#10 — Garry Tan — Building the world you want to live in

Episode details

Garry Tan (@garrytan) is a designer and engineer turned early stage investor as a Managing Partner and co-founder at Initialized Capital. While recording from our coronavirus bunkers, Garry and I chatted about building the world you want to live in, how refugee ancestors has influenced his worldview, navigating the idea maze as a founder, his $200M mistake and how parenthood has changed his life. In 2019, Tan was listed at #21 on the Forbes Midas List having invested in Instacart, Coinbase, Flexport, Plangrid, Hellosign and many others. Prior to founding Initialized, Garry was a partner at Y Combinator for nearly five years where he advised and funded over 600 companies and more than a thousand founders. He was cofounder of YC-backed blog platform Posterous (Top 200 Quantcast site, acquired by Twitter in 2012). Before that he was employee #10 at Palantir, where he was a founding member of the engineering team for Palantir's financial analysis product, and also designed Palantir's logo. He has a BS in Computer Systems Engineering from Stanford and you can find him on his weekly startup vlog on YouTube and Instagram and his videos are packed with valuable advice for entrepreneurs. Garry is incredibly talented and insightful and I think what struck me most about our conversation is how humble, thoughtful and empathetic he is. Hope you enjoy this episode with Garry Tan.