Founder Collective Voice

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Moving Beyond Crowdfunding

I’ve been very fortunate to be involved as an investor in numerous companies that truly do well by doing good. When I first met the founders of GiveForward, I was inspired by the magnitude by which this company was making a social impact, raising millions of dollars for people in need. Today in America, 1 in 3 bankruptcies come as a result of medical expenses.  Imagine at a time that a person is most in need of love and support to fight a life threatening medical condition, they are also on the verge of financial ruin. This is all too common in our country and GiveForward was created to help. On this premise, I was delighted to lead GiveForward’s seed financing in 2012.

Yesterday, GiveForward announced a major evolution in their service and made a surprising admission—crowdfunding isn’t enough.

People come to GiveForward when times are tough and rely on the service to help them raise the money they need for surgical bills, IVF treatments, adoption expenses, pet emergencies, and the costs of living during a crisis. And it’s been successful having raised over $170 million dollars for people in need since coming out of Techstars in 2010.

But over the years, the team at GiveForward realized that fundraising is only a part of what’s needed. During times of extreme stress people don’t just need money, they need a community that’s acting on their behalf and a central rallying point to get things done. Caregivers have been hacking together solutions with spreadsheets, phone calls, and Facebook Groups, but GiveForward felt strongly that hacking something together during a crisis shouldn’t be necessary and set out to build a single cohesive product.

Crowdfunding has been largely transactional business. It’s not uncommon to donate money to a friend in need and then never return to the site. It’s likely that most people don’t even pay attention to which site they’re on when they donate. With its new product, GiveForward gives supporters a reason to go beyond a transaction and show support in various way to those they care about over time.

By providing a centralized service—a sort of mission control—GiveForward has empowered those in need and their closest supporters to build engaged communities that can help with everything, from coordinating meal delivery, sharing information with far-flung friends and family, purchasing necessary items on wish lists, and of course, contributing money to a fundraisers.

This new model helps people through the entirety of these major life events and opens up the door for incredible partnerships and additional revenue streams. For GiveForward, it means more monthly active users and more frequent transactions. For their users, it’s a lifeline during trying times.

It’s an exciting time for GiveForward and I’m more thrilled than ever to be a part of this. On a personal note, I’ve seen firsthand the very real impact they make. A close friend of my brother, Oren Miller, was diagnosed with Stage 3 cancer. Oren was a well known dad blogger and penned a very moving piece about his diagnosis and his hopes for after his death. Oren’s friends and family rallied to raise over $40,000 on GiveForward. The money was helpful, but the outpouring of love and support was incredibly meaningful to Oren. With the new GiveForward, this outpouring will be so much more powerful for those who need support like Oren did. The new GiveForward is poised to improve the lives of so many more people.

GiveForward has a big vision: to be the first place people turn to when someone they love is in need. The entire culture of the company is built around this vision. The whole team rallies around it. What’s more, the decision to embark on this new path has helped GiveForward attract key new executives, like new CEO Josh Chapman, and transformative partnerships, like our new integration with Fortune 100 insurance leader Nationwide.

GiveForward combines the humanity of the best charities with the kind of connection and coordination that can only be achieved by a tech-enabled business. Doing well by doing good is hard, but I have confidence they’re on the path that will thoughtfully combine social purpose and startup scale.

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Announcing our Investment in Transfix

Historically, there’s not been a lot of overlap between the worlds of long haul trucking and high technology, but our latest investment called Transfix is shifting the field into a new gear.

For all of the improvements in logistics over the past few decades, truck drivers are stuck in the 1970s. For example, when a driver delivers a load of corn from Indianapolis to New York and wants to return home they pull into a truck stop off the Jersey Turnpike and look at a “load board.” These are often old school cork boards, filled with local cargo hauling opportunities posted by freight companies. Drivers have to call each company that’s posted a  to see if the job is still available. If they’re lucky, they’ll find a web forum with a listing for a job. If not, they drive home empty, wasting gas and losing out on revenue.

Enter Transfix, a startup that aims to bring Uber like efficiency to the world of Interstate trucking. Transfix solves this problem with an app that matches supply and demand in real time through a mobile app. Transfix solves a real problem and has already attracted paying customers.

Retailers like Barnes & Noble use Transfix to track packages en route from one warehouse to another. The tracking numbers that we take for granted in B2C shipping are largely missing from B2B transactions and most retailers are left in the dark as their products move across the country on trucks. Transfix provides complete transparency and accountability.

Drivers benefit from having a steady stream of work just a tap away. Smartphones have become ubiquitous companions to drivers who use them to stay entertained on long drives, now they can use them to grow their businesses.

