In episode 12 of the Investing in Impact podcast, I speak with Elizabeth Yin, Co-founder of The Hustle Fund on changing the landscape of traditional venture capital and opening up access to aspiring founders.

Elizabeth Yin is a co-founder and General Partner at Hustle Fund, a pre-seed fund for software entrepreneurs. Previously, Elizabeth was a partner at 500 Startups where she invested in seed stage companies and ran the Mountain View accelerator. In a prior life, Elizabeth co-founded and ran an adtech company called LaunchBit (acq 2014). Elizabeth has a BSEE from Stanford and an MBA from MIT Sloan.

Elizabeth has reviewed over 20k startup pitches from around the world in the last few years and has helped numerous portfolio founders raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Her work and writing on startup fundraising has been featured in numerous publications including TechCrunch, Forbes, Huffington Post, BetaKit, and more.

The Hustle Fund invests in pre-seed rounds. Not seed. Not post-seed / mango seed. Pre-seed. As their mantra states – “We invest in hilariously early startups”. The Hustle Fund’s first check is usually $25k unless the team has worked with the founder before. Most of the time, founders can expect to receive a response from the team between 24 and 48 hours after having a call.

Listen to the full podcast about making venture capital accessible with Elizabeth Yin at Causeartist.