Blog

Here’s everything we know about startups. And investing. And hippocorns.

Pixelated illustration of a laptop with a dark screen displaying abstract purple shapes and a light gray keyboard.

Articles

Aaron Levie built Box into a multi-billion dollar company and has been quietly making smart angel investments along the way. His approach focuses on enterprise infrastructure, bottom-up adoption, and technical depth. Here's what studying Aaron Levie investments can teach early-stage investors about backing companies that actually matter.RetryS
Cyan Banister went from homelessness to becoming one of the most successful angel investors of the decade with early bets on Uber, SpaceX, and Postmates. Her investment approach reveals a crucial insight: the best pattern recognition comes from unconventional perspectives, and backing outsider founders often leads to outsized returns.Retry
Advisory equity can be valuable when structured right, but too often it goes to people who ghost after three months. Here's how to actually think about advisor compensation without giving away your company.
Reid Hoffman didn’t just spot patterns - he authored them. This piece shows how LinkedIn’s network-effects blueprint became his Greylock thesis, powering early conviction in Facebook, Airbnb, and Aurora, and now a broad AI bet. The lesson for angels: hunt for platforms where every new participant compounds value, blitzscale to lock the moat, and think in decade-long arcs.
“How did Ms. Fields meet Hustle Fund?” and more fascinating responses to our newsletter rebrand from "General newsletter" to "Founder Playbook"
Just because you’ve raised money doesn’t mean you’ll have that cash in your bank account right away. Learn how capital calls work so you know what to expect when it’s time to raise.
See how Eric Bahn created an elevator pitch from scratch in 15 seconds. Learn how you can do it too.
The biggest takeaways from our Hustle Fund Re-Brand. “If you cover the logo, all VC websites look the same.” - Eric Bahn
In the latest episode of Uncapped Notes, Eric Bahn and Janel Spilker from Hustle Fund compare their setups, share the price of each item at their desks, and talk about what elements they think are most important for founders to have during investor meetings.
Here are 5 steps you can take to make friends in business (and in life).
Networking isn't about playing golf and exchanging business cards. Networking means simply making friends. Why? Because people do business with people they like and trust.
You worked hard to write the perfect cold email to your top prospect but they didn't respond back. While it’s possible that the person you emailed isn’t interested in your product, the most likely scenario is that working professionals are simply busy. Here's how to follow-up the right way, without being salesy or annoying.
Many tech companies are 2-10x overstaffed. Shiyan Koh, GP and co-founder of Hustle Fund, shares best practices for hiring after you raise and for measuring employees' performances.
Our system for tracking the people in our lives and how we keep in touch with friends, family, colleagues and more.
Kevin Lee and Kevin Chan had quit their jobs to start immi, a healthy instant ramen startup. But the pandemic hit and for over a year, they couldn't ship a single product because of supply-chain issues. This didn't stop them from building an audience from scratch. Learn what they did to build an email list of 35,000 people and an engaged community of thousands of ramen lovers without shipping a single product.
When you work for a startup, things change fast and you can't always anticipate what's coming next. Startups have to make changes to stay afloat if they don't know what their runway is. Don't make that mistake - here's how to calculate your runway.
One of the most popular business advice is to worry less about marketing and simply build a product that will naturally go viral. But after building our own successful business and investing in hundreds more, we realized this is actually bad advice. It's more effective to focus on distribution and marketing just as much as your product. We share what it means to validate your market and why you need to obsess over distribution.