The Best of Panic: Garry Tan of Initialized Capital on Crazy Cap Tables, Crypto, Finding Balance in a World of Endless Opportunities and Much More

I’m taking a few weeks off the podcast circuit to go climb some mountains on my bike. Knut and I have produced over 200 podcasts starting in march 2020 and have not missed a week since. With my long trip to Europe and Israel ahead I decided to take a break and pick back up in October. Knut is thrilled about not having to see me and has turned the studio into a replica of a Norwegian whale fishing ship. In the meantime, I’ll be doing reruns of some of my Panic with Friends favorites, like this one with Garry Tan. This episode aired back in September of ’21. If you missed it when it first came out, now is a good time to catch up. I think you’ll really enjoy it. 

Garry is a unique individual I’ve only met a couple of times. He says he’s a fan of the show, so he knows how to sell. His resume is bananas – something we love on Panic with Friends; they may not be famous to everyone, but they’re famous to me! Garry is a Stanford Graduate, was at Y Combinator in the heyday, and was partners with Alexis Ohanian (founder of Reddit). If that weren’t enough, Garry was a seed investor in Coinbase. Oh, and Garry’s now part of my go-to list on the crypto space along with Fred Wilson and Chris Dixon.

You can listen to the podcast here on Spotify or Apple podcast and now all the episodes are on my YouTube channel as well. You can click subscribe on any of these channels and get the podcast alert each week.

You can also listen right here on the blog:

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More details on the podcast are below…

Guest: Garry Tan

Profile: Founder at Initialized Capital

Where to Find Him: Twitter, YouTube

What’s Garry Panicked About?: How many companies there are in the current Y Combinator.

Show Notes:

• Introduction (00:56)
• Welcome Garry (04:28)
• Best place to start a company (04:53)
• Early life in the Bay area (07:01)
• First ‘business’ (08:00)
• Achieving the American Dream (09:07)
• Garry’s first startup (10:58)
• Balance in a world of endless opportunity (17:30)
• Launching Initialized (18:42)
• Panic about Y Cominator (19:58)
• Work on hard, valuable and fun stuff (20:45)
• VC at $1 trillion in a decade (24:42)
• Lean startup / Fat startup (27:35)
• Crypto ups and downs (28:36)
• Seed round investing (31:28)
• Software runs the world (33:58)
• Transitioning the non-digital natives (35:18)
• Obscure industries drive the economy (35:56)
• Building a media platform (39:52)
• How Garry stays up to date (42:52)
• Sky NIMBy’s (44:26)
• Closing thoughts (49:25)
• Wrapping up  (54:18)

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