Turning it to 11

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Turning it to 11

For Initialized’s future, Tan hopes to see the firm he co-founded outlast all its original partners. He nods to Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston, Y Combinator’s founders, who eventually stepped away from day-to-day roles, only to see their creation grow. “I never wanted it to be just the ‘me show,’ or the ‘Alexis show,’” says Tan.

The latter part is easier now, as Tan’s long-time business partner Ohanian departed Initialized to start a new firm, Seven Seven Six. The split wasn’t easy: Tan calls it a “conscious separation,” terminology reminiscent of Gwyneth Paltrow’s famous description of her own split with singer Chris Martin. Ohanian preferred a smaller, more autonomous investment approach, says Tan; he hopes instead to keep growing Initialized, taking a consensus-driven, multi-stage approach. Executive coaches helped the duo with the transition. “We started thinking about the world in slightly different ways, but we also wanted to support each other,” says Tan.

Ironically, a big part of Tan’s strategy for building Initialized feels similar to Ohanian’s approach to his new firm, his marriage to tennis legend Serena Williams, and advocacy on a range of issues including parental workplace rights: “turn it to 11,” especially on social media. Initialized prides itself on supporting its companies with public relations, Tan says; on a personal level, Tan has invested heavily in his time and resources into building a presence on YouTube, where he has 77,000 subscribers; Twitter, where he has 150,000-plus; and Clubhouse, where he has 188,000. After years producing it all himself, Tan hired a producer earlier this year for his videos and works with an editor to get out content each week.

“We’ve clearly learned over the past 10 years that every business is still a meme,” says Tan. “And if we the VCs can help make that meme, that helps with customers, with employees, that’s actually a big part of the war to get the best engineers, designers and product people to work at these places.”

Highlighting founders on his channels has led to them hiring top executives or meeting board-level investors, Tan says; even his educational content creates a positive feedback loop of happy entrepreneurs and referrers of deal flow. “I basically just try to put out content that doesn’t bore me,” he says. “It’s powerful to be able to click a button and have 1,000 people listening to whatever I want to talk about.”

To build on Initialized’s past success, Tan will have to compete with a market that’s seen a record amount of funding flow into startups in recent months. His final lesson from Coinbase’s early struggle to raise money is one helpful to would-be investors and entrepreneurs starting out alike: “The limiting reagent isn’t capital, clearly,” Tan says. “The limiting reagent is actually good investors who won’t eff up companies.”

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