This Week in Startups - E1061 AMA: Hustle Fund's Elizabeth Yin answers 50 questions from founders!

Episode Date: May 18, 2020

Hustle Fund Co-Founder & General Partner Elizabeth Yin answers 50 questions from founders!

Today, on This Week in Startups, we have an Ask Me Anything featuring Hustle Fund co-founder and general partner Elizabeth Yin. This AMA was recorded live in our Twist Slack channel. To participate in weekly AMAs and discuss all aspects of startup life with Jason and our community of 30,000 founders, join us at this weekend startups.com slash slack. This episode is brought to you ad-free thanks to our partners, Clavio, Pitney Bowes, and Dell. All right, well, I want to get through as many of your questions as we can, so we're just going to hop in. And so the first question is from Prashant. Would you have benefited from an angel list equivalent for venture capital?

In other words, if up-and-coming venture firms can find potential LPs from every corner of the world instead of just SF, here's a platform. In fact, actually, Angelist is doing that, and I really applaud what they are doing. They are actually helping a number of microphones get up and running. When we started our fund one, which was now almost three years ago, they were actually not doing this or they were still in the planning stages. So we were a bit too early for that. But I do think that for anybody who's interested in potentially starting a microfund, that could be an interesting option.

Kate asks, what do you look for in a standout startup specifically? How can I attract investors interested in what I do and who will find it rewarding to invest in me besides providing raw numbers and projections? So I think every investor is different, unfortunately. And so what I tend to gravitate towards is very different from other investors. But I would say just as a general thing, a lot of very early stage investors tend to either be in what I would call team founders and the other is team market. Obviously, you need to be able to convey both that you're an awesome team and also that you have an awesome market. But people tend to feel fairly strongly about one camp or the other. And for me, I tend to feel more strongly about team market, but not in a way that you might think.

I'm not looking for TAM calculations like total addressable market. In fact, I don't care about that. I'm actually looking for something that I call market pull, which is how easy or hard do I think this customer acquisition will be. how long or how fast will this sales cycle be? And so those are the kinds of things I'm looking for. And for me, it's more of a gut feeling based on having done a lot of customer acquisition before for my own failed startups or, you know, the one that I ended up growing out.

And just from having tried a lot of customer acquisition, I just kind of make a gut call on that. So I'm actually not even looking for numbers there. Amin asks, what FOMO tactics are you using while fundraising? So I assume that's for my own fundraise for for our funds. I think one thing that we do, which actually is very non-applicable to startups, but what we do a lot is when you're raising money for a VC fund, you actually only have a limited number of investor slots. So for example, for most VC funds, the limit is 99 slots.

If you have a certain size fund, then you can go up to 250. And if you have certain kinds of LPs, then it can be unlimited. But for the vast majority of VCs, you're limited to 99. us included. So one of the things that we do is actually running out of slots is our bigger problem rather than, you know, if I could, I would just like sort of crowd fund this and ask everyone to chip in 5,000 bucks, right? And so what we do is we actually start with a quote, smaller minimum in the beginning. And we say that we're only going to have a certain number of slots, be that smaller minimum, because we obviously cannot have everybody come in at that smaller

minimum if we want to hit a target of a $20 million fund or $50 million fund. And so that's what we've done, you know, with both of our funds now. I think the equivalent for a startup founder is actually somewhat similar, but around valuation. So you can create like a tranche at a certain valuation cap that is a special valuation for just, you know, people who come in and are the first $300,000 of year round. And then the cap is going to go up. And that is a good fomo tactic. So I think that's sort of the equivalent for startups.

Cindy asks, are you open to funding sex tech and how do you approach the vice clause? So for us, I think actually one of the bigger things for us, outside of whether it's sex tech or cannabis or whatnot, we don't do physical products or e-commerce because that actually requires a lot of capital. So unfortunately, we wouldn't be able to get involved in any actual products, whether it's actual weed or, you know, know, hardware products and sex tech. But I think the, you know, the line is rather blurry or nebulous. Like we will look at infrastructure software for any of these. And, you know, I think, and I also think that there's a judgment call around what is considered vice. Like just from an ethical perspective, we do not do any gambling apps, even though there are no physical products involved. So I think our general thinking is less about, oh, is this historically a Puritan

vice definition or more about will this actually do good in the world? And then does it fit within the boundaries of what we can invest in based on our fund size and the limited amount of capital that we have? Kevin asks, how are other early stage firms investing right now? Does hustle funds approach very greatly from the industry standard? We're probably a bit biased, but I think the answer is yes. I think first off, we go in very early. Most funds say that they go in early, but we go in very, very early. I don't care if you have traction. And I think the numbers show for themselves, 50% in the time, we are the very first check-in, whether it's institutional or not, into a startup. And the other 50% in the time, we are definitely in that first round, usually alongside, you know, somebody's mom or

something like that, if they happen to, you know, come from a set of family and friends who can put in some money. So that's a bit about where we play. But I think even beyond that, once you get to the call stage, like when you're actually talking on the phone with a partner, we can usually make a decision within 48 hours. And that's kind of per our name hustle fund. Because at this very early stage, there's not a whole lot to analyze. So you can do analysis paralysis all year and talk yourself in or out of a deal. Susan asks, how do you think about investing in blockchain, AI, spatial computing, XR and AR? I think taking a step back, you know, we certainly look at all of those and many more within software.

Software is very general, and very broad. And so coming back to what is it that we're looking for, I think, you know, ultimately we very much gravitate towards customer acquisition. How are the margins going to be? How easy or hard is it going to be to get customers? And so whatever it is you're working on,

it's less about the underlying technology for us and more about, okay, what is the solution and the particular problem that you're trying to solve? I realize it sounds trite, but we don't look at things from a strictly tech categorical perspective. Matt asks, at what stage should the startup calculate KAC? We are early, so my co-founder and I physically visit customers and obtain them. Eventually, we will change to a cost-effective channel. Should we put a dollar value on our time and begin calculating KAC or not bother at the moment?

I think that's a great question. So first off, I am fully in agreement that that's what you should do in the beginning, even if you can, you know, manually get to customers and sell to them and even if that's not going to scale, I think that is a great way to do customer development. I think that is much better than trying to do online marketing because when somebody comes to your website or leaves your website, you have no idea what they're thinking. You don't even know if you're solving a problem. So I think having a high touch and strong rapport with potential customers or would be customers is great, whether it's in person or over the phone or whatnot.

