Internet hero Christopher Poole—or “Moot,” as he’s known on the image-based discussion boards of 4chan—has joined seed stage fund Lerer Ventures as an advisor, TechCrunch reports:
Moot is plugged into the hacker culture in New York City, which Lerer Ventures wants to tap into. He will advise the fund and bring it deals, as well as participate in the upside of the fund.
Moot created 4chan at age 15 and he’ll be looking for hacker entrepreneurs like himself—tinkerers who started “working on cool stuff” at a young age. 4chan has been the breeding pool for such a huge swath of Internet memes that Moot was once forced to explain “rickrolling” to a federal prosecutor:
Q. And the term “rickroll” you said it tries make people go to a site where they think it is going be one thing, but it is a video of Rick Astley, is right?
A. Yes.
Q. He was some kind of singer?
A. Yes.
Q. It’s a joke?
A. Yes.
This is the kind of conversation we hope the 22-year old Moot will be having with prospective limited partners at Lerer, which has invested in nearly 30 startups over the past year including BankSimple, GroupMe and SeatGeek.
Other Lerer advisors include Eric Hippeau, CEO of the Huffington Post and Jonah Peretti, CEO of Buzzfeed and co-founder of the Huffington Post. Ken Lerer is the chairman of the HuffPo and his son Ben is the founder and CEO of Thrillist, TechCrunch notes.
Note: 4chan users recently brought down Tumblr, MasterCard and a Swedish banking site in coordinated distributed denial-of-service attacks, which knock servers offline usually by flooding them with traffic. Maybe bringing on Moot is a hedge in case one of the young startups runs afoul of the 4chan army?
ajeffries [at] observer.com | @adrjeffries