This also helps consumers. More efficient trucking means fewer wasted trips and the resulting carbon emissions. More efficient trips and less loss due to theft means lower prices for shoppers. From a safety perspective, Transfix matches trucks with proper loads so a driver doesn’t take on a bigger gig than their rig is rated for which can lead to accidents.

Transfix is a compelling product in a market desperately in need of innovation, but even more importantly, it is being led by founders uniquely suited to the challenge. CEO Drew McElroy grew up in a trucking family and helped grow his parent’s logistics business into a multi-million dollar brokerage. CTO Jonathan Salama helped Gilt Groupe unlock another cloistered, if slightly more glamorous market, by delivering a solid marketplace paired with a delightful user experience.

We couldn’t be more excited about joining Drew and Jonathan on what we believe is going to be an interesting and lucrative trip!

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Our Investment in Sense360

By Micah Rosenbloom

Our mobile devices know far more about us than our laptops, perhaps more than our families, but we interact with apps in largely the same way on both types of device. We open the ones we need, occasionally close the ones that we don’t, yet both involve tapping or clicking icons. In 2015, there must be a better way.  

On Android devices, Google Now combines data from the user’s calendar, location, and web to let you know that a flight is delayed before you even check the airline’s website or app. Apple’s introduction of Interactive Notifications in iOS 8 enables users to respond to prompts without leaving an app. But why should Google and Apple have all the power?

There’s a wealth of data and sensor technology sitting in our pockets and yet the average developer doesn’t have the tools or resources to build an app that can deliver a truly personalized experience.

Enter Sense360 which unlocks the power of smartphones by providing an API for app developers to build mind-blowing, personalized user experiences leveraging over a dozen onboard sensors.

The founders of Sense360 are Eli Portnoy and Kamil Mroczek  who previously built ThinkNear, an early entrant into the mobile/local ad technology space which was acquired by Telenav in 2012.

Eli is a thought leader in mobile marketing. When Eli showed me the demo for Sense360, I was blown away with the power of what they built leveraging all of the sensors in the phone.

More importantly, the founders are at least as self-aware and are as focused on their mission as they are on making money.  Over the past five years, Eli and I have talked through a multitude of issues facing ThinkNear, where I was an advisor, and now Sense360. Eli is a high conviction guy who seeks advice, and then charts the course. But in virtually all of our conversations Eli comments something along the lines of “Its important that I do the right thing.”

I couldn’t be more thrilled to welcome Eli and Kamil to the Founder Collective and join them on the journey (again)!

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Coupang: From Daily Deals to Dominating Korean Ecommerce

In just four years, Coupang has become one of the largest ecommerce companies in Asia. Calling it the Amazon of Korea overstates the case, but not by much.  Led by founder/CEO Bom Kim, Coupang has just announced another $300MM dollars in funding with a valuation far north of its previous billion dollar round. We're excited to be one of Bom’s first supporters, are in awe of the business he's built, but are even more thankful for the lessons Coupang has taught us.

Some investment decisions require a prepared mind followed by conscientious diligence. By May 2010, Founder Collective had seen over 20 daily deal pitches and even though Groupon was ascendant, as a group we felt that the space was generally a house of cards.

Despite our skepticism, we were extremely fortunate to be introduced to Bom. His energy, focus, smarts, and unique insight into media and the highly specific Seoul market convinced us that we needed to support him even if we weren’t confident about the deals space. While Coupang started as a site driven by deals, it quickly decided to switch its focus to supercharging ecommerce.

From Daily Deals to Infrastructure Development

Despite challenges from well-funded startups and competitors like Walmart, Coupang used its status as an underdog, it’s intimate knowledge of the local market, and a willingness to go to great lengths to dominate Korean ecommerce.

Pundits debate whether Amazon will ever offer same-day delivery, but Coupang thought it was essential and has endeavored to make it a core part of its offering. Logistics providers in South Korea cannot cost effectively match what we take for granted from FedEx in the US. So Bom has built five major distribution centers, acquired a fleet of trucks, and trained a team of drivers who go so far as to write thank you notes on packages to move customer service to the front lines.

Beyond the business success, we’re thrilled by the glimpse of the future that Coupang may offer related to mobile commerce:

Data + Density = Ecommerce Magic

One of Coupang’s advantages is size. The Seoul metro area is geographically smaller than New York City, but is home to nearly three times as many people. This combination of population density creates opportunities that just don’t make sense yet in the United States.

For example, Amazon set out to to serve the massive American market and as a result focused on selling small, easy-to-ship goods that appealed to a largely male customer base. Only recently, after building out a cross-country network of warehouses, have they made a concerted effort to target women, specifically new moms.

