and Satish Kanwar.
Feature image courtesy Roach Capital.