Founder Collective is a seed-stage venture capital fund, built by a collection of successful entrepreneurs, providing the first professional round of capital to promising entrepreneurs with compelling business concepts. Founder Collective is focused on helping the next generation of great entrepreneurs build important and lasting businesses. Founder Collective focuses on technology-driven companies across a broad range of industries.
Everyone at Founder Collective has started a technology company.
They love building stuff. They aren’t investors who sit in an ivory tower analyzing spreadsheets. They have lived through the emotional roller coaster of leading startups so they have huge respect and empathy for their founding teams.
They think of it as peer-to-peer investing.
Most large venture funds are not structured in a way that is well aligned to founders at the beginning. At Founder Collective, they live and die by their seed investments. They invest in your company because they think you’re going to build something important. They don't invest to buy themselves optionality for a later round. As seed investors, they are conviction driven and avoid protracted decision-making and unnecessary diligence.
They dilute alongside their founders over time. So they have the same incentives as their founders to increase the value of the company in future financings.
Starting a company is tough. And lonely.
They have been there.
That’s why they go to such great lengths to make sure founders and CEOs in their portfolio can interact and learn from each other, both online and offline.
With over a hundred companies and hundreds of exceptional founders, the thing they love the most is the founder “collective” community: a willingness of their founders to help each other. Think of it as having the collective support of some of the best founders in the startup world.
In essence, they are trying hard to create the fund that they wish existed when they each built their first startup.