Congrats to Garry and the Team. Garry was one of our partners during YC W15 - he was incredibly insightful on product and design, generous with his time, and just plain nice throughout.
Thank you so much Dan! Really appreciate it.
Introducing Initialized Capital
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Re: Introducing Initialized Capital
#22Congrats Gary! Will you be sharing your deal flow or syndicating any of your deals?
Re: Introducing Initialized Capital
#23I met Garry in 2014 during YC. After our first office hours with him, I knew Garry would be a valuable go-to. He's a legit advisor because he can dig in at any level with you - founder stuff, company, go to market, users, working with big companies, design/code, hiring, raising money, prioritization, etc, etc. Part of that comes from being a YC partner and seeing that large sample size of startup problems. But he has also built inspiring products, led teams at large companies, is a brilliant developer and designer, and flat out an all around great guy.
So for me, this announcement is bittersweet. Initialized will be great for so many early stage founders, but now I don't have a simple way to book office hours with Garry. Well actually, I bet if I shoot him a message, he'd still be glad to help anytime.
Re: Introducing Initialized Capital
#24I met Garry in 2014 during YC. After our first office hours with him, I knew Garry would be a valuable go-to. He's a legit advisor because he can dig in at any level with you - founder stuff, company, go to market, users, working with big companies, design/code, hiring, raising money, prioritization, etc, etc. Part of that comes from being a YC partner and seeing that large sample size of startup problems. But he has…
Thank you so much Paul! Yes, you know where to find me. :-)
Re: Introducing Initialized Capital
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
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/i…
I have been building my own mini version of Mattermark as a curiosity project. I'm not even interested in deal flow as much as being able to predict rising startups. In terms of being a software engineer, I look at this is a career tool.
I'm sure the bigger VCs and accelerators are building interesting things in this space but I haven't found much that's open source.
As data points, AngelList and Crunchbase are good starting places, but the AngelList API is private and the Crunchbase API is paid.
Re: Introducing Initialized Capital
#26Congrats Gary! Will you be sharing your deal flow or syndicating any of your deals?
We're trying to figure this out now — we're friends with both FundersClub and AngelList folks and it's something we've been talking about.
Re: Introducing Initialized Capital
#27For full transparency: I was Garry's Chief of Staff for 2 years before joining YC.
Garry and Alexis are the most founder friendly investors I've ever had the pleasure of working with. Late nights and early mornings in every time zone were normal for them. When I managed Garry's schedule, he held 3-5 hour blocks every single day to talk to founders. Then, in addition, we'd squeeze in as many calls and meetings the schedule would allow to speak with founders who reached out cold asking for general advice. A nightmare logistically sometimes, but a true testament to just how much they care about helping others.
When stereotypes of fund investors are that they are sluggish to make investments, quick and impatient when it comes to vetting teams and products, it is refreshing to see that Garry and co consistently break that view with their founder-first approach.
It might be an understatement for me to say that I'd recommend Initialized to any founder!
Re: Introducing Initialized Capital
#28Hey 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.
Re: Introducing Initialized Capital
#29very cool. i know you guys mention startups, and IMO thats a pretty generally encompassing term. would that include game development?
Re: Introducing Initialized Capital
#30Has 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.)
The sentence was a bit ambiguous. I should have written "or other indirect investment, like carried interest" to be clear.