David Frankel | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Johannesburg, South Africa |
| Alma mater | Harvard University; University of the Witwatersrand |
| Occupation(s) | Entrepreneur Venture investor |
| Years active | 1993–present |
| Title | Co-founder and managing partner, Founder Collective |
| Website | foundercollective |
David Frankel (born 1970) is a South African-born American entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is the co-founder of Founder Collective, a seed-stage venture capital fund with offices in New York City and Cambridge.
Frankel was born and raised in Johannesburg. His paternal great-grandfather, Jacob Frankel, emigrated from Germany to South Africa in 1915 and in 1920 founded Tiger Oatery, a small milling company. His grandfather, Rudolph Leo Frankel, led the company as it expanded to become Tiger Brands, a South African conglomerate. [1] [2]
He attended King David High School, where he met his friend and future business partner, Alon Apteker. As adolescents, he and Apteker sold CDs and picture frames at a Johannesburg flea market. Frankel graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand with a BSc (honors) in Electrical Engineering in 1992. [3]
As a postgraduate, Frankel was selected for the US Foreign Fulbright Scholarship Programme and accepted to the MBA program at Harvard Business School. [4] Twenty-two at the time, he deferred his admission and remained in Johannesburg to gain professional experience. In 1993, he accepted a job offer from Altech, a technology company, where he worked for the COO. [5] [3]
In March 1994, Frankel left Altech to join Internet Solutions as its CEO. He also made a significant investment in the company, which was co-founded in late 1993 by Ronnie Apteker, Alon Apteker's brother. [6] He was noted for the "hard-nosed" approach he brought to Internet Solutions, which by 1997 had become the largest ISP and private data carrier in Africa, providing the internet backbone for more than 600 companies. Dimension Data (DiData) acquired 25% of Internet Solutions in 1995 and in 1997 acquired the remaining 75% of the company for ZAR 400 million. [7] Following the sale, Frankel was appointed executive director of ecommerce for DiData. He later served on the company's board of directors and in 2000 participated in its £1.8bn IPO and listing on the London Stock Exchange. [8] [9] Dimension Data was acquired by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone in 2010 for US $3.24bn. [10]
In 2001, after deferring admission twice, Frankel left Johannesburg to begin the MBA program at Harvard Business School. He maintained his seat on the DiData board of directors while at HBS, earning an MBA in 2003. Following his graduation, Frankel funded eight companies founded by his classmates, becoming the first investor in Chris Dixon's Site Advisor, and giving the first seed capital to Eric Paley and Micah Rosenbloom, the founders of Brontes. Brontes was sold to 3M for $95 million, and Site Advisor was acquired by McAfee for $75 million in 2005, a year after it was founded. [9] [11]
As an angel investor, he provided the first capital or term sheets for companies including OPower (acquired by Oracle), Media Radar, Volaris (NYSE: VLRS), New Dawn Satellite (acquired by Intelsat), and Context Optional (acquired by Adobe). He was a seed investor in TrialPay (acquired by Visa) and Hunch, founded by Dixon and acquired by eBay. He invested in Olo in 2004. The sole seed investor, he worked closely with the company’s founder, Noah Glass. The company went public in 2021 at a valuation of $3.2b. [12] [13] [14]
In 2008, Frankel partnered with Paley and other successful entrepreneurs to form Founder Collective, a seed-stage "peer-to-peer" venture fund. [15] [16] Based in Cambridge and New York, Frankel, Paley, and several limited partners used their own money to help create the first fund. Rosenbloom joined Founder Collective as a partner in 2013. [17] [18] [19] As of 2021, the company's portfolio included Uber (NYSE:UBER), TheTradeDesk (NYSE: TTD) and Airtable. [20] Frankel was the lead investor for Founder Collective in SeatGeek, BuzzFeed (NASDAQ:BZFD), Coupang (NYSE: CPNG), and PillPack (acquired by Amazon), among others. [21] [14] [22]
Frankel received the IT Executive of the Year award from the Computer Society of South Africa in 1998. [23] In 1999, he was named Technological Achiever of the Century by the Financial Mail for his role in "turning the internet in South Africa into a commercial proposition" and "bringing a business approach to an industry previously dominated by people with technical backgrounds." The World Economic Forum admitted him to the Global Leader of Tomorrow (GLT) program. [4]
Frankel has been named to the Midas List six times. In 2024, he appeared at #15 on the Midas List of the world's best venture capital investors [24] and at #2 on the list of seed investors. [25] He was listed at #5 on the Seed List and #11 on the Midas List of Top Tech Investors. [26] [27] [22]
Frankel was appointed to the board of directors of Rand Merchant Investment Holdings in 2018. He was previously a member of the Rand Merchant Bank board. [28] He is on the board of directors for Olo and SeatGeek, among others. He serves on the Dean's Advisory Council at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, [29] and has participated on the boards of several non-profit organizations including The Rashi School in Boston, Foundation 2000, the King David Schools Foundation and Endeavor South Africa. He was an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Harvard Business School Rock Center. [30]
Frankel served as the founding co-chairman of the Internet Service Providers Association of Africa (ISPA); he held a central role in the 1997 lawsuit that kept Telkom from monopolizing internet access in South Africa. [31] [32] He helped to create Endeavor SA, the South African arm of the global nonprofit Endeavor, which provides support to entrepreneurs in developing countries and emerging markets. [33] [34]
Frankel and his wife, Tracey Frankel, a neurologist, were married in 1998. [8] In 2019, they established the Tracey and David Frankel Chair in Urologic Oncology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. [35]
Frankel tested positive for Covid-19 in March 2020, He documented his experience on Twitter, stating in April that while the pandemic could bring innovation that would improve public health, there would likely be a trade-off in privacy. [36] [37]
Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in terms of number of employees, annual revenue, scale of operations, etc.. Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for equity, or an ownership stake. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing start-ups in the hopes that some of the companies they support will become successful. Because startups face high uncertainty, VC investments have high rates of failure. Start-ups are usually based on an innovative technology or business model and they are often from high technology industries, such as information technology (IT), clean technology or biotechnology.
