Caterina Fake, Founder Partner

"You pick a big, ambitious problem, and look for great people to solve it," Caterina Fake explains. "It's all about the people, frankly."

This has been Fake's experience as both an entrepreneur and an
investor. Having long been interested in social networking--in Web 2.0 before anyone called it that--Fake co-founded Flickr, which remains the dominant photo-sharing Website. After a stint at Yahoo, which acquired Flickr, she teamed up with Founder Collective partner Chris Dixon to co-found Hunch, which is building a crowd-sourced 'taste graph' for search. Her various start-up experiences have made her a big believer in co-founders: "No man is an island.  Even Steve Jobs had Woz; Bill Gates had Paul Allen."

On the other end of things, she has been an early investor in several exciting projects, like Etsy. "I met them when they were four guys in a cat-fur-covered walkup," Fake recalls of Etsy's founders. "But it was very clear that they were going to succeed. They picked a good problem, they picked a good market, they were ambitious and
hard-working, and bull-headed. They weren't going to fail!" If Fake calls you bull-headed, take it as a compliment. Partly, Fake wants to back young entrepreneurs because she knows how important such support can be: "A lot of people helped me on the way up," she explains. "I can't return the favor. Rather, I subscribe to the pay-it-forward model."

Founder Collective's specific mission--experienced entrepreneurs investing seed money in in the Northeast U.S.--is, to hear Fake tell it, above all driven by wise business sense. "Right now there's a lacuna of seed funding in New York City. On top of that, a lot of the funders that do exist are only investors, not experienced entrepreneurs." Founder Collective? "We're people who stayed up late nights, slept on friends' couches, were humiliated by VCs, created something out of very little." She believes that Founder Collective is the right team, attacking an interesting problem. Which can only mean that the smart solution is what comes next.