And so in those beginning stages, what you're really looking for is, what is the specific problem that they have? Are you thinking about a solution that is going after that problem? And actually, not just is it a problem, but like how big of a priority problem is it for them? Would they drop everything to look for a solution for that? And that is really what you're looking for in that beginning stage. I think once you isolate that, then you can start thinking about CAC, like, okay, I've got 10 people whom I manually signed up as a customer. And then let's now try and get the next 10 people through more scalable means, like such as cold emailing and then hopping on a call and then converting them from the call or something along those lines.

And it's at that point, then I would start measuring CAC because for that you can throw people and software at the problem and measure how much it would cost to pay those people on a per hour basis or whatnot. And that is, I think, when you should start looking at CAQ. But it sounds like right now you're just trying to figure out, is this something that people want to buy? And is this a big enough problem? So I'll ask, how do you think about investing in biotech and education? Would you invest in biotech companies tackling the lack of genetics education in K-12?

So I think I probably hammered this over and over in this AMA, but we're very much looking at it from a customer acquisition perspective. So not knowing the details of this idea, I think the way that we would look at it is less around what is the specific education that you're offering, but more about, all right, what is the real need for this type of education? Like who is paying for it? What are the alternatives today?

Are they pretty crummy? Are people looking for this? What do we think the market pull could be like, could this be a fast sales cycle by paying for Facebook ads or whatever it is? That's how we would look at it and less about the specifics of the digital product or the education or what's in the education. Venae asks, we are a startup building the graduate program search engine. We are doing what you had done in Beat the GMAT. Are you still investing in this business model? So for context, Beat the GMAT was my co-founder Eric Bond startup, which he sold to the Daily Mail.

several years ago. And I'm not 100% sure what this question is getting at. Like, are we still investing in this business model? I mean, we are open to a lot of business models. I think the main thing for us is, again, harping on the customer acquisition piece. Like, can you scalably get people there and make money off of them? Now, I would say, though, like, beat the GMAT definitely had a sponsorship component. And we are very much per the size of our fund, not looking at ad revenue models right now where you have to get tons of eyeballs to be able to monetize. So I would say that, you know, depending on the specifics of your idea, like that may or may not fall into can you start to get sales pretty quickly. Kevin asked favorite business models to invest in these days,

conversely least favorite business models to invest in these days. So I think for us, again, it kind of comes back to the size of our fund. If we were a $100 million fund, we could afford to be relatively patient. Like if a startup doesn't monetize for three years, no big deal. But for us, like as a small fund and we are writing 25K first checks, the company more or less has to be able to monetize right away. We have to believe that the company can survive and thrive even if they can't raise any more capital. So we actually tend to prefer companies who are more bootstrapped in mentality as well as in, you know, cash management because we very much align with that, given that our investment checks are so small.

So I think then flipping that around, well, okay, what kinds of models are really conducive to that? I mean, certainly B2B, whether it's SaaS or even just, you know, annual contracts, are great because margins are great and also the dollar amounts can be also quite high. But we're not tied to that. we've invested in many other models, whether it's insurance companies paying for digital health or marketplace models or whatever, we definitely have been invested in a whole variety of models. What would be the minimum traction for a prop tech that you would be looking for before investing

in a startup? I don't care about traction. Most of the companies that we invest in, it's based on a gut feeling of how we think the customer acquisition will go. And I would say that most of the companies that we invested in actually have, you know, either zero traction whatsoever or have a handful of small customers. What kind of trends do you see in sports tech? That's a good question, Ed. I think our perspective is that we are pretty vertical agnostic. In fact, if you look at our portfolio, we are kind of everywhere for better for worse. And in that sense, we are jack of all trades and masters of none, and we very much rely on the founders we back to spot trends. I think at a high level, I would say that within sports, and especially kind of given where we are

these days, we've been looking at a fair number of e-sports companies, but admittedly, we have not pulled the trigger yet on any of those, but definitely an area of interest. But that's not the, I mean, I think we have also gone against the grain and invested in areas that nobody's looking at as well. So it's more about the founder spotting an opportunity and then we believe the reasoning of the founder. Andrew says, I'm an LPN hustle fund. Thank you, Andrew. How can I be a better backer beyond money? What can investors like me do for funds that we back? I think there are a few different things. So one is certainly a number of our LPs are very interested in looking at doing direct deals. Of course, we at Hustle Fund have a lot of companies in our portfolio.

And so we've actually shared all of our deals with all of our LPs. And so if you want to invest in more of our companies, we would absolutely love that. And then I think if you have this actually just goes for all of our. LPs if there are other people listening. Like for people who have specific areas of either background, domain experience, or expertise, whether it's you are a VP of engineering at a fan company, or whether it's you've done growth marketing, or even if you don't have any of those and you've just looked at a lot of decks and you have, you know, good two cents on what

makes for a good deck or whatnot, you know, we would absolutely love to rope people in and, you know, help out our companies. I think mentorship is something that is really important. and I certainly appreciate all the mentors that I had in trying to figure out how to grow my startup. And I know that many of our companies appreciate that as well. Thank you. What kind of startups do you want to see in the next five years? Oh, that's a good question. You know, I honestly think that while I certainly have some thesis around how the world will work, I also realize that I'm quite wrong most of the time. For example, I would not be able to call any downturn. I've been calling the downturn since 2017 when we raised our first fund.

And then again, like in 18 and 19, and then who would have seen COVID coming? I think that it's very, very hard to predict the future. And I do not, you know, I absolutely do not think that I can. And so, you know, really it's just going back to. basic principles, like what are the specific problems that need solving at the time? And then what solutions seem like they might really go after that. And I think, you know, it's very interesting. We invest in both, I would call it U.S. and Canada as one bucket and then also Southeast Asia as a second bucket. And what's very interesting about that is in the U.S.

and Canada, I would say that from an opportunity standpoint, we're actually pretty set. like things generally work. Like we have credit cards. We now underwrite people in many different ways. We have all kinds of banks. We have marketplaces. You can order anything on demand. We have B2B SaaS companies up the wazoo for a lot of industries.

And so within the U.S. and Canada, I think while I still believe 100%, there's still a lot of opportunity, the areas that I would say that we're going after in, let's say, the U.S. and Canada are really sort of out there niches, either industries that everyone's still using paper and pencil, or demographics where entrepreneurs have not built companies serving them. Those are kind of, I would say, the two high-level categories, areas that have not yet been saturated. But for the most part, I would say things are pretty set in the U.S. of Canada. On the flip side in Southeast Asia, I would say, actually, you have almost the reverse. You have a ton of opportunity, like, you know, in some countries, the way payments work is people actually, you know, curry bags of

cash around. And credit card penetration is very low, you know, outside of Singapore. So I think we're also, depending on where, what location we're talking about, I think also the kinds of technologies and problems are very different. And so for Southeast Asia, I would say, in large part, what we're looking at are kind of a lot of the things we take for granted here in the U.S. But making sure that is solving like a local problem like in the way that it works well culturally in a specific country outside the U.S. But within the U.S. and Canada, I, you know, I just really can't predict what that future will look like.