Seoul’s compact size allowed Coupang to offer a wide range of goods from the start—Everything from apparel to electronics to produce. They currently aim to deliver diapers anywhere in Seoul in under two hours. As the United States continues on a path of historic reurbanization, expect to see the dynamics of ecommerce change domestically as well.

This density becomes especially powerful when paired with the world’s fastest internet infrastructure. Bom recently told a group of us that during the last World Cup it was almost impossible to step on a subway where the riders weren’t glued to games streamed in live HD to their mobile phones. South Korea’s appetite for mobile extends to commerce and has become a point of leverage for Coupang. Their app launched just two years ago, but has been downloaded by nearly 20% of the population and is responsible for 70% of Coupang’s $2.2 billion dollars in sales.

Coupang is an example of the amazing achievements that are possible when a company obsessively focuses on making its customers happy. By understanding how his customers wanted to shop and creating the infrastructure necessary to deliver to them, Bom built a massively successful ecommerce company. Now, along with thousands of employees, hundreds of millions of dollars of capital, and a unique perspective, he has an opportunity to build one of the great brands in Asia.

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Removing Friction Across The Web—Our Investment in Experiment Engine

By Eric Paley

Google experimented with 41 different shades of blue for the ad links in its search results and found the exact hue statistically most likely to make people click, #2200CC, which resulted in an extra $200 million dollars in revenue. Amazon is rumored to run over 200 tests like this on their homepage, per day, scrutinizing each word and every button’s placement on the page down to the pixel. A single change in the checkout flow of Amazon is reported to have made the company an additional $300 million dollars a year. Removing friction for customers can add up to huge dollars for web companies. Unfortunately, most companies don’t have the design and engineering bandwidth of Google or Amazon to obsess over and test every detail.

That’s why we’re so excited to announce our investment in Experiment Engine, which offers a turnkey service that allows any company to benefit from the same type of A/B testing processes deployed at Amazon and Google. Experiment Engine utilizes automated tools paired with a community of optimization experts to create fully deployable tests at whatever speed a customer desires, without requiring any internal development or design resources. Whether a company needs help refining their landing page or working out the kinks in a shopping cart, the Experiment Engine platform executes solutions to drive optimized conversion. Their platform is being used by companies with world-class optimization capabilities, but limited bandwidth to run tests, as well as companies with less optimization experience, but the desire to remove customer friction.

In a perfect world all companies could establish processes where this type of experimental optimization would run non-stop without draining internal resources. As each test proved to increase signups or sales, it would seamlessly become the new control version of the page and new tests would begin. The faster tests could be deployed and proven successful, the faster the company would learn and benefit. Experiment Engine enables that vision. In concert with other gold standard tools like Optimizely, we believe startups will use Experiment Engine to massively accelerate their learnings and shorten the cycle time to performance improvements just as Amazon and Google do. Jeff Bezos said “If you double the number of experiments you do per year you’re going to double your inventiveness” and Experiment Engine makes accelerating that inventiveness much less expensive.

Experiment Engine's founders, Claire Vo and EJ Lawless have spent their careers helping companies optimize and as experts in the field of Conversion Rate Optimization, their mission is to make this type of sophisticated experimentation accessible, and scalable, for web companies of all sizes.  

We're honored to invest in Claire and EJ’s experiment to help the web perform better for everyone.

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How Socure and "Social Biometrics" Will Save Online Banking

By Micah Rosenbloom

The stuffy financial world is finally catching up with the internet generation. Lending Club helps consumers and institutions finance debt at low rates. Bond Street, a new marketplace, provides loans to small businesses. Even old school banks are offering new products, like AMEX’s Bluebird and Serve products. Unfortunately, this explosion of online-first financial products has created fertile ground for fraudsters and lead to ballooning costs for banks and merchants as the cost of compliance continues to rise.

Enter Socure and a concept called “social biometrics.” Basically, we all leave digital fingerprints as we browse Buzzfeed, use Uber, interact on social media and shop for tickets on SeatGeek. Socure’s technology uses open internet data to separate real, credit-worthy humans from identity thieves and ‘bots trying to game the system, all while preserving a user’s privacy.

This is particularly important for the millennial generation who may have thin credit histories, but demonstrate an endless appetite for web-friendly tools to manage a diverse portfolio of financial products—school loans, credit cards, and remittances—as well as a distaste for dealing with hacked accounts. Financial institutions using Socure’s APIs and SaaS tools are able to focus on value-added innovation without worrying about cyber-chicanery or digital double-dealing.

The founders, Sunil and Johnny are industry pros. In our first meeting, Sunil hopped up to the whiteboard and used every inch to teach us about identity fraud. They’ve already on-boarded a number of customers in the remittance, retail brokerage and online lending space and have signed up a bunch of exciting pilot customers including a number of the top 10 issuing banks, card networks, core banking providers and credit bureaus—and the number is growing quickly.

