Blog

Please help me welcome Ian Friedman to Collaborative Fund as our newest Partner based in New York City.

I’m thrilled to share that I’ve joined the Collaborative Fund partnership as its first operating partner, where I’ll be focused on supporting our portfolio companies scale their business. The opportunity to work together with Craig, Taylor, Lauren, Morgan and the rest of the team at Collaborative is an immense privilege.

I’ve been interested in distributed ownership models since I was a Ph.D. student - my doctoral thesis was on employee stock options. When I came across Bitcoin and blockchains shortly after I graduated in 2011, I immediately saw parallels between crypto and my academic work. In some ways, it felt like the next big step in what is inevitable for the future of financial transactions.

Time flies.

I am excited to join Collaborative Fund as a principal in San Francisco.

I couldn’t be more excited to join Collaborative Fund as an associate in the New York office. I come to the wonderful world of VC by way of consulting, but I started my career at Ashoka, a social enterprise accelerator, where I first worked closely with entrepreneurs who see the world differently. With a focus on Latin America, I searched for new ways to address tough social challenges, and came away convinced of the special role of startups in improving quality of life and well-being around the world.

We recently announced our new $100M early stage fund that we closed in May, along with a series of new additions to the team in June. Now that July is upon us, we’ve started to make investments out of the new fund and thought it would be good to share how we’re evolving the businesses we want to invest in.

We are excited to welcome some new faces to the Collaborative team. Specifically, Nathan Friedman, Mimi Valdés, and Dwipal Desai are joining as venture advisors.

I am thrilled to share that I am joining the Collaborative Fund partnership alongside Craig, Lauren, Morgan, and the rest of the amazing Collaborative team.

Collaborative Fund is excited to announce that we led Dandelion’s recent seed round.