Hustle Fund

Elizabeth Yin, Eric Bahn, and Shiyan Koh make investment decisions as the firm's General Partners. Elizabeth and Eric co-founded the firm in 2017 after working together at 500 Startups, while Shiyan joined as a General Partner, bringing operational experience from her time as VP of Operations at NerdWallet. The flat partnership structure means any GP can greenlight a deal, reflecting the firm's emphasis on speed over committee-driven process.

Hustle Fund relies on a distributed, inbound-heavy sourcing model driven by its public content engine — including a popular Substack, YouTube channel, and active social presence — plus referrals from its Angel Squad community. The firm reviews global deal flow without geographic constraints, often taking pitches from cold outreach. This volume-based approach flips the traditional VC model: instead of sourcing a small number of warm-intro deals for deep diligence, Hustle Fund evaluates thousands of startups quickly and writes small checks into patterns that resonate.

Hustle Fund is a traditional venture firm managing institutional LP capital, but it layers a community co-investment vehicle — the Angel Squad — on top of its core funds. The Angel Squad raises from accredited individual investors who gain access to Hustle Fund's deal flow and programming. This hybrid structure allows the firm to combine committed fund capital with flexible co-investment dollars from operators and angels who also contribute sourcing referrals.

Hustle Fund's primary engine is writing small initial checks — typically $25,000 to $150,000 — at pre-seed and seed, but the firm reserves follow-on capital for breakout portfolio companies that demonstrate strong early traction. The strategy is not to win on ownership percentage in any single deal but to build enough portfolio density that a few standouts drive fund-level returns. The Angel Squad vehicle operates with a similar allocation philosophy, giving members pro-rata exposure to the same deal flow.

Hustle Fund focuses nearly exclusively on pre-seed and seed-stage equity in technology startups. The firm does not pursue growth equity, private credit, secondaries, or real assets. Within venture, the team is sector-agnostic but has concentrated activity in Enterprise Software, FinTech, AI/ML, Digital Health, and consumer internet. The volume model means the fund can explore a broad range of categories without needing deep domain specialization in any one vertical.

Hustle Fund generally avoids capital-intensive businesses such as hard tech, biotech, medical devices, hardware, and cleantech requiring significant upfront R&D or manufacturing. The firm's check size and rapid-decision model push it toward software and digital services with short iteration cycles. The team has also indicated reluctance toward heavily regulated industries or long-sales-cycle enterprise plays that don't align with the $25,000–$150,000 check archetype.

Angel Squad operates as a pooled commitment vehicle rather than a deal-by-deal syndicate. Members invest in the fund, and the GPs allocate capital across the same portfolio as the core venture funds, rather than picking individual deals. The community aspect includes educational programming and access to a network of fellow angel investors, positioning Angel Squad as a hybrid between a scout program and a consumer-friendly venture fund — built for operators who want venture exposure without lead-investor responsibilities.