Garry was one of the first investors in Coinbase and acted as my CEO coach for the first ~6 months of the business, during a very stressful time. He was incredibly helpful to us early on! Would recommend them as a firm.
Introducing Initialized Capital
111–120 of 155 posts
Re: Introducing Initialized Capital
#112Garry and Alexis were early believers in Cleanly and have been incredible seed investors. Highly recommend them if you can get them on your side.
Re: Introducing Initialized Capital
#113Garry and Alexis have been a huge help in getting Priime started, and have consistently given us solid feedback along the way. I can't say enough how excited I am to see them launch. Congrats guys!
Re: Introducing Initialized Capital
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
One talk I like to give at college campuses is such: A startup is like the obscure 1990's Playstation game Katamari Damacy. You start off with a small magic ball about the size of a pencil eraser. You can pick up anything smaller than you, but if you try to pick up something too big, you bounce off and get smaller. You start picking up paperclips and chess pieces, and then by the end of the game (spoiler alert) you e…
Upvoting this because of the Katamari Damacy shout out! Unrelated, but did you ever play Nobi Nobi Boy from the same creator?
Yes, a long time ago — I forgot what it was called but thanks for the reminder! My 15 mo old at home will love it!
Re: Introducing Initialized Capital
#115Hey Init! Congrats on the launch. Curious, have you funded any startups under Init? If I had to guess, "Our Startups" are startups you (Garry / Alexis /et al) personally invested in.
I noticed that and felt it was a bit disingenuous; it's not as though Instacart (for example) interacted with or benefited from Initialized Capital in its early stages, and the relationships between Instacart and the Init team members who once invested in them are not necessarily good proxies for the type of service Init will provide new startups.
That's not actually true, we invested in their seed round directly from Initialized Capital. Apoorva's in the thread above with a testimonial. :-)
Re: Introducing Initialized Capital
#116Initialized is venture capital without the attitude. Garry has been an incredible advisor to us ever since our first YC interview (he and Alexis were both there actually). Could not imagine a more down to earth, insightful and energetic group. Congrats!
Re: Introducing Initialized Capital
#117garry and alexis are two of the best in the valley! a big congrats for all your hard work :)
Re: Introducing Initialized Capital
#118Congrats Garry, Alexis and team. Just to add another anecdote: We are backed by Initialized coming out of YC S16 batch. Incredibly awesome to work with such founder friendly investors. I'm sure the perspective that Garry/Alexis gained by going through YC themselves gives them this sort of empathy towards other founders.
Re: Introducing Initialized Capital
#119Earlier 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…
Regarding software, have you guys used Gust [1]?
Re: Introducing Initialized Capital
#120Sanjay here from Boosted S12. Garry and Alexis and team were one of our first investors and have been some of the best people we've worked with. I am so excited for them and for all the new founders who will get to work with them.