Blog

We sat down with Srivats Sivanandan to learn how up-and-coming angels can find their unique investment thesis.

We sat down with Azella Perryman to learn how Angel Squad was crucial to getting her foot in the door.

How one founder's proactiveness of talking to their customers directly correlated with their startup's success.

Maya Caddle shares her best practices around being an operator-investor.

A forwardable blurb is a simple, compelling description of your company that anyone can pass along to a potential investor in seconds.An effective blurb has the potential to unblock millions of funding for startup founders. It's one of the most important fundraising assets a founder can have.Eric Bahn (co-founder of Hustle Fund) uses forwardable blurbs nearly a dozen times a day. It’s a big reason why Hustle Fund recently raised $46.1 million for our 3rd round.

98% of first-time website visitors won't buy anything the first time they visit a website. So you need them to come back, again, and again, and again. To do that you need to collect their contact information. Here are two tests to try out to optimize conversions on your landing page.

How do you communicate blunt feedback to your founder in a helpful and respectful way?

We sat down with Adam to hear his two reasons why Angel Squad has been an unparalleled investing experience: unrivaled access and community.

We sat down with Adam to dive deep on how being a founder-investor drives success for him on both sides of the table.

For the final piece of this three-part series, we sat down with Adam to cover two of his biggest mistakes as an angel investor and ways to tactically avoid them.

We sat down with Judy Abad to learn how Angel Squad elevated her investing playbook.

We sat down with Judy Abad to dive into her unique insights as an operator-investor.

One of your portfolio companies wants to raise their Series A. But you don't think they are ready. What should you say?

The founders of a startup sent their data room to my colleague Kera as part of the due diligence process. Kera is new to investing, so she had no idea what to expect, and procrastinated looking into it. It wasn't until she talked to Elizabeth Yin (co-founder of Hustle Fund) to learn what a data room actually was and how the data itself wasn't even the most important piece. Read on to discover what Elizabeth looks at when she views data rooms.

Asking about your portco’s runway is important… but probably not for the reasons you think.

Landon Campbell, founder of the InTheir20s podcast and angel investor shares how he turned a career focused on creating podcasts and hosting events into one in investing.

Landon Campbell, founder of the InTheir20s podcast and angel investor shares how angel investing has helped him create a personal MBA (and how you can too!)

Landon Campbell, founder of InTheir20s podcast and emerging investor shares why angel investors need to clearly communicate their value add to win deals.

Our advice for pitching VCs involves not meeting in person, opening a slide deck, or presenting for 20 minutes. Here are our unconventional tips for an extraordinary first pitch to a VC.

Tim Chen, founder of NerdWallet, spoke at Camp Hustle about how he bootstrapped his company for years, what he learned once he started raising money, and how today's founders can model his experience. Here are our three biggest takeaways.

When a founder is fundraising, sometimes they have to deal with unhappy surprises. For example, they might spend months fundraising… only to find out that their lead investor has suddenly backed out of the deal. Should you panic? What would you do? Here's how we would evaluate if you should stay in or not.

It used to be a big deal if a founder's lead investor was a firm like Sequoia. But the world has changed. Entrepreneurs have options to raise money from many sources, on their own terms, without needing a big-name investor. Here's how everything changed.

Most VCs only spend only a minute reviewing your entire slide deck. Yep, the slide deck that you spent hours building and revising is skimmed for 60 seconds or less. Here's how to write your pitch deck for maximum impact starting with the most important element: slide titles.

Charles Hudson of Precursor VC revealed at Camp Hustle that 70% of his nearly 300 portfolio companies are women-led (compared to the 17% average). What is he doing right? How can we as investors and people do better?

Robin grew a cafe from 0 to 15 employees in just 2.5 years. He sold his business on Craigslist for a hefty profit but realized afterward that he had made a huge mistake: not telling the brand's full story before the sale.

Until recently, market conditions have favored founders. This was especially clear during a fundraise. VCs were willing to compromise on a bunch of things in order to get allocation into a compelling startup. But now that we're entering a bear market, conditions for founders are changing.

Why do we look for patterns when it's the outliers that win? Tara Viswanathan, founder of Rupa Health, decided to break the typical patterns and do unexpected things that have led to finding huge success. After being constantly rejected by investors, Tara shares what the unconventional ways she grew the business from zero to serving over 50,000 practitioners across all 50 states.

Market pull is a measure of how quickly customers adopt a product. There are three things investors can look for to see if a company has strong market pull.

Joining an amazing early-stage startup at the right time can set employees up for true financial freedom. But instead of going through traditional job boards, operators who want to join an early-stage startup with massive equity opportunities should start in one unlikely place: angel investing.

I had an early flight out of Mexico this weekend. I get to the airport in Léon and face one problem: they only had one coffee shop. The line was packed and when I finally got to the front, everything went wrong: the credit card machine was broken, they didn't have oat milk, and I had to wait 10 minutes to get my beverage. But if I wanted coffee, this was my only option. And this is a perfect metaphor for today's topic: greenfield.

Cold emails are a powerful sales tool when done correctly. We distilled our experiences into four best practices. Read on for our analysis of a bad email along with several examples of great emails for you to emulate.

When you invest in a company, you are hoping for a return on your investment. So, how do we get to an exit? Is there anything we can do to move it along quicker? Or increase our payout? There's a short answer and a long answer. We share our take along with actionable steps you can take to increase your odds of success as an investor.

Every great fund has an investment theory. At Hustle Fund we invest in early-stage tech companies with low-overhead and founders who hustle... generally in North America and Southeast Asia. We speak with Jess Lee (formerly Polyvore and currently Sequoia Capital) about her compelling investment thesis and how she arrived there.

Getting rejected sucks. But whether it's in dating or in the fundraising world, there is a right way to do it and a really awful way to do it. Today's topic: how to reject a founder without burning bridges or ruining your reputation.

The best advice I received as a new angel investor: "Be selective. Look at a lot of different companies, and aim to invest in only about 10 of them a year." But how do I look at a lot of different companies?" We're diving into the exciting topic of how to nurture dealflow.

How do you know if a team is the right one to address a specific problem? Should you look at where they went to school? What if they are a wild card with no domain experience? We share how we think about evaluating teams at Hustle Fund.

How can you add value to your portfolio companies as an investor? We cover what NOT to do as well as the best ways to be a value-add investor.

Pro-rata rights give an investor the option to maintain their ownership percentage when a company raises later round of capital. But why do they matter, and when might you exercise them?

An investment thesis is a strategy for making money. It typically communicates what investors invest in (or don't) and why, and their beliefs about what makes startups successful broadly or by stage and/or sector.