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Axios
25-06-2025
- Business
- Axios
Venture capitalist Eric Paley accepts Mass. econ post
Eric Paley is moving on from venture capital, 16 years after helping to launch seed-stage firm Founder Collective and backing from such companies as Uber, Trade Desk, Cruise, Airtable, and Whoop. Driving the news: He's agreed to become the next Massachusetts secretary of economic development, with the switch effective after Labor Day. What they're saying: Paley tells Axios that the first outreach was from Yvonne Hao (ex-PillPack, Cove Hill Partners), shortly after she announced plans to step down from the post. "She said she was going to put me at the top of a short list requested by Governor [Maura] Healey, but that I could tell them no," he recalls. "My reply was that I could tell her no now and tell them no later. I felt I had the perfect career set-up." "But then I truly couldn't sleep that night, thinking about making a bigger societal impact and how this was an opportunity for me to serve within the constraints of what I'm good at and in a community I care deeply about." By the next morning, he wanted in and began doing research.
Boston Globe
24-06-2025
- Business
- Boston Globe
Healey taps venture capitalist Eric Paley to lead economic development
Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'It's just a huge catch,' said Diane Hessan, an entrepreneur who has known Paley for years. 'It shows how serious we are about economic development in Massachusetts. [Paley] is highly respected, he's razor sharp, and he has a great nose for ideas that really have the potential to be transformational.' Advertisement Hao came to know Paley when she helped lead Somerville startup PillPack, which counted Founder Collective among its investors. (Amazon acquire PillPack in 2018.) After she announced she was leaving the Healey administration, Hao reached out to Paley and suggested he apply for the job. He was reluctant at first, but then decided to reconsider. Advertisement Paley said he had a tough time sleeping the night after being pitched for the job. Paley said he realized much of his professional success is due to the state's unique innovation ecosystem. 'I owe a lot to this state and to the people and the capabilities and the talents and the resources,' said Paley, who lives in Lexington with his family. 'At some point, you want to find a way to give back.' Former economic development secretary Yvonne Hao (right) alongside Ashley Stolba, the state's current interim economic development secretary. LEISE JONES While studying at Harvard Business School in the early 2000s, Paley began working with Micah Rosenbloom and David Frankel to launch Brontes Technologies, a Lexington company that specialized in 3D dental imaging with technology spun out from MIT. (Manufacturing conglomerate 3M acquired Brontes for $95 million in 2006.) Paley was the CEO, HBS classmate Rosenbloom was chief operating officer, and Frankel was an early investor. Paley, Rosenbloom and Frankel teamed up again to launch Founder Collective in 2009 to focus on early stage, or seed, funding for promising technology startups. In addition to PillPack, the firm was also an early investor in Uber, Omada Health, Cruise Automation, Whoop, and Formlabs, among other startups. Paley also launched an annual innovation conference, called Collective Future. As he enters state government, Paley will relinquish any control over the firm's investment decisions, but retain his existing equity in the firm's funds. 'I don't know if I would get another opportunity to do something like this,' Paley said. 'They don't come up very often.' Hao said Paley was the first person she contacted about the economic development secretary job. 'He understands startups and founders and the innovation economy,' Hao said. 'He [also] cares deeply about Massachusetts. ... He's always been generous about trying to do more for the broader ecosystem.' Advertisement David Shapiro, chief executive of the YMCA of Greater Boston, had recruited Paley to join the Y's board. Now, Paley will have to step down from that role as well. 'This guy is brilliant as a strategist and a connector,' Shapiro said of Paley. 'Ultimately, I want the commonwealth to be an economically dynamic and vital place. I'm excited that this guy will be in that role.' As economic development secretary, Paley will directly oversee a staff of 700 people and will chair the boards of quasi-public agencies such as the Massachusetts Development Finance Agency (aka MassDevelopment) and the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative (aka MassTech). Paley's staff is starting to implement elements of last year's Hao's top lieutenant Ashley Stolba has been running the department on an interim basis, and the Healey administration expects her to stay in a senior leadership role. Paley isn't a complete stranger to state policy debates: He's been active in pushes to end or reform noncompete agreements, for example, and to try reining in bad-faith patent litigation. 'He's been at the forefront of our future economy,' said Katie Rae, chief executive of the Engine Ventures VC firm in Cambridge. 'If there's a problem to be solved, he's definitely a thinker people go to and somebody who will lend a hand.' Jon Chesto can be reached at
Business Insider
14-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Gaurav Jain wrote the playbook for pre-seed investing. A decade later, he's running one of the industry's most prolific early-stage funds.