We’re thrilled to be joining ffVC and Two Sigma Ventures, and to watch Socure start stamping out fraud, save banks billions, all while protecting consumers in the process!

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Understanding Every Beat - Our Investment In Whoop

By Eric Paley

Will Ahmed was captain of the Harvard Squash team in 2011 and has always been obsessed with fitness and athletic performance.  His coach candidly described him as one of the less naturally talented players on the team, but he was named captain because of his innate leadership skills and his willingness to work harder than everyone else.

But was consistently working harder than everyone else the right way to train? Perhaps working so hard meant he was in the best physical shape of anyone on the team, or maybe he was overtraining which led to fatigue on game days. These questions bothered Will.

With the growth in popularity of the quantified self movement, Will became curious to better understand his fitness in a more scientific way.  Unfortunately, counting daily steps or miles has little interest or relevance to the physiology of an athlete.  Daily body weight measurements are more interesting, but somewhat misleading; building muscle increases weight, but burning fat lowers it.  While body fat percentage measurements are also somewhat useful, they are highly inaccurate and not indicative of daily performance.

Will became convinced that the answer to monitoring his day-to-day physiology and his readiness for game days could only be attained by analyzing his heart.  By understanding the progression and variation of his heart rate, Will could get a better understanding of his workout strain, his recovery, his general fitness and his performance on game day.

Will started to wear a chest-strap heart rate monitor to get this data, but he discovered the raw data was messy and highly incomplete.  The device wasn’t comfortable enough to wear outside of training periods, which meant that it only provided data for when Will was training, and nothing on recovery, general fitness and game day performance.  Moreover, the training data was confusing.  What baseline was he comparing it to and what did all those ups and downs actually mean for how well he was training?  How could he compare from workout to workout how he was doing?  How did his results stack up against his teammates or his competition?

Will Ahmed teamed up with John Capodilupo to answer these questions. John is the son of two physiologists and an award winning Harvard math whiz. John met Will at the end of his sophomore year and has since taken time off from Harvard to lead the technology side of solving this puzzle. Sitting across from the two them is a little like peering into the right and left side of a startup's brain.

In founding Whoop, Will and John's goal is to simplify the understanding of heart rate data, on a beat-by-beat basis, to reveal how that data integrates with other physiological sensors, and to create a device so comfortable that it could be used for 24-hour monitoring to track not only training, but recovery, general fitness and game day performance.  

We invested in Whoop because we think it is the next frontier of quantified self; answering questions beyond what anyone has yet answered about physiology.  We too are convinced that the heart holds unique insights about general health and fitness.  We think access to accurate 24 hour beat-by-beat heart rate data is something that will ultimately be of interest not only to performance athletes, but anyone who wants to understand their health, the impact of their life choices, and how they are progressing physically over time.

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Welcoming Raj De Datta To Founder Collective

By David Frankel, Eric Paley & Micah Rosenbloom

Achieving a great fit between a Founder Partner and our team is tricky. For a start, we prefer to have known each other for a while. We believe that the foundation of any great partnership is trust and unwavering belief in each other’s competence. We apply that philosophy to our own team as resolutely as the teams in which we invest. Additionally, each of our Founder Partners is a well known and respected entrepreneur and each has a track record of seed investing, typically in partnership with FC.

We have to share each other’s values and at Founder Collective, first and foremost that means a gut desire to support and nurture founders. We do what we do, in part, to carry on the legacy of those who supported us when we were first starting out.

We know that our Founder Partners apply these same criteria just as rigorously as we do and getting the puzzle to fit is tough. So given this context, we’re thrilled to announce Raj De Datta as our newest Founder Partner. Raj and FC simply couldn’t be a better fit. We’ve known Raj for over 12 years. We’ve invested at the seed stage together in companies like hunch (eBay), Yub (Coupons.com) and TrialPay. I vividly recall a lengthy conversation together about a burgeoning cold chain opportunity in India which Raj was seriously considering just before he founded Bloomreach. We’ve shared fun meals together including in Raj’s Palo Alto home. Meanwhile Bloomreach, founded in 2008, has become one of the most successful B2B big data marketing companies in the US. Raj, as both a full time CEO and seed investor, is a highly sought after sounding board for aspiring entrepreneurs particularly in B2B software and retail channel marketing.

