Founder Collective's Eric Paley on Empathy and Execution in Venture Capital

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

Please subscribe to Something Ventured!

Eric Paley on X (Twitter)

Founder Collective

Something Ventured

8-Bit Capital