Elizabeth Yin

@dunkhippo33

Co-founder / GP . SF Bay Area native.

San Francisco Bay Area, CA
Joined May 2008

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  1. Pinned Tweet
    11 Jan 2018

    Personal update: on building a meritocracy in our startup ecosystem - Happy New Year!  I am so excited and...

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  2. 9 hours ago

    Ugh. Tough game.

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  3. 23 hours ago
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  4. 24 hours ago

    Our sweet spot is post product & ~99% our cos are pre-rev or have just a few small sales. Also don't care where you went to school or where you worked. Must have a strong detailed understanding of the problem w a differentiated thesis & offering that we believe in.

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  5. Jan 31

    Wow - Parasite is easily the best film I’ve seen in a long time. It talks about wealth inequality in artistic, real, and gripping ways.

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  6. Jan 30

    12) Sometimes if you have a lot of cash you can play more aggressively and take more risk. If you have less cash, you need to play a longer game to amass cash to then take bigger risk.

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  7. Jan 30

    11) Maybe they will become a unicorn that I missed but even if they do, you can't use "resulting" (read ) to retroactively take a result and say it was a bad decision. Strategically it was the sound decision given our fund size even if the outcome turns out differently.

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  8. Jan 30

    10) It was a great company but not a great match for our small fund. Just wouldn't have been good strategy. This co has since gone on to raise a large seed round from whose who investors & they will likely do well because these funds can pour in tons of $$. Did I make a mistake?

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  9. Jan 30

    9) So there was risk in this failing because they needed lots of capital to make this work - that I couldn't provide and also even if they could raise from others lots of money, I would take huge dilution. So I passed.

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  10. Jan 30

    8) 2 yrs ago, I talked to this Co that I really liked. Super seemingly scrappy founders. But a marketplace where I was really concerned w the unit econ. There just wasn't going to be a high enough take rate to build this biz w little cap.

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  11. Jan 30

    7) one way this can work well for a small fund is to have really close rapport w big funds that you know will just love whatever you are backing. This protects downside risk.

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  12. Jan 30

    6) For ex: as a $10m fund it isn't strategic to invest in ad based startups. Even if those cos go on to do very well, they need a lot of capital to get to monetization that you don't have in your fund! Similarly for other high cap cost cos - HW, e-commerce (inventory costs)

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  13. Jan 30

    5) On the flipside, as a fund, cash is also an impt part of strategy. If you have a $10m fund, there are some cos that are better for *your fund* than others.

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  14. Jan 30

    4) as a vast generalization, it means that usually prev successful entrepreneurs who may have access to more capital than most ppl can shoot for something higher risk and higher return. That's a moat in itself.

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  15. Jan 30

    3) If you can't come up w a good cash strategy (such as in my case), you have to think through what is a stepping stone I can hit w cash I can access that allows me to build this end goal ultimately. It could be a smaller product. It could be to zag to a peripheral prod. Etc.

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  16. Jan 30

    2) if you are you can get access to cash (or use your own) to shoot for the moon (literally). But most first time founders can't raise money to build a new kind of car. It's not to say that shouldn't try but you have to have a cash strategy.

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  17. Jan 30

    1 (cont) He was so right. How much cash you have as a startup to a good extent dictates what you can build right now. And some founders can get more cash than others.

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  18. Jan 30

    1 (cont) "You don't have enough cash to build out the bare bones product to compete head to head w other email service providers out there. And raising $ at this pt in time is going to be a difficult pt. No one wants to fund partially built products"

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  19. Jan 30

    1 (cont): We had built out an email ad platform and I wanted to add to to it - eventually moving into doing the emailing via the platform and being an email service provider w a new take. I was so excited & my friend just asked, "how much cash do you have?"

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  20. Jan 30

    Some thoughts today on how "Your Cash is Your Strategy" Applies to ppl, companies, funds - everyone! 1) I started thinking about this topic yrs ago when I was talking to a fellow founder about my Co

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  21. Jan 29

    Yup - lots of hidden unicorns out there. Most ppl think it has to take a lot of capital to build a unicorn but there are many that are pretty under the radar who have been lean. Big big props to them!

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