Every investor has a secret sauce.

A lens through which they view each startups and decide where to place their bets. This is their ✨ investment thesis ✨ – a hypothesis about what makes a startup likely to succeed.

Hearing other investors’ theses is a great way to develop your own. That’s why I jumped at the chance to learn about Elizabeth Yin’s, Jess Lee’s (Sequoia), and Sandy Naidu’s (Marathon Fund).

Today we dive into the investment thesis of Eric Bahn, co-founder and GP at Hustle Fund.

And let me tell you, it's a bit different than the other theses we’ve covered in Small Bets so far.

Hustle: more than just an ankle tattoo

When you hear "hustle," you might think of Gary Vaynerchuk-style grind culture or late-night coding sessions fueled by ramen and RedBull.

For Eric Bahn, it means something more specific. Eric defines hustle as: great execution meets high velocity.

Here’s what it boils down to:

1. Exceptional productivity
2. Rapid learning
3. Relentless focus on metrics

This trifecta forms the cornerstone of Eric's investment thesis. And it's why we named our fund "Hustle Fund" in the first place.

Let's break down these elements a bit further:

1. Exceptional productivity: In the early stages of a startup, resources are scarce. The ability to do more with less is a massive differentiator.
2. Rapid learning: The hypotheses that founders have in the early days are often wrong. Teams that can quickly absorb new information and adapt their strategy are more likely to stay in business.
3. Relentless focus on metrics: Eric believes that great founders identify the most impactful metrics, and then get laser-focused on meeting those milestones. They experiment rapidly and measure everything.

Eric’s origin story

Every investor’s thesis can be traced back to some kind of origin story. For Jess Lee, it was her experience building Polyvore. For Elizabeth Yin, it was getting customers for her business, LaunchBit.

For Eric, it all started when he went to work at Facebook.

Eric worked alongside engineering and product teams that were absolutely crushing it. They wrote code 10x faster than other teams. They shipped features 10x faster than other teams. And they learned 10x more than other teams.

These super producers weren't all Ivy League grads with PhDs. In fact, some of these teammates had only a high school education. Yet they were outperforming teams with elite credentials.

This was a lightbulb moment for Eric. It shattered the conventional wisdom about what makes a high-performing team and shaped his approach to investing, both as an angel and a VC.

Measuring hustle in the wild

Measuring hustle is a lot less cut-and-dry than measuring sales revenue or customer satisfaction.

And a pitch deck can only tell you so much about a founding team's true capabilities.

This is where Eric's approach gets interesting.

Instead of relying solely on traditional pitch meetings, Eric looks for founders who:

1. Build in public: Sharing progress, failures, and learnings openly.
2. Offer transparency: Providing honest, detailed investor updates.
3. Prioritize experimentation and measurement: Constantly testing hypotheses and staying laser focused key metrics… even if those key metrics change over time.

The thesis is thesising

Eric’s focus on hustle has led to some incredible investment decisions.

Like Webflow, which hit a $4B valuation in 2022, and Rupa Health, which was acquired in 2024.

Eric invested in Webflow in the earliest of early days. He knew the founders had hustle because of the way they thought about customer acquisition.

See, the Webflow founders needed to pick a specific persona to go after to adopt the product. The decided to focus on independent web designers.

With that decision made, team got laser focused building an email list of 100s of thousands of designers. The team warmed this target population with their newsletters, and then converted those users into customers.

See? Hustle.

Rupa Health was founded by Tara Viswanathan – one of the most measurement-oriented founders Eric had ever seen.

Tara’s understanding of the business was so meticulous, she wasn’t just measuring revenue and burn – but also nuances of what caused clients to churn; how to identify and activate super excited clients into advocates to bring in more clients; and spotting issues with orders early to indicate whether a client was having a rough time with the platform.

Again… hustle.

Starting a thesis collection – care to join me?

Every investor has their own investment thesis, even within the same fund.

At Hustle Fund, Elizabeth Yin emphasizes customer acquisition, Eric Bahn prioritizes hustle, and Shiyan Koh and Haley Bryant… well, you’ll just have to stay tuned for theirs.

If you're curious to learn about other people’s investment theses, or talk more with Eric about his, join us at Camp Hustle.

It’ll help you refine your own thesis, and expand your dealflow so you can find even more founders who embody hustle.