Are we talking about flying cars or flying vehicles of sorts or whatnot? I have no idea. Arjun asked, what is too early or late stage for Hustle Fun asking because we are told our MRR 15K is too early, but others say not at all. So for us, I would say that we want to see something built. We do not invest in idea stage companies. I think just having a bare bones product is a great way for us to understand what is the particular problem you're trying to solve. And also what is your thesis and your take on that? And so from a traction perspective, we don't care about traction. And so that kind of backs into what kind of

evaluation expectations, does the founder have? Henry asked, how has your selection criteria change for founders as a result of COVID? Are there new verticals that you're backing, given the circumstances? I wouldn't say that there are new verticals. So I would say kind of going back to just the fact that we're a small fund and we need startups to more or less start making money right away. Like we're not investing in areas where basically the industry is at least dead for the current being. But we have also, you know, increased both our look and also we've seen an

increase in the number of startups going after opportunities that in some sense have benefited from COVID, whether it's, you know, working remotely or education or healthcare. Those are probably the three biggest areas where we have seen an increase in number of people working on things and as a result, I would say that the number of deals that we're doing in those areas has increased, but those are not new areas for us at all. Aaron asks, during this downturn, we had time to reevaluate our approach and uncovered an exciting new path forward. It contributes to the flywheel, but is very different from our core model. How can we effectively communicate that this is the best path forward? This is a good question, and I think not having any details,

I'll just take a stab at it, but could be completely wrong here. I think ultimately, if you find that there is a pivot that you can do or are doing that is better than your current model, regardless of whether it's during COVID or not, you know, I would run with it. Now, the really scary part is you have, let's say, worked on something for a little while now. Maybe it's a year or something, and it has some traction. And then you have this new thing, which has very, very early data points. And you're not really sure whether at scale it will actually be better, but your conviction is that it will, just from a gut feeling.

Do you go all in on that new idea? And I think that that's sort of a question that is always, always so hard for founders. I face that problem myself personally. And I think ultimately, I, you know, my take is I would just do it. I would also communicate to your investors like or, you know, stakeholders, whomever, why you think that this is the better path. But I think, you know, that is where you need to find courage as a CEO and just go and do it. Now, if you don't quite have that conviction yet and your experiments are still early,

maybe you're running both in parallel still before going all in. But at some point, you're going to have to make that call before you have a lot of data points. And so that, you know, that day will, will, will come soon. Gustavo asks, how did Corona change the dynamics of raising funds in person versus remote meetings? And do you think we'll fully revert to old practices once things normalize? Good question. I think that, you know, certainly maybe all of you have noticed this or are noticing this.

I do think that just from talking with a lot of my fellow VCs, certainly raising funding now is a lot harder in part. It's because a lot of ECs are not used to investing over Zoom or video conferencing. And I, you know, even within our own portfolio, like, you know, a number of our portfolio founders have received those as responses as well. And so I think that I, you know, we're kind of in a weird state right now, at least in California, because the end of May is coming up and I do actually think that the state is going to, you know, pull out of this shelter in place order. And I do think that VCs will go back to meeting with people in person to make decisions. But I do think also that in part because of COVID, there will be more first meetings

done online. It's just I'm not sure I have conviction that many of my fellow VCs will be able to write checks without meeting people in person at some point. That's just my personal take. And this is coming from somebody who actually only writes checks over Zoom and always has even prior to COVID. What is your North Star vision for the future of Hustle Fund? It's a good question. So actually at Hustle Fund, we have a mission as well. In fact, our mission for Hustle Fund is that we believe that people whom we call, quote, hustlers, people who can execute with velocity and really focus ought to be able to get access to resources. That could be, and primarily I'm talking about funding. And so, you know, I think that our first stab at this problem is with hustle fund or

equity fund, we're pre-seed fund. We go in really early. We look for execution, all this stuff. But, you know, as you can imagine, the next call it 30, 40 years, we could be launching other funds that attack this problem in other ways. And I'll kind of leave it at that. But you're seeing, you know, I think just to tease everyone a little bit, you're seeing people talk about revenue-based financing. And I would say that, you know, that is something that is very exciting as well. You can think about all kinds of new accelerators for areas that are completely untapped. And, you know, right now I'd say it's mostly, quote,

Silicon Valley software startups that get the bulk of the funding, but there's so many other kinds of startups where I believe if the investors kind of align themselves towards the problem, right? You can actually make quite a lot of money as well there. And I'll kind of leave it at that. Jason asked, what's the best pitch you ever got that resulted in the quickest yes and a check from you personally? And how did that investment go? Good question. So I think in general, we are quite fast. I think I've gotten back to almost everybody like from the call stage within 48 hours, whether it was a yes or no. So I think we're fairly fast. And just, from that general process.

You know, we've gotten into some great companies. The pill club is one of them. They do, you know, birth control delivered to your door. And all of a sudden, when I have to think about it, I'm blanking now on our other companies. But, you know, I think I have done three offers, like, in call, like, you know, right on the spot in my life. and we'll see about them,

but one of them has already yielded a successful exit. Super excited about that. And actually, it was such a fast cycle. We invested it on Hustle Fund 1, and now the founder is an LP in Hustle Fund 2, which I'm very grateful for. And then the other two companies, I think, is just too early to say how well they're doing.

One of those companies, one of those other two companies, actually I just made that offer last week. And then the other one was about a year ago. And, you know, at this point, they've raised like $8 million. Of course, fundraisers don't necessarily correlate with big exits, but hopefully, fingers crossed, this one is correlated. Farshot asks, what is the nature of raising a seed round with only an MVP app in a highly regulated industry? There's a catch-22 problem where you need a small round in order to get approval and move forward,

how do investors evaluate those investments and how should you approach it as a founder? Yes, absolutely understand this. Let's just take FinTech or health, for example, very highly regulated spaces. And very often it's hard to get a partnership with anybody big unless you have some funding. Like, you know, no bank wants to partner with some podunk startup that has no funding. And so, I mean, I understand your pain. And a lot of our portfolio companies have gone through this before. So here's what I would do.

