What it’s like to work at Initialized

For the first time in its history, Initialized is doing an open search for new members of its investing team: a Principal and a Partner. Garry’s video covers what Initialized looks for in an investor. The other half of the equation is what we look for in a team member.

Our team works together very closely on everything we do – from investing to advising portfolio companies to developing new program ideas. Many of us have different backgrounds, communication preferences, and work styles. Our processes are built to encourage each person to express their unique perspective and for the group to drive to a decision (but not necessarily to consensus).

Consequently, our most important value is collaboration – each person needs to have empathy and active listening skills so that we can understand each others’ points of view. We will not always agree but we want to understand the opinion of each team member because each person is bringing unique experience or knowledge to the conversation. It’s worth noting here that our firm values diversity, equity, and inclusion. 50% of our senior investing team is women, family leave is taken by all partners (men or women) and we are always working to improve metrics on other fronts, both within the firm and across the portfolio.

Expert collaboration also applies to our work with founders – we want team members who we want to work with and that our founders also want to work with. If you are used to doing things in a silo, this is not the place for you. In addition, a large portion of the team’s job (Partners and Principals) is to work with the companies and help them achieve product-market fit. We do not have a separation between “investing” and “operating” teams – each person brings their own strengths and knows when to bring in other Partners for additional perspective.

Not only do we need people that we are excited to work with, we want people who we enjoy working with. Our team strives to be helpful and responsive to one another and to our founders and LPs. We want hardworking, low-ego individuals that can take ownership of projects large and small and get things done. We move quickly and these traits help us remain agile while also being organized.

In many ways we are a startup and you need to be able to deal with ambiguity. It also helps to be self-aware and focused on constant improvement; we always want to know how we can do better and we regularly interrogate our mistakes, errors, or biases to get better results for ourselves and everyone we work with.

Finally, as Garry mentioned in his video, an important part of the team is for each person to have good judgment and high personal standards. We employ a long-term mindset because we are building a new way of doing venture and we always have to consider how decisions affect the team and the portfolio in the long term.

If this all resonates with you, please apply to join our team. Choose the level that is most appropriate to your experiences and skills.