For Gaurav Jain, there's no such thing as "too early" when it comes to making a VC investment. During the last decade, he's built a reputation as one of the most influential early-stage investors in venture capital: first at Founder Collective, and, since 2016, at Afore Capital, the fund he cofounded to make pre-seed investments at a time where rounds of at that size and dollar amount had a negative connotation in the industry. Since then, Afore has grown into one of the most active early-stage funds and has backed companies such as Modern Health, Neo, and Hightouch. Jain said he's always been obsessed with finding the right founders who had great ideas but weren't far enough along to raise a seed round. That thesis eventually became Afore Capital, he said. Jain ranked No. 2 on Business Insider's Seed 100 list for 2025, which was compiled using data from Termina. "A lot of founders were telling us that we were too early, but you need money to get traction, and you need traction to get money," Jain told Business Insider. "That became the genesis for us to start Afore Capital." A career at the early stage Jain, who was born in India, started his career at Google in 2009. He was one of the earliest product managers at the company's Android division when the mobile platform had fewer than 1 million users. While he was there, he led the Android Nexus product line, a range of phones and tablets that later became Google Pixel. Jain left Google in 2011 to attend Harvard Business School, with the goal of moving into the world of venture capital. He started working with Founder Collective, a seed-stage fund based in Boston, and joined the firm as principal when he graduated with his MBA in 2013. While at Founder Collective, Jain was directly involved in the firm's investments in Cruise, Socure, Firebase, Airtable, and Smyte. At the same time, Jain said he was meeting with plenty of founders who seemed like they'd be great bets but weren't yet at the size or scale to raise a seed funding round. At the time, pre-seed rounds weren't as common, and they sometimes carried a negative perception with investors because they were so risky. Jain, however, saw an opportunity in the market. "There was this gap in the market, where all of these first-time founders had no celebrity and no meaningful traction," he said. "I saw the problem firsthand, which is how we decided to create a fund dedicated to fixing it." Creating a market for pre-seed investing In 2016, Jain teamed up with Anamitra Banerji, a partner at Foundation Capital who'd been Twitter's 25th employee and the company's first product manager. The two cofounded Afore Capital, a fund specifically dedicated to investing in pre-seed startups. Afore currently has around $500 million in assets under management, and it closed its most recent fund, a $185 million Fund IV, in February. The firm writes checks of up to $2 million. Afore's portfolio includes Modern Health, a mental health benefits platform for employers that raised a $74 million Series D in 2021 and achieved unicorn status with a $1.17 billion valuation; the Canadian fintech Neo, which raised a 259 million in Canadian dollars Series D at the end of 2024; and the AI marketing platform Hightouch, which in Februrary raised $80 million at a $1.2 billion valuation. The firm's recent exits include Highlight, a web-monitoring app for developers that was acquired by the software development platform LaunchDarkly in April, and the AI supply-chain startup Factor, which was acquired by the supply-chain logistics platform Cofactr in March. While Afore is technically a generalist firm — when it comes to backing pre-seed startups, Jain said it doesn't have the luxury of building out an evolved thesis on a specific market or sector — it tends to gravitate toward software investments, which, today, means making a lot of AI bets. Jain added that it's much more important to identify strong founders, whose ideas might change five times before achieving product-market fit. "At the stage where we invest in, which is pre-traction and pre-revenue, what we are really investing in is the people," Jain said, adding that he looks for founders with a strong growth mindset who can iterate new ideas quickly and take setbacks in stride. To that end, Afore has a program to support "pre-idea" founders while they search for the right spark to build a startup. If the idea hits, the firm will eventually invest at minimum $100,00 or lead its pre-seed funding round. There's also a college version of the program, in which students can iterate on a startup idea with Afore support instead of completing a traditional summer internship. "At the pre-seed stage, it's crucial to give founders a safe space if things aren't working," Jain said. "We're backing you, not one rigid idea. We invest the time it takes to get to product-market fit, and our commitment is that we'll be the most active, hands-on investors you'll ever have."