Raj is a three time entrepreneur with experience that is far wider than B2B. He co-founded Firstmark Communications in London at age 23 ($80m run rate and 600 employees) as well as a venture from within Cisco in 2003. Raj has started to blog more recently and shares terrific personal insights on topics such as founder’s time management  and entrepreneurial leadership. We’re delighted and humbled that Raj chose Founder Collective as his platform for his continued seed investing activity, while he focuses first and foremost on Bloomreach. It fits perfectly with our model, and we know Raj will be a terrific addition to the FC team. Welcome Raj!

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The Transformation of Book Discovery – Our Investment In BookBub

By Eric Paley

It has become almost cliché to assert that software is eating the world. Some of the examples of this concept are futuristic and aspirational. Software might some day eat currency in the form of Bitcoin, but today most of us still use nationalized legal tender for transactions and savings. Other examples of software eating the world are overwhelmingly evidenced in our every day lives.  CDs and DVDs now seem as antiquated as records and cassette tapes.  Brick and mortar retail has lost massive share to ecommerce. Just trying swinging by your local Blockbuster for evidence of this.

Software is clearly eating book publishing.  Over 40% of print book sales have moved online. Ebooks are now 30% of the book industry and growing over 25% per year.  PwC estimates that by 2017, ebooks sales will out sell print.

I love going to bookstores, but they are disappearing fast. Today, national chain and local bookstores only sell 22% of books that consumers buy each year.

Approximately $10 billion is spent annually on sales and marketing by publishers globally, and these dollars are shifting quickly in a rapidly changing market.  Distribution in the publishing industry used to mean building a large sales force to promote books on bookstore displays and shelves.  In the midst of this intense change publishers and authors still need channels to market and distribute books.  What are publishers and authors to do now as fewer and fewer consumers are visiting book stores?

Enter BookBub, our latest investment at Founder Collective.  In the last two years BookBub has positioned itself as the leading independent platform for helping consumers discover ebooks, which in turn, enables publishers and authors to manage this market disruption and drive sales. While just the tip of the iceberg, BookBub's first product already markets digital titles to nearly 3 million consumers per day, leading to the sale of over 1 million ebooks per month.

BookBub has been bootstrapped to date with remarkable success.  The company works with over 3,000 publishers and authors, including all of the biggest publishers in the book industry.

I've known BookBub's co-founder and CEO Josh Schanker for over 20 years and am very excited by his and co-founder Nick Ciarelli's vision for helping consumers find books that they will love and helping publishers transform to successfully serving readers in a radically different future for the industry.

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Top10: Teams not Ideas

By David Frankel

Adam Valkin first connected me to Tom Leathes and Harry Jones in June 2011. While I prefer face-to-face, the call represented one of those very rare gifts when I "just knew" that we had to be involved. Together with Sonali de Rycker of Accel we closed the first institutional round in July and we both joined the board.

Tom, Harry and their co-founder Alex had just sold their last price comparison company and had bigger ideas with top10.com: a recommendation platform that would narrow down thousands of choices to personalized Top10 lists for any topic - from music, to movies, to travel. Decent early traction with their web app was quickly boosted as they briefly became the #1 app on Spotify. I used Spotify exclusively due to the top10 app, which instantly gave an easily configurable top10 playlist for any artist, compilation or mood.

Trouble was, we weren't monetizing and users plateaued. The hardest "pivots" tend to be those where the product hasn't completely failed. In high growth tech businesses, moderate traction is more of a curse than total failure. The team agonized - how could they use their remarkable assets (search DNA, top-notch engineers, an excellent name and a simple idea) to really create value?

After testing a range of verticals, hotels felt like a good fit: an acceptable bounty, full of noisy experiences with nobody having yet cracked the code on simpler/smarter/faster recommendations or flawless mobile execution.

The pivot was painful – top10 had to lay off special, talented people. But it was very fast and effective: an MVP (minimum viable product) was executed in 3 months. That was followed by non-stop augmentation and incessant, detailed focus on product and marketing. The team relentlessly re-evaluated. Clichéd right? But hard to find.

Today, Top10 is announcing its $8m Series B close.  It seems that Daniel Waterhouse of Balderton had a similar reaction to mine in June 2011 – he “just knew” after their first meeting.

It’s way too early to cheer but top10 is generating over $1m in monthly hotel bookings exactly a year after the team made the painful pivot decision. Users are responding to the clean, personal interface that masks significant behind-the-scenes algorithmic complexity.

And I’m as convinced as ever that, at seed, the team is so much more important than the initial idea.

