The Initialized team is leveling up with a new Partner & COO, and Operating Partner

I’m pleased to announce that Alda Leu Dennis and Brett Gibson have joined the Initialized Capital team.

A common refrain at our firm is that we’d be a pretty killer startup if we weren’t busy funding and advising tomorrow’s best early stage startups. Our partnership has expertise in almost every essential discipline needed to build high growth startups: engineering, design, product management, operations, legal, finance, communications and marketing.

We’re proud to say Alda and Brett are helping us get both deeper and wider on that front.

Alda Leu Dennis joins us as Partner & COO. She’s bringing decades of sharply honed legal and operating experience to both Initialized and our portfolio companies. She previously was a managing partner at 137 Ventures where she led investments in Planet Labs, Wish and CourseHero. Before that she was COO at Airtime, General Counsel at Founders Fund, Assistant General Counsel at Peter Thiel’s Clarium Capital Management, and practiced as a litigator for IP disputes at WSGR. She graduated from Stanford with bachelors degrees in economics and political science, and a JD from UCLA.

Brett Gibson joins us as Operating Partner for Engineering. He’ll be working closely with our portfolio helping them build world-class software teams, as well as build software that supercharges what we can do as a partnership and founder community. He co-founded both blog platforms Posthaven and Posterous (which was acquired by Twitter) and also worked closely with me on the Y Combinator software team, where the two of us built and re-wrote many of the essential software systems that run interviews, applications, events, and the internal alumni social network. He was a founder in the YC S08 batch with Slinkset, a link-sharing community site. Prior to that he cofounded DrawHere, a browser drawing startup acquired by DeviantArt in 2006. He graduated with a BA in philosophy from University of California, Santa Barbara.

Most venture capitalists end up lone-wolfing the way they do their business. We’ve built our team in a way where the opposite is true — when Initialized funds you, you’re not alone. You get the full force of our partnership to help you think through the engineering, design, product, marketing, legal, and strategic challenges that every startup must overcome.

A newly funded Initialized portfolio founder recently told us they got so much out of our team that they wanted to double check that they weren’t going to get a consulting bill. We laughed and said our investment check to them was all the compensation we needed.