Ihar Mahaniok is a venture capital investor at Geek Ventures who built his career as a self-taught teenage coder in Belarus before working 20+ years in engineering at Google, Facebook, WeWork, and Lightning AI, then transitioned to full-time investing after quietly angel investing in 100+ startups including five unicorns like Instacart and PandaDoc. He specializes in helping immigrant founders navigate U.S. fundraising by leveraging his own immigrant experience from Belarus and his deliberate LinkedIn-first networking strategy where he personally knows nearly all of his 5,000 connections, focusing on AI/ML and robotics investments where he can evaluate technical depth as an engineer. Ihar Mahaniok is a venture capital investor at Geek Ventures who built his career as a self-taught teenage coder in Belarus before working 20+ years in engineering at Google, Facebook, WeWork, and Lightning AI, then transitioned to full-time investing after quietly angel investing in 100+ startups including five unicorns like Instacart and PandaDoc. He specializes in helping immigrant founders navigate U.S. fundraising by leveraging his own immigrant experience from Belarus and his deliberate LinkedIn-first networking strategy where he personally knows nearly all of his 5,000 connections, focusing on AI/ML and robotics investments where he can evaluate technical depth as an engineer.