In this talk, Elizabeth Yin shares three personal stories that illustrate her career philosophy: prioritize jumping into fascinating adventures and working with amazing people rather than searching for a single passion. The first story recounts how a high‑school experience observing a friend’s cousin’s startup sparked her desire to build things with close friends, eventually leading her and her friend Jennifer to co‑found LaunchBit, which they later sold. The second story describes an unexpected adventure when she won a contest that sent her to a job fair in Boston, landed a job in Tokyo, was reassigned to marketing due to language barriers, and ultimately used the experience to gain admission to business school, highlighting how failures and successes intertwine. The third story explains how, after selling LaunchBit, she returned to 500 Startups, observed systemic bias favoring founders with certain pedigrees, and co‑founded a venture fund (Hustle Fund) with Eric Bahn to push toward a more meritocratic early‑stage investing ecosystem. Throughout, she emphasizes that her career moves were fuzzy and unplanned, but each was guided by the twin levers of adventure and collaboration, leading to personal growth and value creation.
Chapters
Hi everyone, how are you doing? Good. My name is Elizabeth Yin, and I've been a startup founder, and now I'm a startup investor. And because of this, a lot of people often ask me, "Well, how did you know that you were passionate about startups or startup investing?" And the truth is, I didn't, or I don't. You know, everybody is trying to find their passion these days, but Fuck passion, you know. I think you can go your whole life and search for what you're passionate about and just never find it. So tonight— has this happened to anybody? So tonight, I'm going to tell you about the guiding light that I use for my own career, and it's really simple. It's this: I like to jump into fascinating adventures. Or work with amazing people. That's it. Or ideally both. So I'm going to share with you 3 stories. The first is how I actually decided to start my company LaunchBit, and that was entirely about working with amazing people. And in fact, actually, it started a long time ago, back in high school. So in 9th grade, my best friend Jennifer, one day she came to me and she said, Hey, my cousin Tony is starting a company. Do you want to help him out during winter break? I had no idea what a startup was, but I didn't have anything going on during winter break, and the opportunity to work with Jennifer and her cousin and all these other people seemed really cool. So we came up to San Francisco, went to his office, and it was a really amazing experience. We did not help with anything. We were useless. But just observing everything was amazing. Here was her cousin Tony, he was working with his friends and they were building things and they could eat all the pizza in the world. It was the dream. So on that day I decided that that was what I wanted to do when I grew up. I wanted to build things with with my closest friends. And actually, Jennifer and I made a pact in high school that we would start a company together someday. Now on that day, I was really naive. I had no idea how startups make money or any of that. In fact, actually, it wasn't until 2 years later that I realized what would happen next when her cousin Tony actually sold that company to Microsoft for what was reported a couple hundred million dollars. And then later, he went to bet on another company, another startup, which he now runs today, a small little shoe company you may know called Zappos. So, I did not know though on that day that that, you know, that is one way to make money. All I knew was I just wanted to work with my friends. So, years later in 2010, Jennifer and I teamed up and we started LaunchBit. And over the next few years, we grew it, we eventually sold it to a larger company on the East Coast. And really what drove me to do that startup, it was all about working with amazing people. The second story that I want to share is about having an adventure. So my senior year of college, I got in my head that I wanted to go to business school. And the fall of that year, I was applying to business schools as a senior in college, and I really wanted to visit a couple of the schools that I was applying to that were in Boston. But I was here on the West Coast. I didn't want to pay for my plane ticket to go to Boston, so I decided that somebody else would pay for this ticket for me. Fortunately, there was actually a competition of some sort where the prize was a free trip to Boston. Just coincidentally, it was just right there around that time. And I entered the contest and I won. And so I got my free trip to Boston. And this competition was sponsored by a job fair. It turns out that that job fair was the largest job fair for jobs in Japan. I don't know why they hold it in Boston every year. But they do. And in order to get my reimbursement for the plane ticket, I had to go to the job fair. As it would turn out, I did not get into any business school that year, but I ended up getting a job on the spot