Today, I’m very excited to return to Initialized Capital as a full-time General Partner alongside my longtime friend and collaborator Garry Tan.
Here’s a little history first. Initialized launched in 2011. Before that, Garry and I were having success as angel investors and founders kept telling us we were providing more value than other much better funded investors.
Before long, we’d raised $7 million for our first Initialized fund, which made seed investments into startups like Instacart and Coinbase. We were on to something.
Since then, we have grown to manage more than $250 million, which is invested in companies that are now worth more than $20 billion (including six unicorns, startups that are worth over one billion dollars). We’ve recruited a remarkable team of partners, and built a ton of software to scale all of the traditionally high-touch, and less scalable parts of the venture business to better serve our founders.
We want to be the first check and we want to do the work — we aspire to be the kind of investors we wish we’d had when we were founders. And after more than three years of serving back at Reddit, my first “baby” is in a much better position and has a great team in place.