Paige Finn DohertyFounding Partner, Behind Genius · Founding Partner at Behind Genius Ventures

Key advice GP at Hustle Fund Elizabeth Yin has learned in over 700 LP meetings

4 Oct 2022 · 1 min

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Elizabeth Yin and her co-founder Eric held over 700 investor meetings to raise Hustle Fund's first $11.5 million fund, iterating their pitch roughly 20 times. One LP only committed after Eric followed up 13 times. The lesson: fundraising is a numbers game where persistence and tracking every lead matters more than assuming silence means no.

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Can you share some of your favorite fundraising stories from earlier in your journey? Fundraising is really a numbers game. For Fund 1, which was an $11.5 million fund, Eric and I did over 700 meetings. Yeah. And when you think about it, that's not a very efficient hit ratio, but I think you have to meet with a lot of people to, number one, get your story right. We did 20 iterations on our story. Number two, you don't really know like who is interested. Just because somebody's rich, it doesn't mean they're interested in investing. Yeah. The key learnings there are follow every lead just to even see where it goes. You can drop it quickly. Don't try to convince people, but follow everything. Follow up. Like we have an LP in, in Fund 1 whom Eric followed up with 13 times. There was no answer, but on the 13th time he was like, I'm in. So, you know, it just because you haven't heard back from somebody, it doesn't mean they're not interested. People are busy.