When it comes to investing in startups, most venture capital firms say they go “early.” But Elizabeth Yin, Co-Founder and General Partner of Hustle Fund, takes it a step further. She calls their approach “hilariously early.”

Elizabeth’s path to becoming one of the most active pre-seed investors in the world started with a serendipitous introduction during her teenage years. As a high schooler in the late 1990s, she got a behind-the-scenes look at Tony Hsieh’s first startup, LinkExchange, which later sold to Microsoft for over $200 million. That experience sparked her lifelong interest in startups and shaped her entrepreneurial ambitions.

But it wasn’t a straight path into venture. Elizabeth worked at Google before taking the leap into entrepreneurship. Her first two years as a founder were filled with pivots, mistakes, and painful lessons about customer acquisition. Eventually, she co-founded LaunchBit, an email ad network, which was later acquired by BuySellAds. Along the way, she learned the importance of validating demand early—through presales and scrappy experiments—before investing heavily in building product.

From Founder to Investor

After LaunchBit’s exit, Elizabeth found herself mentoring and angel investing at 500 Global, where she eventually ran the accelerator. Over several batches, she wrote more than 200 investment checks. That experience gave her a unique vantage point: she had lived the founder’s struggle and now had front-row visibility into what it took for early-stage startups to succeed.

By 2017, she and co-founder Eric Bahn launched Hustle Fund with a mission to support founders at the stage where they themselves wished they had more help—the very beginning. While most firms calling themselves “early-stage” still expect traction, Hustle Fund stepped in earlier: often pre-revenue, sometimes even pre-product.

Building Hustle Fund’s Approach

Since its inception, Hustle Fund has raised multiple funds and built a reputation for investing in a high volume of startups—about 250 per fund. Critics sometimes call this “spray and pray,” but Elizabeth explains the logic: at the pre-seed stage, there’s little data and huge uncertainty. The best way to reliably capture outlier returns is to make more bets, while still maintaining a clear thesis on valuation discipline and founder-market fit.

Key to Hustle Fund’s strategy are a few principles:

* Valuation Sensitivity: The vast majority of startup exits are below $1 billion. Entering at reasonable valuations increases the odds of a meaningful multiple.

* Go-to-Market Obsession: Elizabeth looks for founders with a sharp sense of how they’ll acquire and retain customers, even before revenue.

* Founder-Market Fit: Experience in the problem space and early customer connections matter more than perfect pitches.

* Community and Brand: Beyond writing checks, Hustle Fund amplifies its impact through events like Camp Hustle, tactical guides, and affiliated Angel Squad, a program that has introduced 2,500+ operators to angel investing.

Scaling with Process and Technology

With more than 600 portfolio companies across four funds, Hustle Fund has also become a case study in scaling venture operations. Elizabeth emphasizes the importance of documentation, automation, and no-code tools like Airtable, Zapier, and Process Street to manage onboarding, contracts, and portfolio data. The firm is even experimenting with AI to streamline decision-making—though Elizabeth admits that intuition, timing, and founder assessment will always require a human touch.

Looking Ahead

Elizabeth believes the future of venture will rely less on technical defensibility and more on distribution, customer experience, and retention. She’s not afraid to back so-called “wrappers” built on top of existing AI models if they deliver real customer value. Ultimately, she argues, startups are businesses—not research labs—and the best businesses win with execution, not just technology.

Key Takeaways from Elizabeth Yin

* Don’t wait for perfect timing—start where you are, even in downturns.

* Validate with presales and real demand before building too much product.

* At pre-seed, more shots on goal increase the chances of finding an outlier.

* Focus on valuation discipline to improve exit multiples.

* Build community and content alongside capital to stay top-of-mind.

* Use systems, automation, and documentation to scale without drowning.

