2026-10-14 17:16:00
Collaborative Fund is hiring an Investment Associate to join our team in New York.
We back entrepreneurs pushing the world forward. We look for businesses that can generate exceptional financial returns while making the world better or more interesting, with investments spanning Consumer, AI, Infra, Money, Health, and Energy.
This is a highly autonomous, hands-on role across the full range of early-stage investing. You will work closely with our Partners and the broader team to source and evaluate new investments, develop investment ideas, and support existing portfolio companies.
This is a two-year Associate program, designed to provide broad exposure to early-stage venture investing.
We are looking for people with roughly 3-5 years of professional experience who are deeply interested in startups and tech. Strong candidates may have spent that time building, operating, investing, or advising in and around technology companies.
Candidates should already be engaged with the startup ecosystem and excited by the range of areas in which we invest. We are looking for someone who is:
This role is based in New York and is primarily in person. The person in this role will work regularly from our Manhattan office, bring strong connections within the New York startup community and travel to the Bay Area to stay closely connected to the West Coast startup ecosystem.
Complete the application linked here. We will review applications on a rolling basis.
2026-10-14 03:23:00
🎙️ Listen on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Matt Sonsini is Managing Partner and co-founder of Ravello Impact, and the former CEO of The Sobrato Organization. Before moving into investing and philanthropy, he spent almost two decades as a corporate lawyer in Silicon Valley, working with startups, venture capitalists, and public companies.
In this conversation, he explains why waiting to give can become its own excuse, why measuring philanthropic impact is harder than measuring investment returns, and what founders sacrifice when they chase the highest valuation. He also revisits the boardroom moment when a CEO quit on the spot and the unlikely IPO that still stands out decades later.
“Well, I guess if you’re Warren Buffett, you have a reasonable shot at compounding capital at a greater rate than the world’s problems are compounding. But for mere mortal investors, I’m personally doubtful that’s the case.”
Giving has its own risk-return spectrum: Local food banks offer immediate, measurable results. Systemic change demands more time, more resources, and a willingness to accept uncertain outcomes. Sonsini approaches those choices as a portfolio, allocating across both.
Good intentions need honest feedback: A business with a bad product hears from the market. A donor can still get a gala and a name on a building without knowing how much good the money did. He also argues that funders, nonprofits, and government need to collaborate more to make their resources count.
A higher valuation can hide a worse deal: Senior liquidation preferences and separate investor approval rights can create conflicts when growth stalls. He urges founders to resist trading away important terms to reach a headline valuation.
Venture’s failures are part of the process: Funding booms draw talent and ideas into new markets. Many companies fail in the correction, but investors cannot know the eventual winners in advance. He sees that experimentation as necessary.
Optimism takes practice: Legal training taught Sonsini to look for downside. Investing taught him that optimism is essential. The best advisers, he says, tell clients which risks matter and which they can stop worrying about.
00:00 – Introduction to Matt Sonsini
01:03 – Give Now or Compound for the Future?
05:01 – Measuring Impact and the Risk of Virtue Signaling
07:52 – Building a Philanthropic Portfolio
09:20 – Government, Philanthropy, and the Need to Collaborate
12:43 – The Term-Sheet Rights Sonsini Would Remove
16:31 – Why He Dislikes Pay-to-Play Provisions
17:00 – Don’t Chase the Valuation
19:18 – Why More Venture Capital Doesn’t Eliminate Failure
24:25 – A Boardroom Takeover and an Unlikely IPO
29:17 – Learning to Be an Optimist
31:49 – Closing Remarks
2026-09-17 19:21:00
In a market saturated with frothy AI bets, we believe our investment in the paradoxical Dr. Max Goldstein, a practicing family physician and a Mendocino farmer, is just what the doctor ordered.
Born out of organic demand from over 30,000 patient visits, Dr. Max spent 5 years prototyping products in his kitchen before commercializing his modern apothecary.
In an era where parents are expected to be amateur toxicologists, navigating complicated ingredient labels and judging Yuka scores in their diaper caddies… it’s a relief to find products with clean ingredients that just work, made by a family for families.
With less than $10k of marketing spend, Dr. Max’s is already the top selling brand in children’s body care in Erewhon. We believe their organic traction is setting the foundation to build the next generational brand in natural, efficacious personal care. Brands with similar perspectives like Burt’s Bees (sold for $925m in 2007), Coterie (sold for a reported $1b+) and Eucerin + Aquafor generating €1.5b revenue annually, establish the economic opportunity.
Dr. Max’s formulas are EWG verified and accepted by the National Eczema Association, but strong cohort data and organic customer acquisition are the best indications that the products just work.
Parents in Dr. Max’s practice were looking for products they could trust so he made them in his own kitchen, from ingredients grown on his farm. Formulas have been perfected over time from patient feedback, and the brand has been building with his community.
