@5harath Haha -- too many. At this point, I've seen 30k-40k pitch decks in my career - yes. However, the big buckets of pitfalls: -sell the dream but be honest (sometimes ppl will put logos on their slides for customers or investors when they haven't closed yet); make sure it's clear between what has been done vs what you are working towards -don't dive into too many details on your deck; you can always answer investor questions in a conversation but you don't want some minutia detail to prevent you from getting a mtg; e.g. I'm raising $2m (when you'd be open to raising $500k) -- an investor just may say it's out of scope

@jimbomorrison I think 2 things are impt. Founding team and more importantly market pull. In 3-6 months, you can learn a lot about the founding team. Do they execute with speed? Can they hire well / attract talent / do ppl want to work for them? Can they learn new skills? Are they focused on 1-2 things? etc. But you can't always learn about whether the idea has market pull. It may require a lot more learnings and pivots along the way which could even take years. Market pull is a combination of understanding why customers buy? If the problem is really dire / urgent to warrant this solution? And if there is a seemingly repeatable channel to get more of that customer.

@elizabeth_yin1 Fascinating, thanks Elizabeth. Really appreciate you taking the time to come back to me. Best of luck with the fund! 🚀

@britt_joiner A lot of our companies do launch on PH! (not all of them -- a lot of B2B companies selling to old-school industries probably wouldn't find much traction here). I think if you're going to launch on PH, it has to be a coordinated effort. You can't just post here and expect people to upvote. It's has to be an all-out campaign.

@elizabeth_yin1 What would you say drives a successful campaign here on PH?

@rrhoover Thank you Ryan -- that's really kind! And likewise, I admire all you've built w/ this site and Weekend Fund! Because we now have a lot of portfolio companies (300+), we've had to spend a lot of time on scaling. Processes, technology, and scope. In the beginning, it was @ericbahn and I running around kinda doing everything haphazardly and working w/ our companies 1:1. That was fine when we had even say 50 companies but then it got really challenging. We now do a few things at scale: -we encourage founders to help each other on Circle and we'll weigh in too -we run programs / workshops to help a lot of ppl at once (mostly with growth via our Redwood School) -we do a lot more async; I record a ton of Loom videos that seem to address people's qs in a faster way -we hacked together our own technology platform to keep track of things in a more systematic way. Our principle Will Bricker built our triaging system to triage deals quickly and also our system for doing deals quickly. With just a few clicks, we can send out a SAFE, a clear to wire email, and collect onboarding docs for our auditors. There have been growing pains along the way esp when each of these initiatives were in it's infancy, but it's neat to get scale as a VC.

@elizabeth_yin1 appreciate you sharing. I knew you had a ton of investments but 300+ is wild!

@andygcook Ooof -- so many tough lessons! Probably the big one is around people management -- esp when you're pivoting or experimenting with a number of things. Employees feel whiplashed around, and no one likes their work thrown out, when you're pivoting or are not sure what the right direction is. Spending a lot of time communicating this framing is really important when you're pivoting for team morale sake.

@aleksi_halsas1 Incorporation still matters a lot for funding. Less where you are based but more where the company is based, because regulation + compliance is a pain. IMO, a US incorporated company will give you more optionality with US investors. (That may turn away local investors though, so you have to make a decision on where you want to raise.) More here: https://mobile.twitter.com/dunkh...

@aleksdahlberg I basically take guesses on whether the idea will have market pull in the long run. More here on how I make that guess: https://twitter.com/dunkhippo33/... We invest at pre-seed, so there's rarely a situation where we will say no and re-evaluate and invest a few months later. My guess could just be completely wrong (and often is) and I won't know for years. That said, from time to time, we may change our mind a few months later if there's been strong uptake in customers, and if we were already on the fence about whether there could be market pull the first time we evaluated it.

@ivandothetrick We do not hold Nationality from anywhere against a founder. We cannot invest in Russian incorporated companies.

