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Founder and investor based in San Francisco

Nam Dao

Co-Founder & CEO @ Lyra | Managing Partner @ Lyra Capital

Nam Dao

About

Hi, I'm Nam. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Lyra, where we embed the top 1% of engineers into Silicon Valley startups backed by YC, Accel, a16z, Sequoia, Founders Fund, Lightspeed and General Catalyst.

I'm also the co-founder and Managing Partner of Lyra Capital, a fund built by founders for founders. We've backed 65+ startups at pre-seed and seed, most of them YC, and give founders access to a network of 2,400+ startups. We also run Lyra Talent (full-time hires for VC-backed startups) and Lyra Studio (founder stories and launch films).

Before Lyra, I was Head of Engineering at Soma Capital, a software engineer at Canva and the founding engineer at Paraform. I've been coding since I was 12. In high school I built Risen Network, a gaming community that grew to 3,400 members on Discord and earned $50k through our e-commerce site.

Born in Hanoi, raised in Japan and Australia, now building in San Francisco.

Bio

2000Born in Hanoi, Vietnam
2004Relocated to Kusatsu (草津町), Japan
2011Relocated to Gold Coast, Australia
2017Started Risen Network, a gaming community based in Los Angeles and Sydney for Unturned. Eventually, I grew it to 3400 members on the Discord and earned $50k via the e-commerce site.
2021Worked at Telstra
2021Dropped out of The University of Sydney after pursuing my Bachelors of Advanced Computing (Software Development) for 3 years.
2021Worked at Eucalyptus
2022Founding engineer at Paraform
2022Worked at Coinbooks (YC S22)
2022Worked at Canva
2023Co-founded Lyra, embedding top engineers into VC-backed startups
2023Head of Engineering at Soma Capital
2025Co-founded Boring Data, reliable data for US AI labs
2026Co-founded Lyra Capital, backing 65+ pre-seed and seed startups
2026Co-founded Lyra Talent
2026Co-founded Lyra Studio

Things I ♥

Travelling, cycling, training for Ironman 70.3 Santa Cruz (2027), walking my dog, and getting silly with the boys

On the web

© 2026 Nam Dao. All Rights Reserved. Credit to Takuya Matsuyama