Fundraising in Silicon Valley and San Francisco in 2020

I’m reposting a set of tweets by Elizabeth Yin, Co-founder and General Partner of hustlefundvc, a native of San Francisco. Hustle Fund invests in hilariously (their own words and not mine) early startups. I don’t know Elizabeth, but I love her analysis so much hence sharing it here.

I must confess, I had to look up the meaning of bifurcation (the division of something into two branches or parts). There’s even a theory. According to Wikipedia:

“Bifurcation theory is the mathematical study of changes in the qualitative or topological structure of a given family, such as the integral curves of a family of vector fields, and the solutions of a family of differential equations”

The original tweet is here.

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Some trends in VC right now – it’s an interesting time of bifurcation and money:

1) At the early stages (call it pre-A or the whole “seed range”), I’m seeing lots of bifurcation. On one hand, in the Silicon Valley, for some founders, it’s never been an easier time to raise.

— Elizabeth Yin (@dunkhippo33) January 24, 2020

A bit about Elizabeth from her own blog

Elizabeth Yin is a co-founder and General Partner at Hustle Fund, a pre-seed fund for software entrepreneurs. Previously, Elizabeth was a partner at 500 Startups where she invested in seed stage companies and ran the Mountain View accelerator. In a prior life, Elizabeth co-founded and ran an adtech company called LaunchBit (acq 2014). Elizabeth has a BSEE from Stanford and an MBA from MIT Sloan.

Elizabeth has reviewed over 20k startup pitches from around the world in the last few years and has helped numerous portfolio founders raise hundreds of millions of dollars. Her work and writing on startup fundraising has been featured in numerous publications including TechCrunch, Forbes, Huffington Post, BetaKit, and more.