It’s hard to believe that we’ve been in the pandemic for almost 1.5 years now! But the silver lining of a pandemic is it really forces you to question what is important. One of the thoughts I keep coming back to is around mission and purpose, which I wrote about last year at the start of the pandemic. AKA, what are you doing with your life and why?
When we started Hustle Fund a few years ago, setting out to make a boatload of money was not the (sole) purpose of the organization. Prior to Hustle Fund, I could have worked at a number of top VC funds that could have set me on a clear lucrative path. But I wanted to do something bigger and more impactful — something that would also help a lot of entrepreneurs. In mapping out Hustle Fund almost four years ago, we decided that core tenets to our mission at Hustle Fund was to further capital, knowledge, and networks in startup ecosystems.
Recently, we had a chance to reflect on how we’re doing against these tenets at our Hustle Fund team offsite.
At Hustle Fund, we believe that great founders look like anyone and come from anywhere. In the last four years of Hustle Fund, we’ve built scalable processes to fund nearly 300 pre-seed companies globally! Even pre-pandemic, we made almost all of our funding decisions online through video conference calls. We’ve invested in approximately 50 companies off of cold-application forms.
We’ve also spun up Angel Squad led by Brian Nichols, which in its first year alone has deployed ~$10m into startups of all sizes! Both our pre-seed VC fund and Angel Squad are on their respective ways and continue to build momentum everyday.
And beyond Hustle Fund, a lot of our peer VC funds now do the same. While it’s never easy to raise money, entrepreneurs who are not well-connected can now raise at least some capital remotely from connections built entirely online. And it doesn’t have to be from VCs. In the last few years, we’ve seen the rise of crowdfunding, roll-up vehicles, angel-operator syndicates, debt and revenue-based financing options. Startup capital is what made Silicon Valley special for so many decades, but these days, the capital markets for startups has largely opened up and continues to move towards a free-market dynamic — which makes capital more accessible.
But, Silicon Valley is still a special place for knowledge and networks. Successful entrepreneurs here have long shared advice to the next generation of new entrepreneurs behind closed doors. Tactical advice on things like customer acquisition, hiring, fundraising, testing quickly, building teams and keeping morale up have been passed on from one founder to the next.
At our offsite, we realized there’s a lot of work to be done in opening up knowledge and networks. In this next chapter of Hustle Fund, just as we’ve pushed hard (in a small way) to open startup capital markets, we are going to start pushing to make startup knowledge and networks accessible globally. Unlocking the secrets of startup tactics and inspiring stories is the beginning of what you’ll see from us.
To kick this off and give you a taste, my business partner Eric Bahn will be doing a fireside chat with Vlad Magdalin, CEO/founder of Webflow. In this fireside chat, the two will share stories of what happened in the very beginning, before Webflow became a unicorn.
If you read the funding stories of Webflow, on the surface, it looks like it was a walk in the park. But the Webflow story could not have been further from that.
Vlad exemplifies what the American Dream looks like at its best. As a refugee to the United States from the USSR, he cleaned offices at night with his family to make ends meet while growing up. He also started Webflow in 2005 but had to stop many times along the way to take jobs to earn a living. Eric and Vlad will talk about those tough early days of the company in a way that most startup stories are not portrayed.
This event is free to all and will be next Tuesday evening PT – I highly encourage you to attend and stay tuned for much more!