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The Digital Tuxedo - Our Investment In The Black Tux

By Eric Paley 

Given the cost of my bride’s wedding dress, buying a tuxedo for my own wedding seemed a not completely unreasonable expense. I rationalized the purchase based on the assumption that when I was in my friends’ wedding parties, I’d need a tux and would save on rentals.    Unfortunately, just as my bride wanted all the groomsmen to be dressed exactly the same, so did my friends’ brides.  So after buying a tux for my wedding, I needed to rent for friends’ weddings.  Renting sounded reasonably simple, but was far from simple.  For most of the weddings, we were instructed to rent from a local tux shop and inconveniently, the strong preference was that we’d visit the shop in advance to have our measurements professionally taken.  Those that sent in measurements without visiting, all had frustrating surprises the day before the wedding when they picked up their tux only to find that it didn’t fit correctly and last minute emergency alternations had to be made.   Nearly $200 later, we’d inevitably look like we were back in high school going to prom.  The tuxedos didn’t fit quite right, the fashion was dated, and the garments felt like they had been previously worn by a hundred men and had been dry-cleaned more times than any fabric should endure.  Clearly this is a lousy customer experience, but is still preferable to paying much more money to buy a tuxedo that most guys will only wear a couple of times before several years have passed and the tux is completely out of fashion.   When I first heard the pitch for The Black Tux (link to www.theblacktux.com), it immediately resonated with me that the tuxedo rental business is ripe for disruption.  Today it is a completely brick and mortar local experience.  Hearing about a company that was fully focused on the customer experience, great fashion, and exceptional garment quality, made me certain that even if I didn’t invest, I would never buy a tuxedo or rent from anyone else again.   My biggest concern was the logistics of an Internet enabled tuxedo rental model, but the company successfully worked out how to get accurate measurements and how to ship top quality tuxedos and suits with plenty of time for minor alterations.  Most importantly, The Black Tux makes every guy look like a modern James Bond.  You can rent as an individual or for a wedding party. The Black Tux easily dresses groomsmen from all over the country at a price that is lower than people pay today for the lousy rental experience we’ve all endured. So far, the customer reception for The Black Tux has been remarkable - the company has among the highest net-promoter-scores that I’ve seen at an early stage startup.   Brides and grooms take note: the company is nearly sold out already for this summer’s wedding season – so book before it’s too late.   Software just ate the tuxedo.

Click here to see WSJ's coverage of The Black Tux (link to http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303491404579390900885034592)

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Pillpack – Designing the Future of Pharmacy

By David Frankel

Starting in 2012, we were exceptionally fortunate to have Elliot Cohen intern with us at Founder Collective. His focused belief in the ability for technology to meaningfully improve a patient’s experience quickly earned him a place in any pitch involving medical tech. Elliot co founded “Hacking Medicine” at MIT with TJ Parker and shortly thereafter they began to conceptualize a better pharmacy.   TJ, a registered pharmacist and CEO of Pillpack, started working in his Dad’s pharmacy at age 16 - he’s spent a lot of time directly understanding the patient and caregiver stress around managing multiple prescriptions. From our first meeting, I was impressed by TJ’s deep understanding and belief that the combination of simple, convenient packaging and personalized service could meaningfully alter the fog associated with managing medications. TJ and Elliot’s joint commitment persuaded us to write the largest check behind Pillpack in their first financing in April 2013.   The Pillpack vision is "Pharmacy Simplified": Robots do a far better job of pre-sorting pills into carefully designed, personalized, time-labeled, transparent packs - replacing error-prone pillboxes and manual solutions for sorting medication. More importantly this frees up PillPack’s pharmacists who have more time to provide support and answer patient’s questions. As of today, Pillpack is live in 31 states with new states launching throughout 2014.   In July 2013, we co-led the official seed round of Pillpack with Fred Destin of Atlas Ventures. This is the 2nd board that an FC partner shares with Fred. Atlas is a terrific collaborator and Fred works hard for his portfolio companies; I’m delighted to have his support and partnership. We’re also joined by some of our favorite angel investors including Zen Chu, Katie Rae, David Tisch & Andy Palmer.   I watched how my mom and cousin struggled to ensure that my 96-year-old grandfather adhered to his multiple medication regimen. Pillpack would have radically simplified what had become a daily struggle. My hunch though is that Pillpack will make sense to anyone at any age on any daily medication and will become indispensable post receipt of a first PillPack. We’re thrilled for TJ, Elliot and delighted to be alongside them for the journey of radically simplified pharmacy. Please visit PillPack.com or follow the company @PillPack.

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Expanding the Collective - Welcome Scott Belsky

By Eric Paley, David Frankel and Micah Rosenbloom

We’re really excited to welcome our newest Founder Partner, Scott Belsky. Scott embodies the Founder Collective ethos. He’s an entrepreneur at heart, with a passion for helping to build companies that have an impact. More than simply being a great operator, Scott’s a community builder. Anyone who has seen Scott speak, been to a 99u conference or read his book knows that Scott is motivated by inspiring others to follow their dreams.