I think you're in this weird catch-22. For these areas such as FinTech and Health, and I'm sure there are plenty of others, you are not looking for generalist investors. You need to be talking to investors who really pretty much only invests in this and understand that. And so, for example, if it's FinTech, like you want to be going to all the FinTech investors because these people will actually invest pretraction because they all know this as well. And so if you're getting the pushback of, well, you need traction, et cetera, you're not going to the right investor. And so I think that's part of the problem with fundraising.

It's hard to know whether you're going to the right investor or not. And there are just so many investors out there. And many of them don't signal very well, like what they actually are interested in or how they make their decisions. So unfortunately, I would just say it's sort of a numbers game. But what I would look for is just on their angel list or crunch-based profile, like what kinds of things, you know, do they tend to invest in? Martin asks, how do you see your roadmap for approaching globally thinking European-based pre-seed-seed startups? Many non-diluding public grants are around in the EU and Nordics, which are accessible with just a small amount of private funding. Yep. Yeah. And so, Martin, I think, you know,

I think actually these non-dilutive sources are great. And we may have even chatted about this before. I think that it's interesting, you know, for us, like historically, we have not, you know, funded European companies. And the reason actually is not what anyone would think. You know, in a past life, actually, I used to work at 500 startups where we invested globally. And I think one of the things that I notice is that investing globally is a direction that I would love to go in, in the long term. But every country has all these different legal ramifications. And so I think incorporating, you know, in some of these places can set you up for challenges

depending on who you're trying to raise from, et cetera, and obviously it depends on the country. And I think some of that can be, you know, gotten around by incorporating in the U.S. as a U.S. Delaware Sea Corp, but operating in Europe. But ultimately, I think the way that I think about it is, at least at this point in time, for hustle fund, we may make a couple of global bets with some pretty, you know, stringent restrictions around where the incorporation is just from a legal fee standpoint and kind of learn from those bets. Because I think that, you know, depending on the country and the particular area, there's a lot that we don't know yet that we need to learn before we. we can say, hey, we're going fully global, especially as a small fund, especially as a small fund writing a small check. If we're putting in a 25K check, we cannot afford to be spending a thousand bucks on legal fees. That just doesn't make sense as an investment.

And that's something that, you know, we're trying to figure out for maybe the next fund. Jing asks, considering different industries move evolved at different paces when evaluating deals, how important is it for making your investment decision? For example, social media move faster than ecommerce. B to C user growth is faster than B2B to C. Not 100% sure what this question is getting at, but I think going back to what we kind of talked about a little bit earlier about fast customer acquisition,

I think we very much look at things from a monetization perspective. So most social media companies we probably wouldn't be able to invest in if it's something that you need to monetize with ads like five years down the road. And it's not to say that's a bad business. It could be actually an incredible business. It's just not the right business for a small fund like ours. So it's more about, you know, what are sort of the monetization, you know, bumpers around this problem?

Like what are what amount of capital is needed to be able to, let's just say, get to profitability on a company. And that's the kind of stuff that we think about rather than can you get a lot of users. Because ultimately you're running a business. This is about, you know, bringing dollars in for for less than your cost. Timothy asks, how do you typically work with the founders that you backed? And given the larger portfolio, do you try to focus on a certain number at a time? Yeah. So we have over 135 companies to date. And that is a lot of companies. And so actually, this is a good question for everyone to think about in terms of what is it that you're looking for from your investors,

because we have a model that's very different from some of the big Sand Hill funds. Like at a big Sand Hill Fund, they have fewer companies, but it also means that, and that also means that they can spend more time with you and do board meetings with you. And for the right partner, that can be incredibly valuable. For a fund like ours, the benefits are very different. Like we will not be on your board. We will not be meeting with you regularly. And so the way that we've kind of structured things is a couplefold. One is we have a very active and engaged community of smart people, all the founders of all these companies. And so we have, you know, in some sense, obviously depending on the kind of company you are, like they could be good potentially for

partnerships or customers. In general, I don't believe that startups really find much success selling to other startups or partnering with other startups. But we have startups in our portfolio at varying stages, especially since we had rolled in some of our angel investments that are, you know, that we did many years ago that are now quite big. So, so that's one thing, just community helping community, whether it's on advice or connections or introductions. And the second thing is also around, we do more scaled programming. So we do a lot of growth schools around tactical customer acquisition tips.

We're not exactly an accelerator, but I would call it more of an abbreviate accelerator that just comes with being part of the hustle fund family. And you can, you can join and get, you know, tactical things answered about your customer acquisition from our customer acquisition mentors and the growth classes that we run. And so we do more, we do look a little bit more like an accelerator in what we provide, but we don't have the demo days. We don't have the cohorts or any of that. And we're not asking for, you know, more equity or fees or anything for this programming. Suzanne asks, are you noticing any interest from investors related to problems arising out of our

aging society, interest from investors related to problems. I take this question to mean, like, when I talk with my friends who are angel, other angel investors and VCs, are they actively investing in this? I think they spot this as a, you know, a broad trend. I think, you know, it's just sort of the devil's in the details around what the idea is in particular. But, you know, I think, I think, yes, certainly people do. who are interested in what I would call elderly tech or whatnot. I'm not sure if this quite answers the question.

Alex asks, when you look at growth metrics, how much do you attribute to marketing versus product market fit and demand? How do you determine the difference when it's early stage? A great marketing versus go-to-market versus a great solution, but perhaps you need both for it to be worthy. So this is probably a controversial take, and I have a Twitter thread on it,

but I actually think that product market fit is very tied to customer acquisition. They are not separate. It is not sufficient to have a great product that everyone uses and not be able to sustainably promote it. Otherwise, you don't have a company. You may have a product, but you don't have a company. And so I think all of those things that you mentioned go together actually quite well. And so to your question, actually, this is very challenging. like how do you know, like whether you have product marked fit or not? And I think the answer is,

in the beginning, you don't really know. You have some inklings and then you keep on following those inklings until you one day know, as terrible as that sounds, which I realize is not very helpful, but just from personal experience, like that's what ends up happening. And so I think here are some indicators. So one indicator, but it's not the only one because there are plenty of successful companies that didn't have this from day one. But one indicator is, if you have strong product market fit, you will actually see strong market pull immediately. As in,

you can put a dollar into an ad channel, or you can call up, a cold call, an enterprise customer, and they will sign up immediately. Your ad customer will be profitably bought, and they will sign up immediately. And you keep doing that over and over and over.

