Different Gravy: Garry Tan

“Different Gravy” (working name) is a new series of posts about companies and people who are doing something extremely cool in their field, and we, common peeps, know nothing about it. I’ll have to start with an extremely biased take and talk about one of, in my opinion, coolest VC investors that I’ve seen: Garry Tan.

The Whens and Whereabouts

Let’s start with some googlable basics: Garry Tan is a Malaysian-born American entrepreneur and investor. He is the co-founder and former CEO of Posterous, a microblogging platform acquired by Twitter in 2012, and the founder of Initialized Capital, an early-stage venture fund.

Tan was born in Malaysia and immigrated to the United States with his family at age 11. Following a textbook path of an immigrant success stury, he attended Stanford University, where he studied computer science, and after graduation, he worked as a software engineer at Yahoo! and Google.

In 2008, he left Google to launch Posterous with fellow Stanford alum Sachin Agarwal. Posterous was acquired by Twitter in 2012 for an undisclosed sum, which seemingly was enough to put him on a right track towardsc VC. But before that, Tan joined Twitter as a product manager.

He left Twitter in 2013 to start Initialized Capital with Alexis Ohanian, another co-founder of Posterous. Initialized Capital has invested in over 100 companies, including Coinbase, Cruise Automation, Instacart, and OpenDoor. As of 2019, the firm has $1 billion in assets under management.

So what’s the fun part?

Well, Garry’s Initialized Capital is one of the hottest VC funds there are (and my dream workplace) for a number of successes:

1. Coinbase. That’s a love story orchestrated by Garry Tan himself — he pushed through the qualms of Y Combinator to get CB accepted there, he wrote 50k check from his very first fund despite Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston being against that (Founders of YC). It all came down successfully as now Garry still holds a share of Coinbase, ultimately turning a pre-seed check into one of the most successful investments of the 21st century so far.
2. CreatorDAO. That’s a shot for the future, but nevertheless, CreatorDAO check is among the most interesting investments of Garry’s fund in the past few years, marking the successful establishment of DAOs as a direction of investments for the big funds such as IC.
3. Cruise Automation. By coming in with a check, IC secured themselves good multiples on Cruise Automation, a company whose worth is in tens of billions of dollars.

But aside from obvious successes of his company, Garry Tan strikes me with few qualities that I’d want to either inherit or just admire.

• Openness to a discussion. Over the years, Garry has appeared on numerous popualr podcasts either directly in his field or in tech generally, with “Panic with Friends,” “Invest Like the Best” and “This Week in Startups” just to name a few. On each of them, Garry shared his points and was very oped for a dialogue and people challenging his POVs on crypto, investment and more.
• Media presence. While not being a 24/7 user of Twitter and other socials, Garry manages to impact the space around with his tweets and videos on a variety of topics, and managed to grow an auditory of over 250k — something that all the fund managers strive to do to increase their outreach, provide more dealflow and improve the network. That’s only twitter, but Garry also has a whooly succesful YouTube channel, where he conducts short interviews with people of his own interest.
• Vision for success. Despite Garry wearing glasses, he’s one of the visionaries when it comes to early-stage investment with cases I mentioned earlier. The way that this man sees opportunities puts him in the same line with Levy Raiz of Digital Horizon and Peter Thiel of Founders Fund as some of the best investors the 21st century produced thus far. Who knows, maybe one of you, readers, would stand in this line as well.

What’s the conclusion?

Sometimes you don’t have to come from a flashy backgrounds and have 8-figure exits to be a good GP — being an understanding person with analytical background and eye for success might just be enough to convince people to give you some money to try out for the first fund, which in Garry’s case was $7 million — nothing in today’s market.

But the rest,

Well, the rest was history.