Hustle Fund

Karin’s Path: From Eco-Conscious eCom to Angel Squad

Karin kicked off her operating career at Sotheby’s, cutting her teeth in the auction space

And she hasn’t departed from the resale sphere since

She followed that up with business school at Yale, where she was bit by the tech bug and decided to work for a startup — joining The RealReal during its early stages In her four years there, she fell in love with how tech scaled the role of resale in the legacy clothing industry

At the start of 2021, Karin would wind up leaving The RealReal to join Recurate, which builds tech enabling brands to fully own their secondary resales

Angel Investing to Uplift Underrepresented Founders

The RealReal was founded by one woman and scaled with a 70% woman-led team

Karin was there when the brand went public, and she’ll never forget walking through the halls of the NASDAQ with her coworkers

With walls of photos of companies going public behind the podium, essentially all of them showed white men It was such a contrast to The RealReal’s story

Right then and there, Karin resolved to foster the growth of women-led businesses

In mid-2021, she made her first angel investment

One of her friends posted a viral tweet about Karin’s work, and the New York Times wound up picking up her story for a piece on accessible angel investing

Other angels featured in the article included members of the Hustle Fund team, which spurred Karin to learn more — and ultimately sign up for Angel Squad

How Angel Squad Saves Time and Accelerates Equity

For Karin, Angel Squad is a huge step up from traditional VC in two areas: time saved and equity

• Time saved — Generating deal flow the traditional way (AKA building extensive networks) is basically a full-time job in itself
• And Karin wasn’t interested in abandoning her meaningful work at Recurate
• Simple equity — Since VC overwhelmingly revolves around personal networks, equity issues abound
• Karin realized investing in her own circles wouldn’t move the needle for women founders or Black founders, so she looked to Angel Squad for an existing, intentionally accessible network

As a salesperson, Karin knows creating a pipeline takes a lot of work

She sees Angel Squad as the best way to jump in and invest her capital in companies and underestimated founders she believes in

Joining Hustle Fund’s three-month program has saved her hours each week and years throughout a career of building a network to enable strong deal flow

The Impact of Hustle Fund’s Value-Driven Investing Ethos

Since joining Angel Squad, Karin has exclusively invested in women-led companies

One way the Hustle Fund community facilitates that is through our growth arm

Through that branch, Karin invested in Ellevest, a women’s financial wellness and investment company, which she’d followed for years but never would’ve had the opportunity to invest in without Angel Fund

She admits that path simply wouldn’t have been open to her if she was operating alone — and she likely wouldn’t have found out about the investment opportunity in the first place

Karin wound up contributing a small check to their Series B round

Before signing up for Angel Squad, she’d hoped our ecosystem could help her invest in pre-seed founders, get better deal flow, and understand the all-around investment process a bit better

It did that and more, enabling her to invest in a company whose leadership and product she deeply believes in

Learn, network, support founders and invest alongside Hustle Fund.