Scooter Investors Alexis Ohanian and Garry Tan on What They Seek in Start-ups
*By Carlo Versano*
When Alexis Ohanian and Garry Tan, the co-founders of the early-stage VC firm Initialized Capital, consider seeding companies, they think about software.
"Every single piece of GDP will be eaten by a software company," Tan told Cheddar in an interview from the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal ー the only question is, whether it'll be an incumbent or a start-up.
So while the firms they invest in ー companies like Instacart, Skip, GM Cruise, and Coinbase ー are as varied as can be, they all have great software at their core, Tan said.
Ohanian, who also co-founded Reddit, expanded on some of those investments ー like Skip, one of two providers of e-scooters in San Francisco. He's bullish on the red-hot scooter industry because of the so-called "last mile problem" in mobility.
"Even the best car-sharing with the most autonomous, smartest vehicles isn't really designed to solve" what simple scooter fleets can, he said.
Initialized is "investing for the long-term" with Skip, which Ohanian credits with pioneering the hardware and software platforms that make scooters possible. And Skip is showing that transportation start-ups can successfully work with government in both deploying and scaling. They "learned the lessons the hard way from ride sharing," he said.
Tan and Ohanian have long been at the forefront of the crypto craze, and they remain unfazed by recent softening in Bitcoin.
"We're in crypto winter," Tan said, noting that there was a similar period five years ago, which led to the creation of Ethereum. "That's the kind of thing we think will happen again."
Ohanian and Tan like to think of themselves of contrarians in the world of venture capital, where they like to take chances on "real builders and real makers" and founders that follow their own ethos.
"We've never really cared what the rest of the industry thinks is good," Ohanian said. "We make up our own minds."
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/vc-insiders-share-what-they-look-for-in-start-ups).
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