Scott recently tweeted “A ‘Community’ assembles through viral/network effects, but only sustains through the value gained by members. Community must yield utility.” That’s how we feel about what we’re building at FC and why Scott is a perfect addition to the team.

Last year, Scott spoke to a bunch of our portfolio founders about building Behance, and its eventual sale to Adobe. He captivated and inspired the group, and it was clear to everyone that Scott has a heavy dose of entrepreneurial DNA coupled with a strong moral compass.

Additionally, Scott’s track record as an angel investor is among the most impressive in the tech community. He’s an investor in Pinterest, Uber and Warby Parker to name a few. Founder Collective and Scott have co-invested in Uber, Contently, Getable, Paddle8 and KitchenSurfing. We’ve gotten to know Scott well and we’re excited to welcome him as a Founder Partner.

Our fund has been built by serial entrepreneurs who share the passion for the seed stage. Scott will continue to run Behance and serve as VP Community at Adobe. The cornerstone of the Founder Partner model is providing a platform for serial entrepreneurs to invest in seed stage companies, while staying focused on their first priority, the companies that they founded. Scott will work with FC on identifying opportunities, and helping the portfolio in NYC and beyond.

Scott will be joining other Founder Partners, Caterina Fake and Zach Klein, as well as the rest of the FC team. We couldn’t be more excited to have Scott aboard.

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Making Change Easier - Our Investment In Change Collective

By Eric Paley

Change is hard.  Whether it is building better habits; getting into better shape; being more present; adapting to a healthier lifestyle; or performing better at work - - for most of us the odds are against us that we'll create a plan and stick to it.

As a nation we are very aspirational.  Americans spend $12 billion a year on books, coaches and seminars trying to improve themselves and yet very little of this change sticks.  The Journal of Clinical Psychology recently reported that while 62% of Americans make New Years Resolutions, only 8% of those Americans achieve their resolutions.

Persistent change is hard because we lack good feedback and reinforcement mechanisms.  Judging by the change industry's size, many of us read a book and expect to change, but that is nearly impossible.  Once that book is finished, there is very little making us stick to our new learnings, clarifying ambiguities, or reinforcing correct behaviors.  Coaches provide a much more effective experience than books in that they resolve most of these problems.  Unfortunately, change coaches are also very expensive, whether in the form of a personal trainer, nutritionist, or career coach.

Today we're announcing our investment in Change Collective.  Change Collective attempts to correct this gap by bringing all the advantages of mobile to personal change management.  We are convinced that mobile is the most powerful and efficient media for personal change management.  The combination of physical presence, persistent connection, and alerts for reinforcement allow mobile to go way beyond any book or seminar as a change tool, at a fraction of the cost of a personal coach.

I first met Change Collective's CEO Ben Rubin almost 10 years ago, when I was at Brontes Technologies and he was starting Zeo, the personal sleep assistant.  Ben is a pioneer in the quantified self movement.  At Zeo, Ben and his Change Collective co-founder Derek Haswell, studied personal behavior change over many years.  While Zeo didn't live up to Ben's ambitious goals, the learnings that Ben and Derek had at Zeo will be invaluable to making Change Collective a success.

We're excited to co-lead the seed round of Change Collective with our close seed collaborators NextView Ventures.  This is our fifth co-investment with NextView, and I expect we'll be doing much more together as we find them to be kindred spirits in their hard work for their portfolio companies and founder first approach.  Also joining the round are eniac and a group of fantastic seed investors.

As we are all constantly striving to be better, I hope that Change Collective will help us achieve our goals. At a minimum, I look forward to contributing to that mission.

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Our investment in Plated: Redefining weeknight dinner

By Micah Rosenbloom

I recently read Howard Schultz’s book Onward about the reinvention of coffee and the making of the Starbuck’s experience. It’s an inspiring read about how he took something as seemingly mundane as coffee and turned into pop culture. I see strong parallels with what Starbucks has done for coffee with what Plated can do for meals. So many of us yearn for the experience of a home cooked meal, yet lack the time to discover a recipe, go food shopping, and prep the food. Plated has solved this with a product that allows even the mediocre cook (like me!) to make a gourmet, home-cooked meal in 30 minutes or less.

At FC, we spend a lot of time working with our founding teams. I couldn’t be more excited to be collaborating with Josh and Nick. They’re passionate young founders with very complementary backgrounds and skills. Nick served as an officer in the Marine Corps and Josh has a background in start-ups and online marketing. They’ve been at Plated for over a year now and the progress they’ve made is remarkable.

The product also drew us to Plated. My colleagues and I have made dozens of meals - from salmon with kale to korean style tacos. The quality is impeccable and each meal seems to get better and better. Furthermore, the company offers meal delivery throughout the US and the largest breadth of menu choices we’ve seen in this market (including vegetarian options for my meatless Mondays!).

