David Frankel
Managing Partner
Second generation pharmacist TJ Parker, and his co-founder Elliot Cohen, had a compelling vision of a robot-powered pharmacy. Disrupting an oligopoly isn’t for the faint of heart and we proudly invested the first capital into PillPack. We've been empathic supporters ever since.
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 only invest at the seed stage and don’t follow-on which means when it comes time to raise the next round we are fully-aligned with the founding team. We provided the initial capital that enabled Dia&Co to expand beyond their first Bushwick warehouse -- then sales exploded.
When it came time to raise more money, We could provide Nadia and Lydia with objective advice and act as a sounding board.
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.
