Recent Posts

Most Used Categories

Author: dunkhippo33

What Does the Near Future of Artificial Intelligence Look Like and What Should I Build?

by dunkhippo33
This post is by dunkhippo33 from Elizabeth Yin

If you haven’t already read Packy McCormick’s blog post this morning on Attention is All You Need, I highly recommend it.

He always writes with incredible insight, but today’s post is especially important as we think about technology in the next several years and decades to come. Of course, you guessed it – his post is about OpenAI. I want to build on that post and suggest some thoughts on where the best places to build are in light of where OpenAI is positioning itself in the market.

Some context

A few months ago, we saw the launch and rise of ChatGPT, a personal assistant that allows users to ask questions and make requests. ChatGPT is the first product ever to reach 100m users in just a couple of months, an incredible feat that surprised just about everyone. Then, last week, we saw the launch of ChatGPT plugins. With the launch of plugins, users will be able to extend ChatGPT’s capabilities to be able to take actions available across other websites within the ChatGPT interface. 

For example, in the future, within ChatGPT, I ought to be able to ask ChatGPT to: 

  • Text all my Facebook friends a fun made-up song on their respective birthdays
  • Search Kayak for the cheapest premium economy flights to London from San Francisco that serves Haagen Dazs ice cream mid-flight
  • Write a script for me that will re-organize my email inbox, prioritizing my founders first

Months ago, I think we saw all (Read more...)

Leadership during a crisis

by dunkhippo33
This post is by dunkhippo33 from Elizabeth Yin

Wow. What a week.

I’m sure most of you reading this are in and around startups and already know what I’m referring to. But if not, the most popular bank for startups and VCs called Silicon Valley Bank just went under. They are still getting a final count on what percentage of deposits are not insured, but I’ve seen 97% being floated around. That’s a lot of money potentially gone.

But we’re all tired of hearing about what we think happened or whether a buyer will come along. The much more important thing to talk about is what to do in a crisis situation.

Over-communicate. And then communicate some more.

One of the biggest mistakes I see organizations make during a crisis is their failure to communicate swiftly and with poise. Often organizations want to find all the facts and think about the right words to say. They want to focus on solving the problem.

Unfortunately, this is a big mistake. And it’s a mistake that happens all the time — such as in this crisis with SVB or during COVID or when employee allegations about abuse or harassment emerge, etc. Companies make this mistake over and over again — both big and small companies.

It is important to own your communications and use them to get ahead of a situation that is spiraling downwards. In fact, this is so critical that I’ve spent the last 2 days drafting communications for many of our portfolio companies in figuring (Read more...)

The Return of Camp Hustle

by dunkhippo33
This post is by dunkhippo33 from Elizabeth Yin

Today is a big day for my team. We’re announcing the return of Camp Hustle.

But first, I want to talk a bit about what is top of mind for me going into the new year. One thing I think deeply about a lot is how can we get a lot more great startups funded.

Part of this answer is through our Hustle Fund pre-seed fund. Part of this answer is through our 1000+ member global angel club called Angel Squad.

But the vast majority of this answer lies in helping more investors — whether they are new VCs or angels — in their journey. We need to help more people jump into the startup-investing game AND become successful.

This effort starts with community — connecting more great budding investors together to level up everyone’s investing through capital, knowledge, and networks.

We started resuming live events last year with Camp Hustle 2022 and we’re back this year to help connect more investors.

My colleague Haley Bryant interviewed Sequoia VC Jess Lee at last year’s Camp Hustle

What is Camp Hustle?

Camp Hustle is an in-person event exclusively for investors. (Now, if you’re a founder, I’ll get to why you may care about this in a minute…hang tight and read on…)

It’s a full day of networking (a lot), talks (a few) and live pitches (with real-time pitch analysis). It’s taking place on May 17, 2023 in the Bay Area.

What’s the point?

We write a lot of free content (Read more...)

My first trip to Vietnam

by dunkhippo33
This post is by dunkhippo33 from Elizabeth Yin

Happy new year!

I’ve been meaning to post this for a while now and my hope is to write more this year.

