Welcome Back, Elliot Cohen
By David Frankel, Managing Partner
Over the last decade, we’ve had the great fortune to host an extraordinary roster of MBA investment associates. Some have gone on to leadership roles at portfolio companies, while others have founded companies of their own. We have former associates who have become partners at established VC firms and one who started his own fund. However, Elliot Cohen, the Co-founder/CTO of PillPack, has the unique distinction of being the only Founder Collective alumnus to go on to co-found what is now widely regarded as an industry game-changer.
When we started Founder Collective, we created a “Founder Partner” program that allows us to collaborate with the world’s best entrepreneurs in an ongoing, yet ad hoc basis. Elliot is the model of what we look for in this role; someone who is fully dedicated to building or running an important business, whose experience makes them a magnet for talented founders, as well as a repository of valuable insights. Today, we’re proud to announce that Elliot is our newest Founder Partner.
Truth be told, we witnessed Elliot’s intelligence and sophistication in the healthcare space long before the first dose of Omeprazole was shipped from PillPack HQ. During his summer as an associate, he pounded the table in support of Omada Health, a chronic disease management solution that has gone on to raise over $100M in VC and has set a high standard for publishing peer-reviewed research. On just that measure of success, we would have viewed Elliot’s tenure as a major success.
In the five years since Elliot graduated from MIT and finished his term at Founder Collective, he and the PillPack team have done more to change the pharmacy user experience than any company since CVS was started in the 1960s. As PillPack’s first investor and as a board member for most of the company’s existence, I saw Elliot combine the mind of an engineer and the soul of a poet to deliver a superior service to thousands upon thousands of patients who are dealing with everything from allergies to cancer. As part of Amazon, PillPack truly has the potential to change the way pharmaceuticals are dispensed across the globe, and we’re legitimately thrilled to have his vision and experience informing our team.
Venture capital is a business that trades in the future but is built on a foundation of relationships that can stretch back years, and even decades. While technology moves forward in a straight line, we’re thrilled when we can welcome old friends back into the fold. We first met Elliot when Parul Singh on our investment team, recruited him to take her place as a summer associate. After graduating from MIT Sloan, she went on to found a company and eventually, luckily, made her way back to us. Our LPs measure us based on our cash returns, but for us, we have few better indicators of our success than when the most talented people return to us with and for new opportunities.
Welcome home and thank you again, Elliot!