And the companies with the strongest pull can keep on doing that, whether it's the outbound cold email and calling or the ads or whatever it is, and get a repeatable process going such that you can get to, you know, a couple million dollars run rate per year, like in that first year, very easily. That's to be a strong market pull. Now, it's not to say that you couldn't make a big business if you're not seeing that,

because I know plenty of people who have really struggled it out for a good three years, making only a few thousand dollars a month, very far from that, you know, a million or two million dollar run rate number. And then things just sort of kick in by year three or four. That's a much more challenging scenario. Like in the first scenario, you can kind of tell, yes, something's definitely working. Like, I keep on growing and I can keep on profitably doing what I'm doing and get more customers. That is like the ultimate situation that I rarely see. That probably happens about, you know, one to two percent of the time. But then there are other companies that can make it like big who are in that second bucket,

which is like, oh, they're really grinding it out for three years. And yes, they're growing and they keep on doing it. But the growth is not that fast because you cannot profitably use some of these channels to acquire customers. So there's more organic. There's more referrals. And that just slows down the growth. But you just keep at it.

And then, you know, eventually you get to, to where you want to go. So those two businesses, they can both go to really high levels. The difference is in speed. And so from a product market fit perspective, you will, you see product market fit in both categories. And so going back to this question of worthiness, you know, I don't think that anyone is more worthy than another, but there are different paths of what you end up, and that's largely based on lock, in my opinion. Okay, if you invest 20,000 a startup, what do you ask for in return and has that change due to COVID? We don't have set terms. We do it very case by case. For people using social advertising to acquire customers, what should early

companies target for click-through rates? What are best in-class startup click-through rates? I would not look at things in terms of click-through rates. I would look at things. So this is social advertising, I don't know if this is an ad network that you have or whether you are running your own ads to bring people to a product. But I think ultimately it comes down to can you acquire customers profitably? And so are you spending less than what you are making on them rather than about the click-through rates? If you are running ads unlike Facebook, it is helpful to have higher click-through rates because then your ad gets shown more, but it is also a factor of how much are you spending for those ads. And Facebook basically then factors in and figures out like, okay,

worth showing your ad because with that same ad slot, I could be showing somebody else who makes me more money. One, what's your recommendation or hack on getting intros to angel investors? I would do two things. I think I would definitely cold email people in parallel. That's the fastest. You write a good cold email. You will get attention. And it's a numbers game as well. So don't like blanket email everybody the same thing or in the email address, put everybody's email addresses or whatever. I've definitely seen that. And investors tend to ignore those. But if it is a very sort of, you know, solid, cold email that captures attention,

then I think angel investors will respond to that. As for intros, I would definitely pursue that in parallel, but it is slower. Like the slow path is try to get to know, like the best company that that angel investor has invested in, get that person excited, and then get that person to do an introduction. Peter, is there a clearly defined process to pitching you and receiving a yes, no? Yes. Apply on our website and then, you know, if you end up getting a call, whether it's with me or one of my other business partners, then we make a decision within 48 hours in most cases, unless there's something unusual about your situation.

And so that's actually pretty fast. I would say the slow part is in actually, you know, we go through every single email that comes through our site. And I would say that in general, though, we, you know, it's been a bit splotchy, but we do try to get back to people within a couple of weeks. Harry, how would a member of this audience invest in one of your companies? Is there an online demo day for New Angels?

What's a small, acceptable check? You can't write a 25K check. Should one stick to syndicates? Yeah, great question. We don't have an online demo day. And in general, I would say we don't have the bandwidth to actively promote our startups in the public. Like we, as in, people often ask us if we have a page of logos.

And I find that exercise to be constantly challenging. For example, I did six investments last week. So I think constantly keeping an updated page would be hard. But that being said, we have. have had a lot of angels cold email us. And, you know, we have, we actually keep an airtable list of all of the active investors, whether their VCs or angels. So if anyone just in general is listening to this and is interested in particular things, shoot me a cold email at Elizabeth at Hustlefund.vc. And yeah, you know, we would obviously love to, you know, get some of our

startups who are relevant to you, like in front of you. And as far as the second question, if you can't write a 25K check, I think it kind of depends. So, you know, when I was angel investing, I was investing with, you know, 1K checks, 5K checks, like small, small checks. But if you can sell yourself as, you know, hey, I'm not going to be a pain in your butt. Like I'm not, I'm not going to call you all the time. I'm not going to hound you. And if you need help, like, you know, pitch deck help or whatever, I'm happy to throw my two cents. And if you can make a fast decision, yeah, people will take those angels all day. Like, even though everyone says the minimum is 25K, in reality, you can always ask and say,

you know, hey, my personal financial situation can't allow me to do that. And for many people, it can't. But will you take this smaller check? And if it's super easy, people do it. Ken, how much support would an investee expect from hustle fund in connecting them to other investors for later rounds. I think it depends a lot on the company, but we have done introductions for almost all of our companies, sometimes as many as even 30 introductions. So we do a lot of introductions. And this kind of goes back to the last question, which is I do keep an air

table. And I have a very good idea of what every investor's looking for. So we can generally create a subset or come up with a subset that actually yields very productive meetings. Gene asks last week you started a conversation on Twitter about fundraising rounds and the concept of rounds is outdated. Maybe you can share a bit more of your thoughts on your idea. When I read your tweet, I immediately thought about rolling venture funds introduced by Angel List earlier this year. Yeah, I mean, I think it can already be done to a certain extent with safes and we kind of do that as well. I don't know if this is just too crazy, but I'm now seeing like some companies, including our own portfolio companies, you know, doing multiple tranches on saves.

Like I have a company that raised $5 million on three different tranches all on saves. And I mean, I think that there are certainly pros and cons to that. Like in general, as a pro, what I love about that is you can just get quick tranches done here and there. And that's exactly what they did. So they didn't waste a lot of time fundraising. You don't have to involve lawyers and the fees are basically free. the downside is once you start talking about raising like millions of dollars, so not just like 500,000 or a million,

but like, you know, five million, 10 million dollars on safes, then you start to get into other problems of, well, you know, this is a real company now, and maybe everyone should be an equity, and maybe there should be a board, and maybe there should be, you know, all this other stuff. So I think I don't have any concrete thoughts on what logistically or legally this might look like, but if you can kind of blend the two worlds together, like, why is it that equity rounds often require at a minimum threshold? It doesn't really make sense to me why that needs to happen. Why do equity rounds need to be so expensive? I know that people have batted around like the

series seed template of docs, et cetera, but for whatever reason, BCs don't use it. I haven't really dug into why that is. And so, like, you know, the list just goes on and on. Like, if you start questioning, like, one thing, you start questioning the next thing. And so for me, it's just, I don't understand why this is the way it's. is in this day and age. Chuck, are LPs high net worth doing more direct investments into startups? Will early stage funds get in on later stage growth rounds? I think I know where this question is going, but not 100% sure. So yes, there are a lot of LPs and high net worths who like to invest both directly into startups. And that is part of why they invest into funds,

such as ours, for example. But then also many of those people like also doing later stage rounds and like to take the parata of earlier stage funds. And that's another potential benefit as well for a large LP. I'm not sure if that's quite getting at what you're getting at, but that does happen. Like you are starting to see a lot of early stage funds, starting continuity funds or whatever you want to call it,

to invest in the later stages of some of their portfolio companies where they do have that information already and they have that relationship already. Lee, if you are building a few different MVP's before going all in on one, do you want to hear from people only once they're in this all-in stage? If prior to all-in, how should we approach you if one or many of the different ideas fall into your thesis? So our thesis is very broad. We invests across verticals. Like, we are looking to be bought into the founder's thinking and also the problem and solution at hand.

