Ivan Hadzhiev

I'm a product-led go-to-market operator. I like solving complicated problems by thinking through them from first principles, and I'm at my best when technology and taste both get a vote.

I came up the long way. As a first-generation immigrant from Bulgaria, being an independent learner wasn't a choice. That meant no private tutors, secret handshakes, or pedigree. I joined Venture for America out of college, which led me to run biz dev and strategic partnerships at Novel Capital and co-found Villager Studio. Now I'm building Merchpath, a marketplace that matches teams with merch that fits their brand. On the side, I source pre-seed and seed-stage deals for GoAhead Ventures, focusing on fintech, supply chain, AI, and e-commerce.

Outside of the work itself, I love to read philosophy and classic lit. I've self-studied most of the Western canon of philosophy, and right now I'm deep on epistemology, linguistics, and cybernetics, mostly as they apply to AI and whatever comes next. I write about it at The New Standard.

I also started playing guitar at eight, producing music in high school, and DJing in 2020. The thread between music, writing, and building is the same: take a system apart, understand it, then make something new.