Founder Collective
Eric Paley is a General Partner at Founder Collective, one of the great seed-stage venture capital brands – and one of the relatively few venture firms led by startup founders. As the name suggests, Founder Collective is a “founder stage” venture capital fund that focuses on providing the first professional round of capital to “entrepreneurs with compelling business concepts”. Eric himself also founded several companies before becoming a VC. Founder Collective’s investments include: Coupang, Cruise, Kaggle, Pill Pak, The Trade Desk, Uber and Venmo.
In this episode we discuss the importance of Founder-led VC firms, and the evolution of seed VC firms – which barely existed when he started, and now number in the hundreds.
We also discuss:
- Why the unique name “Collective”
- Fuzzy VC math
- VC ‘revisionist history”
- What’s next for Founder Collective