Baby care is one of the highest consideration purchases for families. We believe that Dr. Max’s has the potential to expand their platform from a trusted first product into a lifetime of family care.
In consumer, few are more loyal than a parent who has found the “thing” that finally works. We’re proud to back Dr. Max and his co-founder Erin as they build it.
2026-08-18 21:57:00
“Fries with dinner but no dessert counts as a win.”
Who will build the first era-defining consumer AI company? Even the beloved AI tools we already rely on are only one model release away from obsolescence. The lasting advantage will come from products people emotionally trust, build habits around, and fold into their identities. Tomo extends beyond productivity into the higher-order value of wellbeing, and has the founder and product philosophy to define their category, if not the era.
Habit trackers, calorie counters, and budgeting apps attempt to manage your life in isolation and reward unbroken streaks. But your finances, fitness, sleep, and stress are interconnected, and imperfect. As a unified AI layer holding context across all of it, Tomo intervenes at the right moment to change behaviors and outcomes. That context also allows for grace: fries with dinner but no dessert counts as a win. Forgiveness is the retention mechanic the category has been missing.
Tomo delivers on a far-off promise of AI today by shipping adaptive interfaces that intuit user’s needs: a runner preparing for a race gets a training tracker, someone who can’t get out of bed gets a game that only unlocks during their morning routine. As priorities and goals change, the experience evolves, deepening personalization and increasing loyalty.
Justin and Raymond are as product-obsessed as founders get, dissecting divergent use cases through hours of interviews and observation and inserting their own taste when it’s needed
Traction is exceptional. 10,000+ paying subscribers in three and a half months, entirely by word of mouth, while still in stealth. Users text Tomo 20 of every 30 days, engagement that rivals the stickiest consumer apps.
Generational consumer AI companies will be the ones people trust with their lives — in all their fullness and chaos — not just their work. We believe Tomo is building for that future.
2026-07-30 21:52:00
🎙️ Listen on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Jacob Hodes is a partner and Chief Investment Officer of Private Investing at Brown Advisory, the Baltimore firm descended from Alex. Brown & Sons — the first investment bank in the United States. He got there by way of Goldman Sachs, law school, and Skadden, a path he describes as meandering.
In this conversation, he explains why he’s both the loudest advocate for private markets at his firm and increasingly nervous about where they’re headed, what a post-industrial city does to an investor’s judgment, and why the junior people who rise fastest are rarely the ones with the best pedigree.
“You think you do, but committing yourself for 10 years is really tough. … If half of all marriages end in divorce, that’s usually within 10 years. You probably feel much more strongly about getting married than you do about making an investment.”
Private markets were built on information asymmetry: A century ago the Rockefellers and Carnegies could make private bets because their operating businesses gave them a data set nobody else had. That edge migrated to institutions with the balance sheets to go long — and the fund structures followed.
Illiquidity is underestimated by everyone who hasn’t lived it: A ten-year commitment outlasts half of all marriages. As private vehicles push downmarket, Hodes expects investors to fall out of love with positions they can’t exit.
The asset-liability mismatch is the risk to watch: Semi-liquid vehicles wrap multi-year illiquid assets in structures promising something closer to daily liquidity. Smart people will eventually solve it; the road there will be bumpy.
Underdog geography sharpens judgment: Working from Baltimore rather than a coastal financial center means finding value where others don’t look — and holding onto discipline when you’re across the table from a high-flying founder.
Read newspapers from places you don’t live: Local papers from cities and countries outside your own break the echo chamber and show you how other people are actually seeing the same events.
00:00 - Introduction to the Guest and Firm
01:13 - A Meandering Path: Princeton, the Nasdaq, and Goldman Sachs
03:29 - Back to Basics: What Long-Term Investing Requires
05:22 - Why the Dot-Com Bust Was the Formative Crash
08:50 - Politics, Government, and the Limits of Prediction
12:13 - Baltimore as an Investing Lens
17:33 - What a Law Degree Teaches (and What It Doesn’t)
20:32 - The Junior People Who Rise Fastest
24:49 - The Armchair Psychologist Side of Client Work
27:10 - The Contrarian Take: Private Markets and the Retail Push
31:01 - How to Read: Local Papers from Places You Don’t Live
33:01 - Conclusion and Final Thoughts
2026-07-27 21:08:00
Nan Ransohoff (Head of Public Goods at Stripe) recently published a sharp piece on what she calls the third wave of American philanthropy: the tidal change coming as AI wealth becomes liquid and a generation of founders gives it away.
It’s a generous, clear-eyed essay about a real institutional mismatch: an enormous new pool of capital is forming, but the systems built to turn that capital into lasting public good have not caught up. Nan’s point is that the next generation of givers may need new vehicles, new norms, and new institutions to make that money matter.