at the job fair. So I was kind of conflicted about what to do, but it sounded really amazing to be able to work in Tokyo. This was not something I had planned. And so I took the job. The next fall, I moved to Tokyo, and a month into the job, my boss pulled me aside and he said, "Elizabeth, this really is not working out. Your Japanese is not good enough for this job." And I was just like, "Oh my God, am I getting fired from my first job here?" And fortunately, they were really nice about it. They said, "OK, you can't stay in this job, but we're going to move you into the marketing department where you will not have to talk with customers." So that's how I ended up getting into marketing. And— but they said that actually they didn't have enough budget for me to stick around for very long, so I ended up trying to figure out what I wanted to do next around that time. And since it was the fall again, I decided to reapply to business school. This time I only had enough time to apply to one school, and I actually really didn't have time to rewrite any essays, so I sent in the same ones. Unfortunately, the questions were the same. And I sent in the same letters of recommendation, and I didn't have time to take the test again, so I sent in everything pretty much the same. And this time I got in. So my takeaway from that is I couldn't get into business school, so I got this job, and I couldn't keep the job, so I got into business school. And the overall lesson that I learned though is that you just never really know how failure and success will be coupled together. You just— when you do one of these adventures and you jump in, you can't really see the end result, but somehow everything will just sort of all work itself out, and you should just go for it anyway, even if you don't think you're qualified enough to speak enough Japanese for a job or whatnot. The last story that I have to share is about how I got into startup investing. So I actually had never ever thought about becoming either a venture capitalist nor had thought about getting into startup investing. And the short story is, after Jennifer and I sold LaunchBit, eventually I made my way back to 500 Startups, which is where LaunchBit had been incubated a few years before. And I went there because, again, I either really like working with amazing people or jumping into adventures. And there were a number of amazing people whom I wanted to work with there. And what I noticed in the process of getting into investing, I had the opportunity to work with hundreds of teams that went through our accelerator program. And so I saw a lot of teams and how they executed. And I'm sure many of you already know this somewhat intuitively, but having actually seen a lot of the data, What really floored me was this: founders who fit a certain profile, like their pedigree or the way they look or the way they talk, if they check all the boxes, it's really easy for them to raise money. But if they don't, and even if these founders execute really well, it is very difficult for them to raise money. Now this may sound somewhat obvious or intuitive to many of you if you are a startup founder and you've shared this sort of experience, but I've actually seen it firsthand with hundreds of startups. And so along the way, about a year ago, my friend Eric Bahn and I started batting around this idea of, can we change this? Can we bring about a meritocracy to at least early-stage startup investing, or at least work in that direction? And so we decided that the best way to try to tackle this problem is to start a new VC fund. We had no intention ever of becoming venture capitalists, but this is the vehicle for doing so. And this is where I am today in my career journey. Um, this is yet another adventure that I am jumping into, one that is very meaningful to me. And also, fortunately, I also have the opportunity to work with amazing people such as Eric, such as many of our collaborators, and founders and investors. And I don't know where it will lead, but it is going to be another amazing journey. Now, if I look at my own resume and I see, okay, I was at a tech company and then I became a startup founder and then now an investor, it almost seems like, oh, that was very intentional. But in actuality, at each of these steps, it was very fuzzy the whole way through. I never knew what was gonna happen at the end of each journey. Journey. But that's okay, because even though that was fuzzy, one thing that was very clear to me at each point in time was that I knew that by jumping into either an adventure or working with amazing founders, I would learn a lot and I would grow a lot. And so I encourage all of you, as you look at your own careers, to kind of think about it in this lens. Can you jump into an amazing adventure "Can you work with amazing people?" rather than looking from the perspective of, "Am I passionate about this?" or "Am I going to be able to climb up this ladder?" Because ultimately, by jumping into amazing journeys or working with amazing people, you will find a lot of personal growth, and ultimately, that's what people value in their careers. Thank you.
