Roach Capital’s Fahd Ananta follows Kaz Nejatian to Opendoor

Roach Capital chief Fahd Ananta is the latest Shopify alumnus, albeit a distant one, to join San Francisco-based real estate tech firm Opendoor.

“I hate losing, so I’m going to give every ounce of my energy and attention to this.”

Ananta was a product manager at Shopify but left the company in 2020. He now follows former Shopify COO Kaz Nejatyan to Opendoor after Nejatyan was appointed general director proptech company last week. Ananta announced her new job in a post on Xcalling it the “biggest bet” of his life.

“I hate losing, so I’m going to give every ounce of my energy and attention to this,” Ananta said.

Opendoor is a technology-based platform for buying and selling residential real estate. Ananta told BetaKit in a text message that he would lead “everything customer-facing” for the company. He added that he's not currently moving permanently from Toronto to San Francisco, but hasn't ruled it out.

Nejatyan has worked at Shopify since 2019, but took the reins into his own hands on Opendoor from interim CEO Srisha Radhakrishna last week after GameStop style period trading led by retail investors (and partially filled head of Canadian hedge fund Eric Jackson).

The push has sent the company's share price up more than 400 percent year to date. Populism continued like Nejatyan. took it to X this week to announce that Opendoor has parted ways with its external communications agencies and will use the social platform to communicate directly with its investors. Even the notorious “pharmacist” Martin Shkreli, weighed on the rise of the company.

CONNECTED: Shopify COO Kaz Nezhatyan is leaving to lead Opendoor

“It's truly a unique experience to be part of [a] a business that is going through a transformation,” Ananta told BetaKit. “I'm in.”

After founding and selling his own Canadian technology companies, Ananta launched Roach Capital in 2019 as a vehicle to invest his own money. After some early success, Roach brought in outside limited partners and closed about 6.4 million Canadian dollars invest in an internet business at an early stage.

Ananta told BetaKit that Roach's fund is now fully utilized and that he will continue to carry out the necessary administrative and reporting duties.

“This [new risky job] means the cessation of publications about Roach Capital and all current rates; it doesn’t matter,” Ananta wrote in one more post. “If it works, it will be Roach Family Office. If not, we'll worry about that later.”

With files from Madison McLauchlan.

Disclosure: BetaKit's majority owner Good Future is the family office of two former Shopify leaders, Arati Sharma and Satish Kanwar.

Image courtesy of Roach Capital.