I agree with all of it. But the piece also surfaced an adjacent question I keep coming back to:
What if the most important social institutions of the next 50 years aren’t nonprofits at all?
For most of modern philanthropy, the sequence was simple: build the company, make the fortune, then decide what the fortune should repair.
Andrew Carnegie endowed infrastructure for self-improvement after he built U.S. Steel. John D. Rockefeller funded medical research after he built Standard Oil. Both were unusually systematic for their era. Carnegie’s “Gospel of Wealth” (1889) argued that the rich had a duty to give in their lifetimes and to do so strategically — “The man who dies rich dies disgraced” — not through charity, which he openly disdained as wasteful, but through institutions that would endure (libraries, universities, museums, research).
Rockefeller went further on the operational side. He hired Frederick Gates (no relation to Bill) as essentially the first professional philanthropic strategist, and Gates ran the giving like a research operation: identify root causes, fund the underlying science, measure outcomes. The Rockefeller Foundation’s work on hookworm eradication in the American South and yellow fever globally was “outcomes-driven public health” decades before that was a phrase.
The pattern was straightforward: industry created enormous wealth and enormous externalities, and philanthropy emerged to repair what industry broke. Make money first. Give later. The two halves were kept on separate ledgers. You don’t have to squint too hard to see the seeds of Effective Altruism in this early philanthropy: earn as much as you can, then deploy it where the math says it matters most.
Squint a little harder and you can see the same shape in a much newer idea: that some of the largest companies in the world might hand shares directly to the next generation. It may be the most promising thing the two-ledger model has produced.
But the architecture never changed. The company is the instrument, the impact is the output, and the two only meet at the end.
I don’t think this new generation of founders sees it that way anymore.
The most ambitious founders building companies now draw no clean line between “what the company does” and “what the company is for.” They want the operating model itself to carry the values. If a company’s success requires people to be healthier, better educated, breathing cleaner air, or more financially secure, then every dollar of revenue is also a unit of the good it claims to want in the world. The two ledgers collapse into one.
The skeptical read is that “mission-driven companies” are a marketing pose — purpose-washing layered over a normal P&L. We see it all the time. A company discovers that virtue is good for customer acquisition, or that the language of impact helps it recruit, raise capital, or soften the edges of an otherwise conventional business. Anyone investing through this lens has to develop a pretty sensitive ear for the difference between mission as decoration and mission as design.
The strongest version of a mission-driven company is not one that donates a percentage of profits after the fact. It is one where the business can only get bigger if the stated mission becomes more true—even if aligned incentives have to be constructed against entrenched ones. A health company should thrive when people get well, not when they stay sick. A climate company should make money as emissions fall. A financial company should grow when customers build wealth, not when they fall into debt. In those cases, the social good is the unit economics.
You can see companies running this experiment right now. WHOOP only grows if their members actually sleep, recover, and live better (i.e. the subscription renews on results). Redwood Materials gets bigger as more batteries come back around instead of ending up in landfills. Base Power scales as the grid gets cleaner and more resilient. Etsy grows only as independent makers earn a living. Periodic Labs is making the wildest bet of all: that accelerating scientific discovery itself can be the business. The list should be much longer.
Call it the Villain Test, the Miracle on 34th St., the Warren Buffett See’s Candy manifesto. The strongest businesses don’t sell what they make; they sell what they mean. The companies most likely to matter in fifty years — the companies with lasting impact — will be the ones whose meaning is indistinguishable from their work.
Nan is right that we’re short of philanthropic startups and capital allocators, and that those gaps need to be filled fast. She is, in fact, doing just that—Stripe recently announced the Intercept Fund, a $500m philanthropic initiative to eradicate respiratory infections. They write: “There are many important products (public goods!) that would improve the world but don’t exist because the commercial motivations aren’t yet sufficient.” I couldn’t agree more, and I’m proud to serve as an Advisor to this initiative.
But not everything will look like philanthropy.
Some of the most important problems of the next 50 years — health, climate, civic trust, the cultural conditions of a good life — won’t be solved by foundations alone, or by nonprofits alone, or even mostly. They’ll be solved by companies that were never asked to choose between profit and progress in the first place.
This is not a claim that every problem has a market solution. Many do not. Some of the most important work in the world will always depend on gifts, public funding, religious institutions, universities, mutual aid, and nonprofits willing to serve people and problems no market will reward. If anything, that need is about to grow: as AI reshapes work faster than institutions can adapt, the safety nets markets don’t provide will matter even more.
But when a problem can be addressed by a company whose incentives are aligned with the outcome we want, that should count as part of the philanthropic imagination too — not a substitute for giving, but as a reminder that the check is not the only vehicle.
That’s the version of the third wave I’m most interested in: not just more wealth moving into philanthropy after the fact, but more founders refusing to separate the wealth from the good in the first place.