And so, yes, that would require going all in on one that you think is a strong problem and solution. Can you please name some industries that you view as dying or dead? The death industry. No, I think that I am not a very good predictor of the future. Like, this COVID thing could end up changing. I'm not sure if killing is the right word, but changing a lot of industries. and, you know, even industries that I generally think are moving in the wrong direction or not in a popular direction, there's always an idea that will work well.

So this is not a venture idea, but for example, the golf industry, like if you look at the numbers, if people are playing golf, et cetera, but then you have top golf, which is incredibly popular. So I think even in a dying or dead industry, there's always, you know, an exception. And that's why we kind of look at things for the specifics of the idea wrong. rather than, oh, I love this industry. Because there are also plenty of bad ideas in industries that I quote love. Max, given the high volume of portfolio companies you invest in, how do you and your partners find time to give advice?

How do you prioritize? Which portfolio companies do you give your time to? Yeah, great question. So I think the way that we set expectations with our founders is, like, we like to, you know, have the most conversations with them up front. Build that report early, like right after we invest. And also I think that's frankly speaking when we can be the most helpful. You know, I think one of the things that I noticed from previously running an accelerator

is like my biggest value is in the beginning because it's after I've given you a bunch of these intros, I kind of don't have that many more intros that are relevant to you. Otherwise, I would have done those intros already for the most part. And then similarly around the advice or the help around, let's say, you know, customer acquisition or or fundraising or whatever. Like once you've really kind of honed your deck, there is like everything else that you can get for me is pretty incremental. Or once, you know, we've kind of walked through some outbound email experiments or whatever. Like once you're on your way, everything else I can help you with is pretty

incremental. So, so I think what ends up happening is like we, you know, we end up working with their companies more upfront for the first few weeks. This is not an accelerator, so we don't do that for months. And then certainly on a, you know, whatever as needed basis, like people can call us. And very often I would say that I end up hearing from founders when they, trying to raise their next round is when I typically hear from them. Or, you know, if there's an issue with the team or something like that. But other than that, we mostly, you know, just get the, I don't want to call them automated reports, but we're perfectly fine with that. Like, you know, send us your revenue updates or whatnot. And that's kind of how we work with founders. And then I think

more scaled help, we do continue to do our workshops for all of our founders continuously throughout the year. And so they can continue to get things from the hustle fund family, but from my personal network or help, I think it's probably exhausted by that point. Priyanka asked, what are your thoughts on D to C? And is there a changing your thesis due to COVID? Or does it largely remain the same? Yeah. I mean, I think at a high level, I'm very optimistic and bullish on D to C. Like, you know, just in general, the way that we've traditionally bought things in the store and everything is mass produced and all that, is sort of an older way of doing things. But D to C pretty much disrupts that.

You can get anything coming to you directly and you can do a certain level of personalization in many cases, et cetera. So I love that trend, but given our fund size, like, and I would say D2C actually requires a fair bit of capital. Like when you're talking about physical products,

like, you know, they're minimum batch orders and shipping costs and all this other stuff like they're cogs. And so we do not invest in DTC with hustle fund or physical products just in general. And so unfortunately, you know, this is sort of where, you know, my own thinking kind of diverges just because of the nature of the, of our fund. Like, you know, our thesis around our fund is, it's partly based on how we think, but also partly based on the circumstances of, you know, if you have a fund of, you know, that's $25 million,

like, what can you do with it? And what does that model look like? And so even though I believe that COVID will actually help a lot of DDC companies, as we're already seeing. Our thesis still remains the same because those costs and capital required do not change. Betsy asked, what if any biases do you have in evaluating deals that you would like to rid yourself of that you think would make you a better investor? I'm not 100% sure what this question is asking. Am I interested in tools that would help investors. And I think the answer is no. Like we have a fiduciary duty to our investors. So we're looking at this strictly from a customer lens. Like I always like to put myself as much as I can in the shoes of your customer, regardless of what startup you are. And it's less about what do I personally

like at Hustle Fund or I personally like just in general. I think that if I am that customer persona, I would look at it, you know, in the same way. And, And so, you know, I have seen a lot of actually very interesting tools that I think could be useful to investors or whatever. But that doesn't change our mind about the investment decision. Emin asks, what are your aha moments when you see a founder and want to invest in their startup? What is your favorite or top founder persona? I think over the years, I've learned to really tone down my aha moments because maybe that's

just being old and jaded at this point and from having done this a long time. I mean, I think as we all know, and I've been in the trenches before for many years, like, it is really hard to run a startup. So even if a startup ends up doing incredibly well, for most of that time, it sucked. And so I kind of just restrain my aha moments. I mean, I think I still get excited about opportunities, but you also kind of are measured by, okay, well, these are all the problems that are going to happen. And I still may end up investing, but every startup has problems. So I probably don't have those aha moments anymore. What is your top founder persona? So this question I love, I love very thrifty founders, frugal founders, I guess I should call them. Like low burn, I've noticed over the years, goes very far. And especially

in times like these, when it's harder to get investor dollars or maybe your customers and their sales to your customers has dropped a lot. I think frugal founders win regardless of the market. And so that's a big, big thing to me. But of course, I think coupled with the fact that, and hence our name, hustle funds, like, you know, just in general, not just me, we really love scrappy, high velocity executors. And I think a big part of that is not, are you doing a lot?

