Sunset Ventures

Sunset Ventures

Sunset Ventures was founded in 2022 by General Partner Brandon Hoffman and is co-led by K. Marco Hardie. The firm operates from dual hubs in Los Angeles and San Francisco, positioning itself at the intersection of Southern California's growing innovation ecosystem and the Bay Area's established venture corridors. Unlike traditional funds that rely on inbound founder referrals, Sunset Ventures' origin is tied to Hoffman's stewardship of the Emerging LA community — a network that now spans over 2,883 professionals and places fellows from USC, UCLA, Caltech, Harvard, and other universities into operating and investing roles. The firm invests at the pre-seed and seed stages, targeting companies redefining consumer behavior across software, gaming, media, fintech, blockchain, AI, AR/VR, commerce, marketplaces, and IoT. Its investment model combines direct venture checks with a community-driven sourcing engine — the Emerging VC Fellowship, which has placed students at Coinbase, Goldman Sachs, and Pathway Capital Management. Fellows participate in real investment workflows; the community also launched an Emerging Angels syndicate, enabling co-investments alongside the firm into companies such as Anthropic, SpaceX, Perplexity, Databricks, Cursor, and xAI (per LinkedIn, 2026). Sunset Ventures has 2–10 employees and lists 19 professionals on its LinkedIn page. Beyond the dual-city California footprint, the firm's reach extends through Hoffman's public-facing role co-hosting curated events — he ran a high-signal investor list during LA Tech Week organized by a16z, drawing over 1,500 events. In early 2026, Sunset Ventures announced the third cohort of its VC Fellowship, now split into an Operations Track and an Investments Track, with a Southern California geographic mandate spanning San Diego to Santa Barbara (per LinkedIn, January 2026). The structural differentiator is Sunset Ventures' integration of a venture fund with a talent and deal-flow engine that functions as a proprietary sourcing laboratory. The fellowship program doubles as a pipeline: it trains the next generation of allocators and operators while creating a de facto scouting network embedded in top universities and early-stage startups. This blurs the line between community-building and principal investing, giving Sunset Ventures visibility into companies and talent before formal fundraising processes begin — a model more commonly associated with large platform funds than a sub-10-person firm.