1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Taylor Greene of Collaborative Fund (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me about the kinds of B2C ventures you like to invest in. Besides the ventures doing good element, is there other parameterization that you could put on your preferred investments?

Taylor Greene: I try to simplify as much as possible. It’s my job to find outstanding entrepreneurs with breakthrough ideas who are solving big problems in markets that are either big already or that could grow into something huge. I’m always looking for that.

We do start very broad. We have a handful of focus areas. One area that’s really exciting to us is digital health and healthcare. We think this is an area that’s right for disruption especially here in the US. We also spend a lot of time in the money category, which is effectively FinTech.

We are looking for mobile-first businesses that either offer more transparency to users or more access to users. That’s a really exciting category to us. We also do invest in some direct-to-consumer brands. Those tend to be mostly in the food space.

One area that we’re really excited about is how people are thinking about their diets and health & wellness. A lot of them are coming back to some interesting things we’re seeing in food. It could be an environmental component with meat that’s grown from cells. Or it has to do with plant-based diet which people are flocking to because of certain health benefits.

Those are the main categories that we are focused on at the moment. I think there’s plenty of really interesting companies that fall into those buckets. 

Sramana Mitra: What about geography?

Taylor Greene: We’re based here in New York. We focus a lot of our investing here. We also have an office on the West Coast. Just given our network and deal flow, most of our investing tends to be in New York and San Francisco. We also see a lot of deals in Los Angeles. More recently, also in Boston.

Sramana Mitra: You do consumer businesses mainly and you do seed. What do you like to see by way of validation? How do you decide what stage qualifies as seed for you? Again, we’re seeing all kinds of different definitions of what is an acceptable seed situation for a fund.

Taylor Greene: We tend to define seed as an investment that’s valued below $15 million. That allows us to invest really early in what’s now called pre-seed. We can come in early if we have a thesis around the space and if we really think it’s the right team. We have no problem writing a smaller check into a very early-stage company at a lower valuation.

Sramana Mitra: You would invest in a concept-stage venture?

Taylor Greene: Yes, especially if we have a thesis on the space. Half of the time, our investments are driven by pre-existing thesis that we have. Other times, it’s more opportunistic where it’s an idea that we haven’t really thought of before. We do our work and are able to validate it. We will invest in those companies as well.

We like to come early in companies that we’re excited about and for which we have a pre-existing thesis. We can also go a little bit later if, for whatever reason, we need more data to validate that thesis.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Taylor Greene of Collaborative Fund
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