Elizabeth Yin Comes to Venture Underground

Elizabeth Yin, co-founder and General Partner of Hustle Fund, will headline the next Venture Underground on February 12, 2026 in San Francisco. She joins a new series of special guests from outside the Decile family that we're bringing to Venture Underground this year to deliver even more value to our community of emerging managers.

We know a solo fund manager's time is triple booked. You are raising money. You are looking for deals. You are supporting the deals you've done. (Oh yeah, and you probably have a family or a life outside of work.)

So we figured we should pack even more value into our monthly Venture Underground events. We already designed these to give you face time with the senior Bay Area Decile team and to network with one another. And we've heard incredible stories of GPs meeting LPs at these events, and Decile GPs increasingly co-investing with one another or tapping each other as resources in other ways.

But this year, we have also worked hard at booking special guests at each Venture Underground from our network of industry friends from outside the Decile family.

Our first guest is Elizabeth Yin of Hustle Fund, who is always a crowd favorite. She was the guest on our

, attended virtually by thousands.

We say this with all love: in another life, Elizabeth Yin could have been a cult leader.

The firm was co-founded by Yin and two friends and Silicon Valley veterans asking themselves one question: 

Their answer was to write small $25,000 checks, as they say, "hilariously early," to give founders who may not look like tried-and-true central casting founders a shot at hitting some metrics to unlock bigger rounds. Sometimes after just one quick phone call.

The non-traditional approach hasn't just worked in terms of returns. Hustle Fund has backed over 300 startups and built a far more diverse portfolio, simply by giving different types of founders with great ideas a shot to prove themselves.

It's almost like Hustle Fund was a spiritual forerunner to VC Lab's style of scrappy, entrepreneur-driven venture funds. They write small checks hilariously early and act more like part of the rebellion than people who joined "the dark side."

It has built a brand unlike that of any venture capital "firm."

We put "firm" in quotes, because how many stuffy Sand Hill Road outfits host raucous hustle camping events, have a purple hippo mascot, or offer merch like "The Anti-VC VC Club" hoodies, not to mention promote newsletters on their site that are "so good you'll be pooping hippo rainbows"?

Elizabeth's path into venture capital started in the most unlikely way. In 1996, as a high school freshman growing up in Silicon Valley, her best friend asked if she wanted to help her cousin Tony with his startup. She had no idea what a startup was. They took the Caltrain up to San Francisco and walked into a nondescript office with pizza boxes on the floor and young people in their early twenties who were genuinely excited to be at work.

It was the first time she had ever thought that work could look like that.

That cousin was the late Tony Hsieh, who would go on to build Zappos and sell it to Amazon for $1.1 billion. The experience had a lasting impact on Elizabeth, not because of the eventual outcome, but because of the principle Tony embodied throughout his career: he was not afraid to do things completely differently, even when people thought he was nuts.

Elizabeth didn't go straight into venture from there. She earned a BSEE from Stanford, got an MBA from MIT Sloan, worked at Google, and then in late 2008 decided to leave and start a company. Her timing was, as she puts it, awful. Two weeks after she left Google, Sequoia sent the now-famous "RIP Good Times" memo telling founders to batten down the hatches and that no one was getting funded.

She paused. Read the memo. And went ahead anyway.

What followed was two years of experimentation. Affiliate sites for wedding dresses and nutraceuticals. Random websites. A grinding education in customer acquisition that would shape everything she built afterward. She eventually built an ad tech company called LaunchBit, sold it in 2014, joined 500 Startups as a partner, ran their Mountain View accelerator for several batches, and then realized her life's work wasn't advertising or accelerators. It was backing founders who hustle.

Hustle Fund launched in 2017. Eight years later, it's one of the most recognized names in pre-seed investing.

One of the most striking things about Hustle Fund is that Elizabeth has put a hard cap on the fund: it will never exceed $50 million for their pre-seed fund. Ever. This is deliberate.

She is adamant that once you raise a $200 million fund, the game changes in ways that destroy what got you there. At $50 million and below, you can write $150,000 checks into pre-revenue companies. You can take enormous risk. You can back founders that bigger funds would never touch. The moment you scale up, you need to see more traction, more proof, and you become the very person who says "you're too early" to the founders you set out to serve.

The economics of staying small are brutal. Fewer management fees mean you can't easily hire the support staff you need. Elizabeth solved this by building multiple business lines around Hustle Fund, including Angel Squad, a 2,000-person global angel investing community run by its own general manager. That structure lets Hustle Fund operate with nearly 30 team members despite managing a deliberately small fund. For context, that is more people than some of the most storied firms on Sand Hill Road.

For emerging managers, this is one of the most instructive case studies in the industry. Elizabeth's approach demonstrates that the path to building a sustainable venture firm doesn't require raising an ever-larger fund. It requires getting creative about how you build the business around it.

At the February Venture Underground, Elizabeth will share insights on building emerging manager funds from scratch, navigating the pre-seed landscape when most investors are still uncomfortable investing pre-revenue, what she's learned from backing over 300 startups and reviewing more than 20,000 pitches, and how to redefine being a VC on your own terms.

We'll also talk to her about getting above the noise as a small fund, making industry-defining moves with $25,000 checks, and starting a venture-cult for good.

For all the jokes and hippo merch, Elizabeth Yin is dead serious about her mission: democratizing wealth through entrepreneurship. For everyone.

If you've ever wanted to become a VC but thought, "How could I look myself in the mirror being one of those guys?" — you need to be in this room.

This will be unlike any VC event you've ever attended.

Venture Underground is a monthly in-person event series hosted by Decile Group in San Francisco, bringing together emerging fund managers, LPs, and senior Decile team members for candid conversations about what it really takes to build a venture fund. Venture Underground meets on the second Thursday of each month.