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Introducing Initialized Capital

initialized.com

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Re: Introducing Initialized Capital

#11

Post by OoTheNigerian »

Congratulations Garry!

A few questions.

1. An obvious question is: Why start out on your own rather than via YC as you've done for a while and seems to have succeeded for you.

2. Would you actively seek investments from outside the United States? As you may well know, emerging markets are gaining a load of attention. In 3 months Nigeria would have hosted Zuckerberg, YCombinator and 500 Startups. (You're always welcome :D)

3. What's the investment thesis of Initialized. Didn't see an Investment Thesis on the website.

Congratulations and all the best!

PS: Not sure if you remember me but you were in the panel that interviewed me for YC in Summer 2014

Re: Introducing Initialized Capital

#13

Post by baccredited »

garry wrote: post #3

Hi HN! Happy to answer questions here, which is funny because this is where it all really started for me back in 2007 when I was first thinking of starting my first company. I started as an HN reader working at a friend's startup, applied to YC and got in, became a YC partner, and then an early stage investor. We're engineers and designers and product folks, and most investors aren't still (which is crazy, right?) so…

Hi Garry. I've invested in over 100 YC startups (mostly through Wefunder/FundersClub/Angel.co). Can I invest in your fund? Obviously I believe in the business model. If not where else should I be investing?

Re: Introducing Initialized Capital

#15

Post by pdog »

Congratulations! However, other seed funds have rejected potential investors because of their refusal to disavow and sever ties with Peter Thiel[1].

Will members of the Initialized Capital team publicly disavow and refuse to do business with Thiel?

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-10-24/peter-thi...

Re: Introducing Initialized Capital

#16

Post by garry »

OoTheNigerian wrote: post #11

Congratulations Garry! A few questions. 1. An obvious question is: Why start out on your own rather than via YC as you've done for a while and seems to have succeeded for you. 2. Would you actively seek investments from outside the United States? As you may well know, emerging markets are gaining a load of attention. In 3 months Nigeria would have hosted Zuckerberg, YCombinator and 500 Startups. (You're always welcom…

YC is awesome and I remain a super big supporter. I owe half my career and most of my friends to what an awesome family YC has become. What I realized was just that I could help companies the most in that 9 to 18 months you have after YC is done. I have a pet theory that in the next ten years, you're going to see the YC alumni turn into the most powerful set of investors in tech, and that'll be a good thing because we have a pretty strong shared culture around being good to founders and helping, and frankly doing no evil, which seems like it should be a basic thing for early stage investors but really isn't.

We have no specific mandate for US-only, and we think startups are absolutely happening everywhere and we want to help them.

An investment thesis at the early stage is really hard to do because we don't know what people are going to start when they're just a few people starting out. E.g. it would have been impossible to write an investment thesis that would include Coinbase early on because nobody was thinking about cryptocurrencies.

Thanks so much for your questions Oo!

Re: Introducing Initialized Capital

#18

Post by garry »

foobarqux wrote: post #14

Has one of the GPs directly invested in each of the startups listed on the "About Us" page or are some of those startups listed because of an advisory relationship or indirect investment (e.g. carried interest)?

We've invested in all of them, almost all of them in the earliest possible seed stage. (Small nit: Carried interest doesn't have anything to do with advisory shares.)

Re: Introducing Initialized Capital

#19

Post by thomasle0n »

garry wrote: post #8
soneca wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi Garry, congrats and good luck! My question: will you follow other investors pattern for whom only warm introductions matter? I read in the press other SV investors stating that exactly zero investments were made as a consequence of a pitch through the contact email. Will this be true to you as well? thanks!

We're trying to figure out ways to get around this for later stage seed investments. We don't have a solution yet, but we're working on it. In a thread below I talk about file cabinet industries — industries that basically have no software, and are horribly inefficient. Investing is absolutely one of those, but only using email and calendaring. The main bottleneck for investors is number of hours in the day, because…

"So, spoiler alert, software. :-)"

This got me thinking... I really do think that better tools for sourcing deal flow are a foundational component of the next age of entrepreneurship. Crowdfunding isn't working as precisely as some have hypothesized. I'd be really curious to see how companies like AngelList & Mattermark are parsing their data to determine correlative attributes of "fundable" companies. Any thoughts/ideas on traction toward successfully automating dealflow?

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