Roelof F. Botha is a South African actuary, venture capitalist and company director.
Joshua Kopelman is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and philanthropist.
David F. Marquardt was a co-founder of venture capital firm August Capital in 1995. He has served on more than 35 boards of directors during his 40-year venture capital career including Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, Seagate, Adaptec, and Grand Junction Networks.
Index Ventures is a European venture capital firm with dual headquarters in San Francisco and London, investing in technology-enabled companies with a focus on e-commerce, fintech, mobility, gaming, infrastructure/AI, and security. Since its founding in 1996, the firm has invested in a number of companies and raised approximately $5.6 billion. Index Venture partners appear frequently on Forbes’ Midas List of the top tech investors in Europe and Israel.
Chris Dixon is an American internet entrepreneur and investor. He is a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, and previously worked at eBay. He is also the co-founder and former CEO of Hunch. He was #1 on the Midas List in 2022. Dixon is known as a cryptocurrency and Web3 evangelist.
Terry McGuire is a co-founder and general partner of Polaris Partners based in the Boston office. McGuire focuses on life sciences investments.
James W. Breyer is an American venture capitalist, founder and chief executive officer of Breyer Capital, an investment and venture philanthropy firm, and a former managing partner at Accel Partners, a venture capital firm. Breyer has invested in over 40 companies that have gone public or completed a merger, with some of these investments, including Facebook, earning over 100 times cost and many others over 25 times cost. On the Forbes 2021 list of the 400 richest Americans, he was ranked #389, with a net worth of US$2.9 billion.
Klaus Hommels is a German venture capitalist. He focuses on early and growth-stage investments and has founded his own venture capital fund by the name of Lakestar, through which he has been investing mainly in digital businesses. He has been invested in Facebook, Skype and Xing; other examples are Klarna and Revolut.
WantItAll.co.za is an online shop based in Johannesburg, South Africa that sells over 14 million products. Founded in 2006 by Justin Drennan, Ryan Drennan and Terence Murphy, the company received venture capital and investment from entrepreneurs David Frankel (entrepreneur) and Ronnie Apteker. WantItAll is ranked as the third largest web store in South Africa in terms of sales and the second largest in terms of visitors as per Alexa Internet rankings, with 200 000 customers and over 150 000 products shipped from the US to South Africa.
Danny Rimer OBE is a partner at Index Ventures, a global venture capital firm founded in Geneva in 1992. Rimer opened the firm's London office in 2002 and its San Francisco office in 2012. He has become a leading voice on venture capital in Silicon Valley and Europe, and has been actively involved in various philanthropic and cultural activities.
Neil Rimer is a Swiss-Canadian venture capitalist who is the founding partner at Index Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in Europe, the United States, and Israel. He is also the co-chair of the board of directors at Human Rights Watch.
Aileen Lee is a U.S. venture capital angel investor and co-founder of Cowboy Ventures.
Jonathan Lacoste is a venture capitalist and software entrepreneur based in Austin, TX. He is the Founder & General Partner at Space.VC, an early-stage venture capital fund specialized on space, defense, and frontier tech investments. Notable investments have included SpaceX, True Anomaly, and Loft Orbital. Previously, Jonathan was the Co-Founder of Jebbit, an enterprise software company he co-founded in 2011 with university classmates. He and co-founder Tom Coburn ran the company for 12 years before being acquired by Vista Equity Partners.
Initialized Capital is a venture capital fund founded in 2011 and headquartered in San Francisco. It was founded by Alexis Ohanian, Harjeet Taggar, and Garry Tan.
Gili Raanan is an Israeli venture capitalist and one of the inventors of CAPTCHA, the WAF and many other inventions in the fields of Cybersecurity. Raanan started Sanctum in 1997, and rolled out the first Web application firewall AppShield and the first Web application penetration testing software AppScan. He later started NLayers which was acquired by EMC Corporation where he worked on the science of Application discovery and understanding. He was an investor and a General Partner at Sequoia Capital, the Founder of Cyberstarts, and is the first investor and board member at Wiz (company), Adallom, Armis Security, Onavo, Moovit, and Innovid (NYSE:CTV).
Freestyle Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm based in San Francisco, California. General Partners Dave Samuel and Jenny Lefcourt are both entrepreneurs who entered venture capital after founding multiple companies. The firm was founded in 2009 and typically invests in 10-12 companies per year with an average investment between $1.5 million to $3 million. Previous investments include Intercom, Patreon, Narvar, Digit, Betterup, Airtable and Snapdocs.
Michael Eisenberg is an American-born Israeli businessman, venture capitalist, and author.
Anna Fang is a Chinese venture capitalist. She is the founding partner and CEO of ZhenFund.
Eric Paley is an American entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is the co-founder and managing partner of Founder Collective, a seed-stage venture capital fund based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.