Last fall, I took a trip to Vietnam, my first time traveling there. I was really impressed with the people and the country! The energy in Ho Chi Minh was incredible. Construction and buildings are popping up left and right. You can feel the rise of the city and the country as a whole. Being there felt a lot like how I remember feeling when I visited China in 2005. The excitement of fast growth. It’s so hard to believe that this was the same country that the US left in shambles less than 50 years ago. In fact, while the US is suffering from inflation and declining growth, Vietnam’s inflation today is only ~3% and their GDP is expected to grow 6-8% per year in the near term. Remarkable.

We took our Hustle Fund team there because, we have invested in a LOT of startups in Vietnam, almost all of whom we invested in via video conference — even pre-pandemic! In meeting many of our founders for the first time, I was really impressed with the level of passion and hustle. And what so many of them have achieved with their companies in such a short period of time is mindblowing.

Celebrating Eric’s birthday w/ our portfolio founders at CTY Kitchen, which had great food and is owned by one of our founders (check it out (Read more...)

Happy 5th birthday Hustle Fund!

by dunkhippo33
This post is by dunkhippo33 from Elizabeth Yin

Wow, it’s hard to believe it’s been 5 years since we started Hustle Fund! In the last 5 years, we have: 

  • Raised and deployed ~$130m
  • Brought on 25 team members at Hustle Fund
  • Built a community of nearly ~1000 Angel Squad members
  • Funded ~400 portfolio companies
  • Worked with ~300 LPs
  • Grown to 100k+ followers on my Twitter acct

I’ll let you know how it’s going in about another 5 years! 😀

For all of this, I am so grateful. All that we have achieved has been a community team effort. Hustle Fund is so much more than a VC fund. It has become a movement.

I say this because movements are about values. Movements are about being mission-aligned. When we started Hustle Fund, we didn’t set out to build a VC fund per se. We set out to solve a problem that we personally understood well that we could work on solving over the rest of our careers of 30+ years. The mission that we are on is to democratize wealth via startups by helping startups with capital, knowledge, and networks.

In our first inning of Hustle Fund, we focused just on the capital problem. Specifically, how can we help more fantastic startups who may not have a rich uncle get capital at the pre-revenue stage? Without a warm intro and without needing to be in Silicon Valley. 

This is the hardest stage to raise money, and five years ago, there were only a handful of VCs addressing this (Read more...)

Some reflections on turning 40

by dunkhippo33
This post is by dunkhippo33 from Elizabeth Yin

Last week, I celebrated my 40th birthday with my family (which is pretty amusing since my birthday is in November).

When I think back about the last few decades, a few stories from my professional life come to mind that I thought I would share here.

1) Serendipity and luck trump everything.

Certainly hard work and skills are important, but luck and being at the right place at the right time is so critical.

I wasn’t born into a family of entrepreneurs or even tech. I got into startups, because of a couple of key events that happened to me. One event that got me into startups happened in 1996 growing up in the SF Bay Area during my freshman year of high school. My best friend Jennifer told me one day that her cousin Tony was starting an internet company. And she asked me if I wanted to help him and their startup out over winter break. I didn’t know what a startup was, but I also had nothing major going on during winter break. So, we took the Caltrain up to San Francisco to “help” Tony. When we showed up, the place was honestly a bit of a mess and chaotic. But it was exciting! Tony and his friends were working together on all kinds of projects. They didn’t have to dress up in “grownup-work-clothing”. And they could eat all the pizza they wanted. It was the dream.

I wasn’t any help at all to their company. But (Read more...)

What if everything goes right with crypto?

by dunkhippo33
This post is by dunkhippo33 from Elizabeth Yin

I was in middle school when I first started getting excited about the internet. It’s hard to describe just how clunky the internet was back then. My parents had a 9600 baud dial-up modem that would hog our only phone line and would connect to the internet. It took minutes to log on, and it would drop every 3 minutes or so. Not to mention, I drove up their phone bill so high quite frequently, they got super mad.

And there were all these scams you could easily fall into — especially if you were using the internet for transactions. In fact, the word “phishing” developed during this era. And it was common for people to actually physically mail dollar bills to purchase things on eBay. Adults were buying tech stocks. My neighbors in Silicon Valley were talking about taking jobs with stock options. And finally, in late 2000, the stock market came crashing down, and everyone thought the internet was dead. What an insane era!

