President and Partner
Last May Jen was promoted to president and partner to manage and build the team while continuing to oversee the firm’s day-to-day operations. Jen is an active investor in companies such as AptDeco, Cohere, Narrator, and an unannounced stealth unicorn. She works closely with all our founders, lending her expertise in design and coaching founders on leadership issues like co-founder conflict, leading through a downturn, hiring diverse teams, and many other sensitive issues that could otherwise sink a company.
Jen is also the heart of Initialized, intentionally building a workplace and culture where collaboration, high-integrity, empathy, and diversity are top priorities.
Last year Jen launched a pioneering open hiring program to search for new investment team partners and principals — something non-existent in the VC world that has traditionally hired from the same small and exclusive networks. Her intent was to find people who best exemplify the firm’s culture and values from outside our networks, bring valuable expertise to our founders, and open up opportunities on our investing team for some exceptional people.
Jen is an experienced operator, executive, and builder, as well as an expert in design with 20 years of management experience under her belt.
Investment Manager
Brett has deep experience in enterprise SaaS and dev tools, and invests primarily in crypto and web3 companies. He’s mostly interested in the technical, infrastructure side of crypto, but also real uses, social applications, how people are adopting it, and how companies are handling data sovereignty and privacy. In his new role, he’ll oversee investments across all of our investing sectors.
He’s led deals for companies such as Bison Trails, Talos, TRM, Hummingbot, CoinTracker, Fly.io, Alliance DAO, Paper, and non-crypto companies like Depict.ai, Albedo, and Rescale.
Brett is extremely sympathetic to what our companies need as they go through the VC process and as they grow their business. He invests in people first and seeks talented founders who are intellectually honest and straightforward, with completeness around their vision and an obsession and deep focus on what they’re building. Our founders appreciate Brett’s credibility and know he’ll go to bat for them.