Called the Collaborative Fund, it will invest in startups focused on two themes: collaborative consumption and those which use their values as a competitive weapon. Collaborative consumption, explains Shapiro, is “this trend of businesses to extract value form existing resources.” Think of all the peer-to-peer sharing services out there that use the Internet to make existing economic resources more productive by making it easy to rent, share, or swap them. Examples include Zipcar (shared cars) and AirBnB (shared housing). The other related focus is on “brands that mean something.” The models here are companies like Zappos and Honest Tea that target Richard Florida calls the creative class. They live by values like happiness, authenticity, and transparency, which end up being a perfect way to market to consumers who don’t like to be marketed to.

To get the fund going, Shapiro rolled most of his own investments into the fund, including BankSimple (better banking through a better UI), Profounder (crowdsourced funding), Gobble (an AirBnB for food), Groundcrew (organize mobile teams), and MindSnacks (learning games for touch devices). He plans on making 4 to 6 seed investments a year, and may launch sister funds later to do any follow-on investing.

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Authors: Erick Schonfeld

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