Hi @ivandothetrick 👋 I am Moiz, founder of https://grandeur.dev. Barging in the conversation because I have been there (almost, originally based out of Pakistan). In my experience, nationality doesn't really matter (we raised from multiple US VCs). But the location of core team matters. For starters, incorporate in USA. It will open so many doors for you (particularly, if you are a global company, like targeting US users). But if you are solving a local problem (e.g. Uber of Russia), then it is actually much better to raise from local VCs. Because local VCs will help you solve a lot of regulatory problems in long run.

@elizabeth_yin1 I meant Russian founders in the US obv. Not investing in Russia-based enterprises. But I guess I got the answer. Hope to see more talents from post-soviet space in your portfolio then ✊

@moizhusnain We are the venture studio based in New York scouting at post-soviet space and trust me I've seen it all. My question here is based on experience of hundreds of founders I met in person. Post-soviet founders is highly underrepresented cohort not even recognized here as one and now it's getting even worse. I think @elizabeth_yin1 told the truth, at least the one she believes in. But I will truly believe in it when I see these talented founders among The Hustle funds deals. So far the % of founders coming from post-soviet countries getting here pre-seed funding is catastrophically low.

@vingar thank you Vinish!

@sanja_mitar Re: founder traits - hustle (as I define as execution with velocity), focused on just 1-2 things, experimentation mindset, customer-centric, able to learn new skills, and frugality.

@stefani_kovachevska this is probably the most unusual pitch I've received as an investor: https://twitter.com/dunkhippo33/...

@elizabeth_yin1 Awesome, they really did their homework and connected the dots creatively :) Thanks for sharing!

@robin_161 Yes - we receive a lot of applications where people just thought of the idea yesterday or thereabouts. I think there's a lot of homework that is helpful for founders to do even if they are pre-revenue and trying to pitch. Some questions that one should be able to answer: -who is your customer persona? -what is the day in a life of that person? -what problems (concretely) does that person have? -what alternatives are being used by that person? -what is he/she doing / paying to use those alternatives? -who pays for the current solution? who uses it? and how much? -how do you find 10 people of that customer persona? -what are hypotheses around where you can find 100 ppl of that customer persona? 1000? -can you pre-sell this? etc....

@sonu_kalwar4 Cool!

@andelyons Thank you, Ande and yes! Lots of ups and downs (and mostly downs), but so much personal development and growth I wouldn't trade for anything else.

@paulkorver This is a great question! Yes, we invest pre-revenue. But not solely in ideas. We send out automated responses, so I suspect you checked the box that you have not built anything yet. But, if you have built something, please check that box. Thanks!

@elizabeth_yin1 No... we didn't select the box that said we haven't built anything yet because we ARE actively building. The three options in your Typeform question 4a "What is the status of your product?" were (A) Nothing built (B) Currently building MVP and (C) MVP built (or beyond). We checked option B and which triggered the auto-rejection. So I stand uncorrected :) It doesn't seem like Hustle Fund comes in as early as advertised. Wouldn't it be more straightforward to simply say "hit us up once you've built MVP! That's when we may want to invest"?

@stelian_dobrescu1 Great q and so many! If I had to pick one, as a small fund, I'd choose low competition. More thoughts here: https://twitter.com/dunkhippo33/...

@leeconstantine No hard and fast rule, but the fastest companies tend to go from product to $1m in < 1 year. More typical for good companies, $1m in < 2.5 years. So working backwards, if you raise a pre-seed at no revenue, under this timeline, you might be raising a seed in 6-12 months. But, again, there's no typical, and sometimes it takes a while to figure things out. If you have to pivot, I would say your "start time" on the idea was post-pivot and don't incl all the other time you spent on other ideas.

@webb_knudsen1 Oh gosh - I think both are hard (with the caveat that the investor role is as an emerging VC fund manager). For both, you have to do 2 things that are particularly challenging: 1) Marketing / customer acquisition. 2) Fundraising Both are just hard activities to do. As a founder, I thought that being an investor would be way easier, but we do way more fundraising mtgs than any of our founders. And our B2B lead generation process is very similar to what I've done before as a founder. One thing that I think is a lot easier in being a VC, though, is that you don't have to manage people or as many people. And that's also really hard. For startups who get off the ground and get to scale, people management (and recruiting) becomes a real nightmare...because well people... :)