And it's not, are you staying up until three in the morning to do stuff? That is not what hustle means. To me, hustle means like, okay, what is like the top priority? And I'm just going to go and move the needle on that. And in some sense, maybe at the expense of many other things that you could be doing as a founder. I think part of the challenge in being a founder is figuring how to prioritize because there are 101 things you could be doing. And prioritization is really challenging for many people. And so that's what I like.

frugal founders who are very laser-focused and fast on that laser-focused. Harish asks, how much value do letters of intent have as you evaluate a deal? This is before a pilot gets launched, but the prospect is very interested and is waiting for legal and other hurdles clearing up. I mean, for us, because we invest pre-traction, letters of intent are great pieces of information for us. I mean, we would even invest even without letters of intent. But I think the more that you have, like, you know, the better. We would never ding anyone for having letters of intent or sales or traction. So I, you know, if you had that, I think that's great. Obviously,

letters of intent, I've seen all kinds. Some of them basically just say we, we agree to look at this product and others are stronger than that where it almost commits to buying. And so there's a whole range in there, but it is something. It means you've done your work and reaching out to customers and engaging them and starting a process with them. At the end of the day, though, I would say that we still very much are gut investors on customer acquisition. Do we actually think that this seems like a problem to that customer? And do we actually think that that customer is going to buy? And it's big enough of a problem to move relatively quickly. And asks if early customer adoption is important for your fund, in other words, getting paid, do you like or dislike MVP or are

you bothered? I'm not 100% sure of this question because customer adoption is actually not important to our fund. We do, as I may have mentioned before, we invest pre-traction. So it's more of our good feeling on what we think the customer acquisition will be like, regardless of whether you have sales or not. Like very often founders will come to me and say, well, I think I think you're wrong because these are the KAC numbers I'm seeing. And it's not about that actually, because I think you can get your customer acquisition to work for the first couple of people, no problem. It's more of what do I think gut feeling this will look like in five years. So I'm not quite sure how to answer this question, but I think basically what we're looking

for is what is your thesis on the problem and what have you built towards the solution to solve that problem? Like, is this a big problem that people actually care about and will prioritize? Jane asks, can you share your ratio of solo founders versus founding teams? in your portfolio, is the coaching and mentorship you provide different based on that? And that is actually a great question. We've done a lot of slicing and dicing of our founders, but not based on solo versus having a co-founder. So that is something that might be interesting for us to dig into. But I think also partly as a response to that, I, you know,

I personally don't have any qualms investing in solo founders. So that's also in part why we haven't done that exercise. The coaching and mentor, that we provide generally is along the lines of customer acquisition and fundraising. So that isn't something that we have really addressed. But I do know that it is quite lonely, you know, to be a CEO and especially as a solo founder. And I think that, you know, depending on the situation, the company, you know, with the cash and where they are, would definitely recommend getting like an executive coach for startups at some point. Vishal asked his hustle fund also help with H1B sponsorship for founders.

we have not gotten involved. I have certainly written my fair share of 01 letters over the years. And so I think if there are one-off requests that our founders have, we're certainly happy to do that. I think given that we don't have any expertise in getting H1B sponsorship for people, we have not, you know, dived into the weeds and nobody has asked us about that, although we do have a lot of immigrant founders, so I imagine they are getting help from more, from experts elsewhere.

Ashley asks, what are your top three reasons, observations and triggers for scheduling a second meeting, assuming a standard VC process, and the opposite, any immediate red flags that make you want to politely end the first meeting before time is up. Top three reasons. So for us, if you're talking with one of the partners, we actually don't usually do a second meeting,

we just decide. So I think the first question is not applicable to our fund. In the case of where you're talking with one of our associates on our team, then we will move it up to a second meeting based on their notes. And we've found that to actually work quite well. Our associates are awesome, like they know exactly, what we are looking for. And so I think the top three reasons, just like, you know, customer acquisition is near and dear to my heart. So basically, I think given that many

companies don't have traction and we don't care about what your traction results are, what does that actually mean? Like, we want to have conviction that this is a real problem. And so you have to really be able to spell that out in some format. It could be through storytelling. It could be through a personal problem that you faced. It could be you've worked in this domain before and you found that with customers that you had, it could be through traction. We don't ding people for having traction, but we really want to understand your level of understanding around the specific problem. And I think that being able to also explain the customer persona in detail says a lot about your understanding of the problem.

So, for example, if let's say I'm coming up with a new product for, I don't know, virtual babysitting for kids during COVID, like my perfunctory customer, like, understanding of a customer persona in this case would be, oh, well, it's for working parents. That's a very high level understanding of the problem. If I actually did customer development or if I had worked in the space before or had some level of domain knowledge from something I did in the past, whether it's a lot of babysitting or, you know, I don't know, having tried remote babysitting like during this COVID times, like, then I would be able to actually spell out in more detail, like working parents who have tech jobs and can work from home and be in the other room and generally own their house

and or, you know, are in a place where they have a study that's separate or so. Like, you can go rattle on and on and on about this person's day and a life. Like, that's a very good understanding of your customer persona. And generally speaking, it's a very good understanding of the problem at hand. So those are the kinds of things we really want to see more than anything to be able to escalate to a second meeting. And then on the flip side, there are all kinds of red flags, like people who are inconsistent with what they say. Like, for example, oh, yeah, I have, you know, $5 million already committed.

And then you start digging in actually they don't or whatever. If you have inconsistencies, like don't try to overhype because that is a definite no. trust starts from 100% and starts to go down. And since we've never met you, like you want to keep that trust at 100% as much as you can. I think other things I've often seen have been like just founders ramble on and on. And I realize I'm rambling on and on in this show. And when you ramble on and on,

it doesn't allow you to understand what the other person is actually thinking. And by rambling on and on to the point of I've had founders, literally talk nonstop on the phone with me for over 20 minutes before cutting them off. Now I don't let that happen, but earlier in my career, that did happen. Heidi asks, what type of advice can you share with founders who are looking to raise now, who have traction in their sales and product and overall operations, knowing that we're in the middle of a global pandemic? Good question.

I think it depends on the size of the round. I think that what I'm seeing at least is I'm seeing a lot of smaller investors. I would call them microphones and angels. They're quite active still. We're active. A lot of angel friends of ours are active. A lot of other microphones are active. People have no qualms making decisions on Zoom.

And I would call it for checks that are 25K, 50K, K, 100K. But then we're talking about much larger rounds. Like if you're pitching a Sandhill fund, I think it will be. be very, very challenging to try to find a lead to lead, you know, your round at five million bucks or even two million bucks. And so I don't know what your situation is now in terms of your cash, but my recommendation would be to wait until we are out of this shelter in place. And for California, that's not that far away. People are talking about end of May. So we're talking about just two weeks. I don't think that's very far off at all. And I would, I would actually

just prepare all your materials and even start getting introductions to line up meetings, you know, now. That's probably what I would do. If you are in an absolute cash crunch, and if for whatever reason we don't come out of this shelter in place in the next couple of weeks, then I would probably recommend raising, you know, 200K, like just party around it on a bridge, on safes or convertible notes from these smaller folks. Charles, you gave a wonderful example of a bakery pivoting from selling bread to selling bread kids. How can a founder spot when it is time to pivot and what opportunities there are? Should they test, should they tentatively test and iterate?