Elizabeth Yin’s story is a reminder that venture capital doesn’t have to be mysterious or inaccessible. By betting hilariously early, Hustle Fund is rewriting the playbook on how founders get their first break—and how investors can create meaningful impact from day zero.👂🎧 Watch, listen, and follow on your favorite platform: https://tr.ee/S2ayrbx_fL 🙏 Join the conversation on your favorite social network: https://linktr.ee/theignitepodcastChapters:00:52 Early inspiration: Tony Hsieh and the dot-com boom

03:30 Surviving the dot-com crash and landing at Google

05:28 First startup struggles, pivots, and hard lessons

07:42 Building LaunchBit with presales and scrappy tests

10:12 The “Wizard of Oz” approach to validating features

11:32 How partnerships led to LaunchBit’s acquisition

12:47 The power of documentation and short handoffs

14:32 Exploring new industries and discovering angel investing

16:51 Running 500 Global’s accelerator and writing 200+ checks

17:45 Founding Hustle Fund to back founders “hilariously early”

19:34 Choosing a fund model over an accelerator model

21:42 Raising Fund I: challenges, lessons, and differentiation

26:32 Investor-market fit and building a unique brand

28:49 Why Hustle Fund focuses on valuation sensitivity

33:06 Portfolio strategy: 250 startups per fund

35:54 Why high-volume investing works at pre-seed

37:29 Evaluating founders, ideas, and the “why now” factor

41:23 Building community through Camp Hustle and events

44:29 Angel Squad: democratizing angel investing

47:51 Scaling portfolio management with automation and no-code

49:32 The role of AI in venture decision-making

52:13 Defensibility in AI startups and founder-market fit

53:53 Closing thoughts and reflections

Transcript

Brian Bell (00:01:02 ): Hey, everyone, welcome back to the Ignite podcast. Today, we’re thrilled to have Elizabeth Yen on the mic. She’s the co-founder and general partner at Hustle Fund. We’ve been longtime admirers and collaborators. It’s a pre-seed VC that writes hilariously early checks and shares no BS tactical startup advice. Thanks for coming on, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Yin (00:01:20 ): Yeah, thanks for having me, Brian. Big fan of what you guys do as well, so...

Brian Bell (00:01:24 ): Yes. No, it’s been a long time coming. I mean, I’ve been admiring you guys from afar. And we finally met at the conference, the East Meets West conference in Hawaii. We’re just sitting there on a panel together and we’re in like in a small room taking pitches.

Elizabeth Yin (00:01:38 ): That’s right.

Brian Bell (00:01:39 ): And yeah, I was like, oh, wow, it’s Elizabeth. I’ve been meaning to meet you. So, yeah. Well, let’s talk about how you got here. I mean, you’ve built lots of stuff. You’ve invested in hundreds of startups, but maybe you could give us your origin story. Where did it all begin?

Elizabeth Yin (00:01:52 ): Yeah. So I’m originally from the San Francisco Bay area, grew up during the dot-com boom. So that has all largely shaped me. It’s not like my family’s in tech or was in tech or they were not entrepreneurs. So I think time and place definitely has had a huge influence on me. And, um, actually, fun, fun story. So the way I got into all of this actually was in ninth grade when my best friend in high school, her cousin, Tony, was starting a company that year. It was 1996. And my friend asked me, oh, well, do you want to go and help him out with his startup? And I didn’t know what a startup was and I wasn’t really sure how we could help. But I also had nothing to do during winter break. So we went to his office and what I loved about that place is one you could eat all the pizza you wanted it was the dream and two here was tony and a bunch of his friends just like kind of doing everything and it was really chaotic but also really magical I never knew that work could be like that. It seemed so fun. So I knew from that day on that I wanted to do that when I grew up. And I think fast forward, I didn’t think about how they made money or how that would go. But years later, Tony sold that company for a purported over $200 million to Microsoft. The company was called Link Exchange. But I think he’s better known for being one of the early angel investors in a little shoe company called Zappos, which sold to Amazon for about a billion dollars. And Tony was the longtime CEO there as well. So the late Tony Hsieh is this person in this story. So that’s the sort of serendipity that I could not have imagined.

Brian Bell (00:03:34 ): Wow. Yeah. I mean, how lucky to watch a master work on a startup. I mean, every kid should get that opportunity. I wonder how we would, you know, foster that a little bit more. There’s something like that. You know, 20,000 pre-seed fundings every year is the data that I saw recently. And, you know, there’s lots of kids that could be, you know, lots