Brett Hershey

Brett Hershey is best known as a co-founder of Tripod, Inc., one of the pioneering companies of the early consumer web. Tripod originated in 1992 and was founded by Williams College classmate Bo Peabody together with Hershey and Dick Sabot, an economics professor at Williams. The company was headquartered in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Initially conceived as a site offering practical advice for new college graduates, Tripod evolved into one of the first platforms letting ordinary users build free personal web pages.

Tripod grew into the eighth-largest site on the internet and was acquired by Lycos in February 1998 for a reported $58 million in stock — one of the notable early-internet exits and a foundation of the "Berkshires" tech/venture ecosystem that Peabody later built on (Peabody went on to co-found Village Ventures). Hershey's role as a listed angel investor at the seed stage is consistent with a founder who realized an early-web exit and subsequently deployed capital into new companies.

A word of caution on identity: aggregator databases (Foundersuite, Crunchbase, RocketReach, and others) attach multiple unrelated people named "Brett Hershey" to overlapping records — including entries suggesting a "site developer" role and separate real-estate/holding-company entries. The verifiable, notable thread for the investor profile is the Tripod co-founder. Details asserted only by scraped databases (e.g., a specific current employer) are not repeated here because they appear to be namesake conflation.

The link between this investor and Varkain rests on the contact email carried by the Foundersuite profile (`[hidden]`). Varkain is a Las Vegas–based venture firm whose named team is Managing Partner Nick Jones (founder of JRNL), General Partner Laurie Hinckley, and Director of Operations Amy Veloz — Hershey is not listed among Varkain's principals, so the relationship is most likely that of an angel/LP or co-investor who routes contact through the firm, not a Varkain partner.

• Stage: Seed / early-stage, consistent with an angel-investor classification.
• Sectors: Consumer internet and consumer technology — inferred from his operating pedigree (Tripod, a consumer-web pioneer) and from the focus of the associated Varkain fund, which describes itself as a boutique seed firm with a particular interest in consumer technology.
• Geography: United States.
• No publicly published personal investment thesis or check-size range could be located; the above reflects documented stage/sector signals rather than a self-stated memo.