Or is this the time for bold strikes? Pivoting is always so hard. But I think the good news is with COVID, you may find that you may have to take drastic action and you may be forced to. and that could actually be a good forcing function and a good thing. For example, if your market no longer exists right now, maybe you're in travel, maybe you sell the restaurants, maybe you sell the small businesses,

that may force you to pivot. And I would just go all in with that because I don't really know what the world will look like when we come out of this. It may be that we are out of shelter in place, at least in California and some other states in the next few weeks, but it would not surprise me if we go back into shelter-in-place a couple of times this year. And I think that these markets that I just mentioned are not going to come back in full swing for quite a while.

And it's not to say you couldn't sell to these markets. There are definitely people, you know, pivoting to kind of take advantage of the situation. And I say take advantage in a good way. Like, you know, maybe it's helping restaurants do delivery or whatever. And, you know, that market is seemingly crowded, but there may be room for other players with another take. Or small business owners who, you know, aren't in the shipping game and they're not on Amazon, getting them up and running. And I don't have any concrete ideas here. But kind of along the lines of the bakery pivoting to bread kits, helping maybe helping people sell kits.

Who knows? And travel, like, you know, maybe it's not actual travel, but maybe it's more Airbnb local getaways. I don't know. that is actual travel or virtual travel. I'm not really sure. But nonetheless, I think if you are seeing your sales drop tremendously because of this, then I would definitely do a bold pivot. Now, if we're just talking under normal conditions where this is sort of working, you're sort of growing, but it's, there may be something that that has faster growth that you're itching to go after. Then I would probably lean towards what you, you know, what you mentioned, which is maybe

start by doing some small tests, iterate, and then actually see just from that initial data whether you have conviction to go in, go all in on that new path. But that's always hard to call it because you have very little data on that new path. It's large a conviction-based. And abandoning an old path that is growing slowly is always very challenging. So I don't really have much advice there except good luck. And then asks, do you mostly invest in founders with domain expertise or non-domain who changes customer user experience, we've invested in both. It comes back to the customer development and customer discovery. What does the founder know about the specific problem? What does the founders take on how big of a problem this is? Does the founder really understand

the day and a life for customer persona of the customer? And you can get that fairly easily if you previously worked in the field or you are a domain expert because you're a customer or whatever. Like, if you have experience with that, we have definitely backed founders in that category. But you can also get that by really doing your own customer discovery and development to just work your way into an industry that you previously didn't work in. Machik and Mike asks, what do you search for in hardware and hard science startups? What are your thoughts on hardware or software and hardware components? and startups and has this perception changed over time.

I think this is similar to the D to C question where I'm actually very bullish on hardware as an industry. I think that so many investors gravitate towards software that there are a lot of overlooked hardware companies. And I also think that especially when you're talking about the U.S. and Canada, so not Southeast Asia, but you're talking about countries where things are large. solved in software, the next big things are probably in, you know, areas that are completely untouched, which is, you know, hardware being one of them. So for that reason, I'm very,

very bullish. But the problem with hardware and kind of like the problem with e-commerce and direct to D2C is, you know, it just requires a lot of capital. So as a small fund who's writing a 25K first check, it doesn't help a hardware company go very far. And, also in order to attract the attention of many investors, you often have to, you know, you often have to have a product in market. And it often takes a lot of capital to get there, like the minimum batch orders and everything. And it's also very hard to iterate with hardware companies, although that's getting a bit better now. But so for all of these reasons, we have certainly dabbled with hardware companies. But I would say that more and more we, like,

For the fund sizes that we have, like, we are not the right funds for those companies and for hardware companies, because I think it just takes way more capital than what we have in our fund to do it well. Jody asks, many investors invest in companies when they know the founders. What is your advice on how to build those relationships if you don't live in NYC or SF? Yeah. So I think this is where I, you know, I am not that customer persona. So I am just trying to draw from my own intuition of my friends because actually about 15% of the teams that we backed were completely cold without a warm referral or

introduction or anything. And so I like putting myself in those. shoes of investors who only look at those warm referrals and especially really like those strong relationships. I think it does take a lot of time to network, but one of the things I've always appreciated about the San Francisco Bay Area. I've never lived in New York, but San Francisco is a place where people give back and they're very generous about introductions and very generous about helping each other. You see founders helping founders all the time. And so I think in a world that is moving more remote, I think actually it becomes easier and easier, but it still

takes a lot of time and effort to network where, you know, now you, if there are, let's say, angel investors, you can approach either because you went to an event and who knows how things will change with COVID, but let's say you went to an event in, let's say that you're in Dallas and you go to an event and they're angel investors there. The chances these days of an angel investor in your local environment, being connected to somebody in either San Francisco or New York is actually pretty high. Like, people are a lot more connected these days. And so you can leverage like a local investor,

whether it's somebody who is actually invest in your company or somebody who even just likes you enough to make an introduction. Like that's your way in. And so then from there, like everybody in San Francisco. Francisco knows each other and everybody in New York knows each other. And so you just kind of, you know, get intros after interest after interest. Now, of course, it takes a lot of time to take all these calls, et cetera, but that's what I would recommend as one path. The other path is there is value in accelerators. I think a lot of people ask about that. And it really depends a lot

on what you're looking for in an accelerator. But if networking to get in front of investors in New York or San Francisco is one of those priorities, that's definitely the easier path in. And and the faster path in, these accelerators bring in everybody who's who investors. If I'll give a quick plug for launch, and there are other accelerators in the Bay Area as well. Like, you know, just apply to an accelerator that has, I don't know if I would call it cash a per se, but has a brand and is known for bringing in other well-known investors in the area. And that is a faster way to connect. So those are probably the two ways that I would recommend.

So on Twitter, you can follow me and find me at Dunk Hippo 33. I often tweet storm a lot about either customer acquisition or fundraising. My blog is at Elizabethan.com where I write much longer articles on both of those topics, usually tactically from a tactical angle. But I also like, you know, I just give out my email address like Elizabeth at hustlefund. VC pretty freely. And I get back to pretty much everyone unless your email goes to spam or whatnot. So. Um, yeah. Thanks for listening to Elizabeth Yins Ask Me Anything. If you'd like to participate in weekly AMAs and discuss all aspects of startup life with Jason and our community of 30,000 founders, join us at this week in startups.com slash slack. Thanks again to Clavio, Pitney Bowes, and Dell for making this possible.