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david frankel

T2 · manager / operator

David Frankel is a co-founder and partner at Founder Collective, a seed-stage venture firm with 18 years of investing. He led early investments in Uber, PillPack, SeatGeek, Shield AI, Suno, Whoop, Trade Desk, Coupang, and Olo. He emphasizes founder-first investing, ownership discipline, and long hold periods.

18 calls·18 names·39% bull·last heard 3 days ago·20VC
track record

no scored calls yet — needs a stated position or a categorical verdict, with a matured window vs SPY

top calls

highest conviction · one per company
1sthigh conviction
$SHIELD-AIShield AIposition

Shield AI thesis: AI layer on commoditized drones/hardware is the real value

All hardware (drones, cameras, sensors) is now commoditized; the defensible moat is the AI software stack that makes autonomous systems work — applied AI on cheap platforms.

20VC2026-08→
2ndhigh conviction
$SEATGEEKSeatGeekposition

Frankel still holds every SeatGeek share from 2010: top-3 ticketing platform

SeatGeek has become a top-three global ticketing business, but liquidity takes extreme patience — 15+ years and counting — and the fund has never sold a share despite the long hold.

20VC2026-08→
3rdmedium conviction
$OLOOloposition

Olo exit at $2B after 17 years: great journey but IRR not amazing

Olo was a 17-year journey to a $2B take-private by Thoma Bravo — a wonderful founder partnership but suboptimal IRR, illustrating the tension between venture returns and relationship-driven investing.

20VC2026-08→

most discussed · click a bar to filter

recurring themes

18 total
$SIMILEY
Similey
MEDdavid frankel·20VC·3 days ago
Similey: enterprises will spend $100-200M on single model inference for critical decisions
Simulation-market company Similey predicts Fortune 500 firms (P&G, Coca-Cola, Nvidia, Visa) and governments will pay $100-200M for a single high-stakes model output — a new paradigm of ultra-high-value AI inference.
"we will have companies spend 100 to 200 million on one uh model kind of result because that model result is so important like the output of one query... PNG, uh, Coca-Cola, Nvidia…"
71:40
$SUNO
Suno
MEDdavid frankel·20VC·3 days ago
Suno at $5B: betting on creation-to-consumption pivot to disrupt Spotify
Investors at the $5B round are underwriting Suno as a potential Spotify/Apple Music disruptor, but the critical leap is moving from a creation tool to a consumption platform — the CTO says he'd swap the model instantly if a better one appeared.
"When you're doing Sunno at 5 billion, what are you underwriting it to? I think that the folks investing at that level are going this is a Spotify disruptor that this is that Spoti…"
82:50
$OLO
···
Olo
MEDdavid frankel·20VC·3 days ago· position
Olo exit at $2B after 17 years: great journey but IRR not amazing
Olo was a 17-year journey to a $2B take-private by Thoma Bravo — a wonderful founder partnership but suboptimal IRR, illustrating the tension between venture returns and relationship-driven investing.
"It's 17-ear journey to a 1.6 1.7 billion exit... 2 billion exit. I love Noah. I love Ola. It's an amazing business. It's an amazing journey. But when you think about like utilizat…"
81:00
$NVDA
···
Nvidia
MEDdavid frankel·20VC·3 days ago
Photonic computing will disrupt Nvidia or force acquisition of optical chip startups
Photonic/optical computing — using light instead of electricity for chip interconnects and eventually compute — will solve data-center energy constraints and disrupt Nvidia's dominance within 10 years, unless Nvidia buys the emerging optical-chip companies.
"You're going to see optic chips with which are very very energy compliant. So when people talk about the data centers and the energy sucks that's going to change in my view if you…"
75:50
$VIVA
···
Viva (Veeva Systems)
MEDdavid frankel·20VC·3 days ago
SaaS apocalypse overshooting: buy basket of beaten-up embedded SaaS leaders
The SaaS selloff has thrown the baby out with the bathwater; deeply embedded, mission-critical SaaS (Veeva, Olo, Airtable) are hard to displace, and a basket of these discounted leaders will outperform.
"the SAS apocalypse... is the baby being thrown out with the bath water? And it's about the last 5%... the more embedded you are like the more difficult you are to dispense... I th…"
43:00
$MCCOR
Mccor
LOWdavid frankel·20VC·3 days ago
Mccor at $20B valuation cited as example of billion-dollar Series A norm
Mccor's $20B valuation is cited as evidence that top-tier AI companies now command billion-dollar-plus entry prices, reshaping seed fund economics.
"we have Mccor at 20, we have Cognition at 26, Cursor gets sold for 60 sold. This is liquid. Well, maybe a billion is the new series A."
34:00
$WHOOP
Whoop
MEDdavid frankel·20VC·3 days ago· position
Whoop vs Suno: hardware path means high dilution vs AI speed means low dilution
Whoop's hardware journey required many capital-intensive rounds (high dilution), while Suno's pure-software AI momentum enabled rapid markup with minimal dilution — business model dictates cap table evolution.
"Sununo has been a very quick journey. So if you look at like how lower how much lower the dilution is part of it is just how quick the momentum of that has been versus a Whoop whi…"
53:10
$WIX
···
Wix
LOWdavid frankel·20VC·3 days ago
Wix trading at 1x revenue shows market irrationality but price is the market
Wix at 2.1B market cap on 2.1B revenue exemplifies irrational pricing, but fighting the market's valuation is futile — capital must flow with the tide.
"when I look at like a Wix today trading at 2.1 billion on 2.1 billion of revenue, it's a great example where like there's obvious irrationality at play, but it doesn't matter. The…"
26:50
$MSFT
···
Microsoft
MEDdavid frankel·20VC·3 days ago
Microsoft has done a crappy job on AI; its offering feels second-rate vs top models
Microsoft's AI execution has been poor and its models feel inferior to the leading frontier models (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google), putting it at risk of losing platform relevance.
"Microsoft have done a crappy job of um AI generally like I think... their AI feels second rate compared to the top three or four."
64:40
$UBER
···
Uber
MEDdavid frankel·20VC·3 days ago· position
Frankel admits selling Uber early at $10B; still net long at IPO
Founder Collective sold some Uber around $10B valuation (likely too early) but remained net long through IPO; illustrates the difficulty of timing exits in compounding winners.
"in retrospect, we probably sold a little too early. So, this was early on. You know, this is a business that's getting close to$10 billion in valuation, and there's an opportunity…"
52:40