Elizabeth Yin is Co-Founder & General Partner at Hustle Fund, a pre-seed focused firm based in the Bay Area. Appropriately named, Elizabeth and her team truly epitomize the word hustle. She and her co-founder Eric raised $11.5MM Hustle Fund I in the fall of 2018 and more recently started investing out of a larger Fund II. The firm has a unique investment model that starts by investing $25K in each startups, and then by working closely with their entrepreneurs looks to upsize their commitments into select portfolio companies.
Previously, Elizabeth was a partner at 500 Startups where she invested in seed stage companies and ran the Mountain View accelerator. In a prior life, Elizabeth co-founded and ran an ad-tech company called LaunchBit (acq 2014). Elizabeth has a BSEE from Stanford and an MBA from MIT Sloan.
In this episode, Elizabeth covers the following:
* What their journey in raising their first fund together was like.
* How broad their LP outreach was, and how they managed hundreds of LP conversations.
* The continuous nature of raising capital.
* The role of brand in venture.
* The thinking behind their unique portfolio construction model, and how they serve such a large group of portfolio companies.
* How to efficiently manage a firm amidst all the competing priorities.
* What she wishes she knew before she started Hustle Fund.
Mentioned in this episode:
* The Hustle Fund
* Elizabeth’s post “How I Raised my $11.5m VC Fund”
* Here’s her post on “11 Things I’ve learned from running a micro VC in the last year”
* Elizabeth’s post “How Do VCs Make Money?”
Hope you enjoy the episode, feel free to tweet or DM me @samirkaji your further questions from the show or other guests you think I should invite to the show under the hashtag #ventureunlocked.
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Venture Unlocked: The playbook for venture capital managers