The Ledger
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Lemkin: Initialized Capital's Fund II will achieve a 10x return
“Their fund two is going to be a 10 X fund, I think with flock safety rippling and others.”
Lemkin: Initialized Capital's early funds achieved up to 100x returns
“Initialize ones like 50 X tiny fund, maybe a hundred X and initialize to I bet is 10 X net for a big fund.”
Alexis Ohanian: Initialized could have returned Fund I by selling Zenefits
“I should have sold, we got, we could have returned the fund once over in whenever the fidelity markdown was, like literally putting an SPV together to sell Zenefits and then the markdown, the fidelity markdown happened and it killed the SPV. That was one, that…”
Rabois: Lost Rippling seed to Gary Tan over $10M valuation gap
“Rickling came in, Parker came in and we gave a term sheet. It was, you know, obviously controversial at the time, for the seed, and Gary Tan, initialized, also gave a term sheet. And at the time, there was about a ten million dollar gap. I probably offered fiv…”
Dishotsky: Initialized Capital deserves credit for calling out startup hustle porn culture
“And I actually have to give kudos to the initialized guys for taking down the notion of sort of hustle porn, as I would say. There's this concept in the valley that like you should just grind to the limits of your existence and think about yourself secondarily…”
Tan: Operational VC coaching adds more value at pre-seed than post-Series A
“Post series A, series B, and later in particular, it really is about care and feeding the organization. So as a company, you've already chosen your direction. In fact, often you've chosen your go-to-market. And so now it's about taking that go-to-market and sc…”
Tan: Founders with prior Initialized relationships perform three times better
“We actually ran the numbers recently and people who we worked very closely with previously, their startups outcomes are actually looking about three times better. Then the folks that we didn't have sort of that multi-year background and sort of process with.”
Initialized Capital requires two strong yeses or a GP silver bullet
“At initialized, all the GPs get silver bullets, you know, not unlimited ones, but you know, that's sort of the release valve. And then up the middle, we basically require two strong yes in that process.”
Initialized Capital will remain strictly focused on the 0-20 employee stage
“Yeah, I think we should be disciplined around, well, We really should focus on the zero to 20 employee sort of stage. I think there are tons and tons of people out there who are fantastically great scaling operator, like series A and later investors. But for u…”
Clarkson: I passed on Initialized Capital's first fund, which returned $390M
“So I passed on the initialized fund one because we had just launched, yes, I know. It was bad. But- Do you know, it made three hundred and ninety million.”
Ohanian: Seven Seven Six launched with team from Initialized Capital
“And then yes, very recently went out and brought a few of the folks over from initialized to launch a new firm, a seven, seven, six.”
Cohen: Initialized Capital is not yet actively investing in voice startups
“I'm not going to come out here and say that we invest in voice companies. We're really not sure yet, but it is a really interesting new platform.”
WorkRamp chose Initialized to apply consumer growth tactics to enterprise software
“We went to them because not because they were hardcore enterprise seed investors, but really because they understood consumer markets extremely well. And we wanted to apply those same growth strategies to the enterprise market”
Initialized targets 5% to 10% seed ownership to accommodate co-investors
“Between five, if we can target five to 10% ownership initially, that's still enough to bring in the SV Angels or the Fuel Capitals or other great investors that we especially like to work with.”
Initialized Capital targets 20 investments per year to maintain founder support
“For us, the right trade-off is we think that we can work with about 20 companies per year and really spend quite a lot of time with them bi-weekly to monthly meetings all the way through until they're Series A.”
Initialized is waiting for the next computing platform before big bets
“And so, you know, we are frankly are waiting for that platform and it's anyone's guess when that will be.”
Ohanian: Ohanian and Gary Tan hold stakes in each other's funds
“I'm a, I like, I'm a personal investor in the new, a reconstituted, initialized Gary's going to be or is an investor in seven, seven, six”
Ohanian: Initialized Capital invested in Coinbase's seed funding round
“There's a great Gary Tan story about Coinbase where we had done their seed round”
Ohanian: Initialized invested in WorkRamp for its unsexy, mandatory software
“The most recently publicly announced one would have been WorkRamp. And the reason why is because it's so unsexy and so mandatory. Basically, it's the easiest way to train and develop an employee.”