David Frankel
General Partner
The partners at Founder Collective have all built and sold technology companies. Our goal is to make Founder Collective the firm we wish had existed when we were starting out. Venture capital is a dangerous commodity – we provide an instruction manual.
We believe entrepreneurs should try to raise as little money as possible to accelerate their businesses, while preserving ownership. Startups don’t have to raise billions to be worth billions—a point proven by The Trade Desk which raised just $22.5M in VC before earning a billion dollar IPO.
Founder Collective is deliberately anti-thematic. We don’t have a thesis, but when Embark showed us the future of doggy DNA, we couldn’t resist. Visionary founders have shown us that the weird use cases of today can become the hot themes of tomorrow.
We invest for the seed-stage which means when it comes time to raising the next round we are fully-aligned with the founding team. We have structured the firm to be as aligned with the entrepreneur's financial interests as possible – at our short-term expense. We’re founders first, financiers second.
Our mission is to be the most aligned fund for founders at the seed stage. Everyone on the investment team has started a company and understand the ups and downs of entrepreneurship.
