Hi there 👋 I'm Elizabeth co-founder and General Partner at Hustle Fund. AMA

@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... :)

@ericbahn It was your mom's idea.

@elizabeth_yin1 Talked to my mom just now, she is disappointed you didn't become a doctor, like your mom.

@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....

@fxlabs I think the biggest difference is in who is driving the car. As the founder, you're driving the car. As an investor, you're not. When I first became an investor, my mindset when I saw a business was to generally be very optimistic about most businesses. Because I saw *myself* running them and thought about how I would run them. But as an investor, you're not running anything. So, I got some hard lessons on being too optimistic about people and their abilities when I first started investing.

@elizabeth_yin1 Thats a great answer, its the people that make the company and you are essentially investing in them.

@kirby_montgomery There's no right or wrong answer here. I think the considerations here are about what your goals are for the company, how quickly you want to grow, and how much you want to own your own destiny. Goals: If you bring in investors, since they are effectively middle(wo)men, they will need the company to be very large in order to make money. Having a large goal (billion dollar + exit) is impt for investors. You can still build a billion dollar business as a bootstrapped company, but you have more optionality to not to as well. Speed: Everyone wants to grow quickly. (in theory) But, often the best thing to do for a company is to do the same thing over and over and grow that really well instead of expanding into 5 other things with more capital. If you do want to expand into 5 other things, you need to be prepared for utter chaos and poor management. Not everyone wants that. Lastly, if you want to have complete optionality on the company and decide what kind of outcome you want, bootstrapping is the way to go. If you have investors, they may take Board seats (and be your boss) and will be able to block / have a lot of input on potential acquisitions. It's important that if you raise money that you always aligned w/ your investors so that you can control your destiny as much as possible. But there are always horror stories where ppl are not aligned and the founder ends up losing everything as a result. :( My recommendation is to raise money when you know exactly how to put it to work $1 in becomes $1.01 out. And raise from people you think you trust. If there's any sense of distrust, walk. It's not worth it.

@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.

@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.

@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.

@denny_wong2 Yes, I've invested in European startups before. When I was at 500 Startups, it was a lot and I often went to Europe to scout. With Hustle Fund, we only have 2 companies incorporated in Europe (out of 300+ companies). Here's why so few (tl;dr US gov compliance): https://mobile.twitter.com/dunkh... I would love to do more, but we need to solve for US gov compliance a bit more at scale. Perhaps someday this is a separate European fund. We don't have a timeline for this though.

@elizabeth_yin1 Yup! read your earlier tweet around US Gov compliance. A lost for the EU startups, much opportunities still between EU-US as the EU eco-system continue to grow. Do keep up the good work in sharing your thoughts, experience and making startups investment more accessible for all!

@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!

@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

@imarkphillips Building out Hustle Fund! Hustle Fund is fundamentally a company. We started with our VC firm, but we now have many other business lines run by other GMs. Our mission for the company is democratize wealth via startups by impacting capital, knowledge, and networks. We have 20 people now working on programs like Angel Squad (our angel program), Hustle Fund Scale (our late stage angel program), Redwood School (our growth school) 3 crypto initiatives, and more to come. It's fun!

@edgar1 I would take a step back and think about: 1) Are you still excited about doing a startup? 2) If so, are there other problems (with the world wide open) that you are excited about solving? 3) if so, perhaps do customer development in those other areas Sometimes people need to take a break, make some money, and then get back at it. Finding product market fit is hard (and a lot of luck IMO), and sometimes you just need to reset a bit.

@elizabeth_yin1 Thanks for your answer! I will definitely get to thinking this weekend. Definitely still excited about doing a startup just need to think about everything

@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...

@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/...

@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!

@devlorenzo1 Reposting from above: 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.

@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.

@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"?

@ehsanullah_baig Unfortunately, this isn't something that I can answer. This has to be founder-driven based on your own customer development and talking w/ your own customers / users. I think in most other models I've seen of marketplaces, they charge a % in between, so perhaps that's a model to explore. But you can explore all kinds of models -- SaaS model for power users. Or maybe your own token if you make this app decentralized. Regardless, I would message 20 of your customers and call them to learn why they picked your app, what they hoped to succeed with it, and learn about their willingness to pay (and in what way). Just my $0.02.