Eric Zhu

Eric Zhu did not stumble into venture by accident. During the pandemic at 13, he was hanging out in Discord servers with investors like Sam Altman, learning how capital actually flows and where private market data breaks. That vantage point preceded his first meaningful product, Esocial, a digital platform for schools that he scaled and sold inside a year, which gave him his first real proof that he could ship software that institutions would pay for.

The Aviato thesis came from watching VCs and private market operators up close through Bachmanity Capital, the Gen Z led fund he joined as a teenager. He saw that every investor and recruiter was duct taping spreadsheets, Twitter, PitchBook and random databases to answer simple questions like who is building in this niche or which operator just left a breakout company. Instead of trying to be another pitch portal, he decided to build a private market data engine first, then layer workflows for banks, recruiting platforms and venture firms on top.

Aviato started in probably the least likely place for an enterprise data company: a high school bathroom in Carmel, Indiana. Eric scheduled investor and customer calls during class, set up a ring light and green screen in a stall, and pitched from there until the school finally kicked him out, but not before he had early believers. That scrappy setup turned into real traction when he converted those bathroom pitches into pilots and then into institutional users like NEA, Republic Capital and 8VC who began relying on Aviato to surface founders and track private companies.

Capital followed that use case, not the meme of a teenage founder. A first wave of checks came from angels and operators who met him through Twitter and Discord, including an early personal investment from Hustle Fund co founder Eric Bahn. Seed money from 8VC, Soma Capital, SoftBank and later a strategic check from CerraCap Ventures brought Aviato to roughly $2.3 million raised, and it emerged from stealth positioned as data infrastructure for banks, recruiting platforms and VCs rather than a novelty youth project.

1. Embed inside investor workflows before building a brand. Eric did not launch with a public facing data dashboard and hope VCs showed up, he DMd investors, joined their Discords, took bathroom calls and manually ran searches for them so that Aviato started as a behind the scenes engine that solved real sourcing problems for specific firms. Those early white glove workflows gave him the query patterns and feature requests that hardened the product into something institutions could not get from generic databases.

2. Use content and memes as a distribution wedge into serious buyers. Long before TechCrunch wrote about him, Eric was posting sharp meme content on Twitter about VC, private markets and founder life, which turned him into a known character among younger investors and operators. That attention was not vanity, it meant cold DMs landed warmer, intros came from mutuals who already liked his voice, and Aviato demos rode on the back of a persona that people wanted to root for.

3. Turn the investor seat into a customer acquisition loop. By co founding and helping launch a $20 million early stage fund while still running Aviato, Eric sat on the other side of the table and felt the pain of sourcing and diligence directly, which shaped feature priorities. Every co investor, scout and founder he met through fund work became a prospect or referral for Aviato, so each deal and fund relationship pulled double duty as both a check and a new distribution node for his data engine.