1. An obvious question is: Why start out on your own rather than via YC as you've done for a while and seems to have succeeded for you.
2. Would you actively seek investments from outside the United States? As you may well know, emerging markets are gaining a load of attention. In 3 months Nigeria would have hosted Zuckerberg, YCombinator and 500 Startups. (You're always welcome :D)
3. What's the investment thesis of Initialized. Didn't see an Investment Thesis on the website.
Congratulations and all the best!
PS: Not sure if you remember me but you were in the panel that interviewed me for YC in Summer 2014
YC is awesome and I remain a super big supporter. I owe half my career and most of my friends to what an awesome family YC has become. What I realized was just that I could help companies the most in that 9 to 18 months you have after YC is done. I have a pet theory that in the next ten years, you're going to see the YC alumni turn into the most powerful set of investors in tech, and that'll be a good thing because we have a pretty strong shared culture around being good to founders and helping, and frankly doing no evil, which seems like it should be a basic thing for early stage investors but really isn't.
We have no specific mandate for US-only, and we think startups are absolutely happening everywhere and we want to help them.
An investment thesis at the early stage is really hard to do because we don't know what people are going to start when they're just a few people starting out. E.g. it would have been impossible to write an investment thesis that would include Coinbase early on because nobody was thinking about cryptocurrencies.
A few questions.
1. An obvious question is: Why start out on your own rather than via YC as you've done for a while and seems to have succeeded for you.
2. Would you actively seek investments from outside the United States? As you may well know, emerging markets are gaining a load of attention. In 3 months Nigeria would have hosted Zuckerberg, YCombinator and 500 Startups. (You're always welcome :D)
3. What's the investment thesis of Initialized. Didn't see an Investment Thesis on the website.
Congratulations and all the best!
PS: Not sure if you remember me but you were in the panel that interviewed me for YC in Summer 2014