We are particularly excited about what Josh and Nick have planned for 2014. While we don't want to open the kimono too early, suffice it to say that the Plated offering will expand dramatically over the coming months. They have spent over a year behind the scenes building state of the art software and data driven operations, and they have built an impressive team. We are excited to see how they use this foundation to transform the way Americans think about ordering and receiving quality, nutritious, delicious, affordable food with the same convenience we've come to expect for everything else from glasses to pants to books. This is going to be a big year!

We’re excited to be joining our co-investors FF Ventures, Lerer Ventures, Great Oaks and a handful of very successful and well known angel investors including Paige Craig, Alain Bankier, and Andrew McCollum. I am pleased to be joining the board and play a part in building a great company. Most of all, I hope to improve the dinner experience for millions of Americans.

Eating at home has long been integral to the bond between individuals and families. If you yearn for a home cooked meal but only have 30 minutes to spare, Plated is for you! Give it a try (here’s a secret discount code: 15fromplated :)

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Burner: Frictionless Mobile Identity

By David Frankel

As consumers, we try to make the most of available services, despite the friction invariably embedded in them. In fact we rarely stop to even consider that friction. Despite stamps, envelopes and long queues, the US postal service sufficiently sent letters …. until we had email. Horses & carriages most probably seemed adequate pre the advent of the motorcar in 1886. Fast forward to Dropbox. Creating a drag-and-drop user interface removes all that previous technical friction and now makes consumer data back up easy and ubiquitous.

If a substitute service truly removes significant friction, it has the magical power to create demand that seemingly didn’t exist. Uber satisfies that proposition remarkably well: remove the friction of not quite knowing which dispatch service to call, price perceptions pre increased supply & the lack of a reliable ubiquitous brand? Uber now makes the process so easy that they create brand new demand for a premium car service.

Now try envisaging a different reality for our mobile identities: Managing multiple mobile numbers today is so cumbersome that we don’t even try. 2 yr. contracts? Store visits?  Expiring Sim Cards? Carrying two phones? Multiple Google Voice numbers? It’s no surprise that we each operate a single personal number for every dimension of our lives.

What if we could have as many numbers as we wanted each with voicemail, text and more? What if we could create them or “burn” them anytime? Obviously all on a single hardware device?

Some of the use cases are obvious: Why share your private mobile details on a blind date? Why share your private number when you sell a bike on Craigslist? A school teacher can have a dedicated phone number for parents of a child experiencing a rough patch. When the problem subsides, all texts and voicemails are saved to Dropbox before the number is “burnt”. A lawyer can have a dedicated number for each client. As the call ends, an API could automatically log the call duration to QuickBooks for billing purposes.

Just as our email addresses are de-coupled from our ISP, we should all be able to configure our multiple mobile identities with zero friction. We think that removing that friction will seed demand in ways we can’t yet imagine.

So obviously we’re thrilled to be backing Greg Cohn and the terrific team at Burner. Greg has deep expertise and experience in the area of identity management through his work at Yahoo! Together with Venrock, we’re looking forward to helping out the Burner team on their journey towards zero-friction mobile privacy & identity.

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Our investment in Tulip Retail - Omni-channel for the rest of retail

By Micah Rosenbloom

We are fortunate to have a number of fast growing e-commerce companies in our portfolio. Several of them are experimenting with offline stores or pop-up shops. Yet when asked about their biggest challenges, scaling logistics are usually among the first words said. Likewise, traditional retailers are trying to compete in the world of the “endless aisle” or “omni-channel selling” (selling across brick and mortar, web and the two in combination). Thus, enter our investment in Tulip Retail.

Tulip Retail aims to solve these challenges by offering a lighter-weight solution for retailers than those offered by Oracle and IBM. For mid-size retailers, Tulip offers technology to power a shopping experience similar to an Apple Store.

What compelled us most about this opportunity is the founder, Ali Asaria. Ali is perhaps best known for developing the BlackBerry game Brickbreaker. Several of us spent tens of hours playing the game as we procrastinated real work. More importantly, Ali started Well.ca, Canada’s answer to Diapers.com. Well.ca grew into a sizable company with e-commerce logistics that rival even Amazon. The technology powering Tulip has been spun out of Ali’s technology at Well. We’re also proud that Tulip will remain headquartered in Canada - with a facility in Toronto and Waterloo.

We are pleased to be joining co-investors Charles Hudson from Softech who will join the company’s Board, and co-investors Lerer Ventures, Box Group, iNovia Capital and angels Matt Mullenweg and Greg Kidd among others.