And yet it was amazing. The first era of the web was about connecting people. And over the next 10-20 years, people made the web better. We moved past the clunkiness. Interfaces and UX got better. It wasn’t as slow. People figured out how to get wiser about security. We now have mobility — you can get on the internet just about anywhere and even with devices that fit in your pocket. You can transact in your local country.

That said, despite the open (Read more...)

The New Era of Media Companies

by dunkhippo33
This post is by dunkhippo33 from Elizabeth Yin

For many years now, VCs have absolutely “hated” investing in media companies. If you were starting a blog or a newsletter, it would be very challenging to raise money from traditional VCs unless you had proven out a ton of traction (with a fast growth trajectory).

But I think it’s important to understand why, because we’re starting to see an inflection point that will shift the entire industry.

Side note: my view on this topic is fairly strong and comes from working with a lot of newsletter companies over the years in running my startup, which was an email ad network.

What’s wrong with media companies?

VCs typically have not liked these criteria about media companies:

Low exit multiples on ad revenue (often 1-2x on annual revenue)
Hard to acquire users quickly & scalably (CAC is too high at scale)
In a recession, companies reduce ad spend – especially brand advertising

All of these things have been traditionally true — especially if you’re looking to sell your business in 5 years.

But what if you thought more long-term? Not a 5 year horizon but 10-20 years or even 20-30 years out? How would you think about your business differently? What would your strategy be?

Regardless of your business, you might do something like:

Gather an audience – maybe start a newsletter to get loyal fans
Launch a product to that audience
Launch many products to that audience to upsell them etc..

And maybe you sell ads or event tickets in (Read more...)

The Rise of the Decentralized Startup

by dunkhippo33
This post is by dunkhippo33 from Elizabeth Yin

I think we’re seeing a very big shift right now in how startups are created and operate. But before we dig into that, I want to spend some time talking about work.

For centuries, work has been incredibly inefficient. In the “barter era”, one person would do work in exchange for someone else’s work. E.g. I’ll make you a silver fork in exchange for salt and spices. There were many things challenging about this type of economy. 1) There was no common currency to transact and understand value, and 2) on a macro level, it was hard to know whether your good or service was really needed and whether it was going up or down in value. E.g. Is there a surplus of spices? Should I be spending time in spices or something else this year?

Money came along and solved the first part of that problem. Tribes and groups of people adopted currencies that are the predecessors to modern day money. You could carry around some form of fiat and use it to buy things. You could sell your goods and services for fiat. This helped standardize commerce.

Eventually, the Medici family in Europe established ledger-based banking so that you could take your goods and services to one location in Europe and it would be good for a credit that could be used at another Medici bank. Coincidentally, around the same era, the Yap money system in Polynesia had similarities where money was actually represented by large stones, and (Read more...)

A reflection on our mission

by dunkhippo33
This post is by dunkhippo33 from Elizabeth Yin

It’s hard to believe that we’ve been in the pandemic for almost 1.5 years now! But the silver lining of a pandemic is it really forces you to question what is important. One of the thoughts I keep coming back to is around mission and purpose, which I wrote about last year at the start of the pandemic. AKA, what are you doing with your life and why?

When we started Hustle Fund a few years ago, setting out to make a boatload of money was not the (sole) purpose of the organization. Prior to Hustle Fund, I could have worked at a number of top VC funds that could have set me on a clear lucrative path. But I wanted to do something bigger and more impactful — something that would also help a lot of entrepreneurs. In mapping out Hustle Fund almost four years ago, we decided that core tenets to our mission at Hustle Fund was to further capital, knowledge, and networks in startup ecosystems.

Recently, we had a chance to reflect on how we’re doing against these tenets at our Hustle Fund team offsite.

Mapping out the future of Hustle Fund

At Hustle Fund, we believe that great founders look like anyone and come from anywhere. In the last four years of Hustle Fund, we’ve built scalable processes to fund nearly 300 pre-seed companies globally! Even pre-pandemic, we made almost all of our funding decisions online through video conference calls. We’ve invested in approximately 50 (Read more...)