Initialized Capital

Profile

We are builders & founders
We’re founders and builders here to help others create and scale transformative companies.

We built the team that we wish we had in our corner when we founded our first companies.

Venture is an antiquated industry, so we’re using software to scale the un-scaleable parts of our business in order to better help our founders and make best use of our all-star team’s time.

Our partners — leveled up through software — are a hive mind to serve founders, who in turn help us see the future.

We've helped more founders build startups at the earliest possible stage than most anyone you'll meet

Initialized’s founder and managing partner, Garry Tan, evaluated more than 6,000 startups as an early partner at Y Combinator.

He was part of Y Combinator as it grew from a little-known entrepreneurial program into Silicon Valley’s best-known and regarded network for early-stage technology startups. He also built their internal software system, Bookface, and conceptualized Continuity, their late-stage funding program.

Garry then built Initialized Capital into a standalone San Francisco-based early-stage venture capital firm with $1B assets under management and more than 200 companies in the portfolio.

We've helped more founders build startups at the earliest possible stage than most anyone you'll meet, and that means we can help startups avoid the 1,000 landmines that can cause certain failure. A lot of great investors, advisors, founders, and friends have helped us along the way.

Initialized hosts both small and large events bringing together people from our portfolio and community on subjects ranging from how to manage engineers, to how to build a design identity and set of guidelines, to how office space impacts your company culture. We also have regular founder dinners and happy hours to build camaraderie in the portfolio so that our family of entrepreneurs can easily turn to each other for advice.

We've helped more founders build startups at the earliest possible stage than most anyone you'll meet, and that means we can help startups avoid the 1,000 landmines that can cause certain failure.

We focus on investing in high-potential software startups at seed stage and earlier, with small teams that include great engineers, designers and product founders. Many companies come to us when they are just two or four people, and we help them get from there to their Series A or B rounds and beyond.

If you have an idea that is not reflected in our current portfolio, don’t be dissuaded from pitching us. We’re a firm that has often discovered the next technology wave through the talent in our network. For example, we knew Brian Armstrong through his work on risk management and fraud detection at Airbnb. But his next company had nothing to do with travel or hospitality — it was Coinbase, which has become one of the pre-eminent ways to hold, invest and trade Bitcoin and Ethereum in the world.