A personal update: I am happy and excited to share that I’ve joined the Initialized Capital team as a partner focusing on SaaS, health tech and analytics.

I spent the past few months on “walkabout” -- trying to decide if I wanted to go back to operating or continue investing. Getting back in the trenches with the amazing, spirited, and talented team at Smalls was energizing — and reminded me that I’m motivated, more than anything else by building, and that will always be true.  

But as I got to know Garry and the Initialized team over the past eight months, it was impossible not to feel an incredible fit. (Check out Garry’s YouTube interview of me here.). I am thankful for having had the chance to learn the craft of venture capital over the past five years from David, Eric and Micah at Founder Collective, and I’m everlastingly grateful to them for all their support.  Yet I’ve been itching to be even more hands-on.

As an investor, I have been known to:

• QA test a new product launch

• Proofread sales and fundraising decks or marketing copy

• Create product strategy documents and decision-making frameworks for my early teams

• Pinch hit on product and operations

• Send annoyingly detailed product feedback (can’t get too far from my UX developer roots) 😜

Not every team needs this.  As much as I try to be there for my companies when they need me, investors also need to let founders run their companies their way. Sometimes assisting, cheering on and strategizing from the sidelines while the team is building is the right thing to do. And it’s good to know I can help with more if they need it.

I will always be a builder at heart, and that is what drew me to Initialized.  The entire Initialized team are builder-investors and we take turns pitching in for those really early teams, where it makes a tremendous difference to be able to get to the right person, the right answer, the right resource at the opportune moment. In a world of hands-off capital, it's more natural and plays to my strengths to be hands on.

I’m so happy and grateful for how warmly I’ve been welcomed into the Initialized family and eager to start taking pitches again.  Here are some investing areas I’m particularly interested in at the moment.

Consumerized, data-driven healthcare:

While I continue to be engaged by value based care and models which disintermediate insurers (previously I invested in startups like Flume Health — doing the latter), but even more exciting has been seeing new health care models and technologies bypass payers completely and go direct to consumers, who have been very eager to “break the wheel”.  A lot of forces have speeded up healthcare innovation and adoption in the past year.   And meanwhile, wearables have gone from biohacking to the mainstream. 

Verticalized, data tooling and workflow-oriented SaaS:

I’ve been building enterprise workflow tools since my first startup in college, and there are a few more innings yet to go.  What else will software touch?  I’m eager to see how founders will use the new SaaS growth playbooks we’ve amassed over the past few years, and what’s around the corner.

Companies where data is the key asset:  

As a society, we run the risk of drowning in data.  But it’s still breathtaking to see a founder taking an unexpected micro-slice of that data and providing unique value.  Whether these are prosumer tools for SMBs to manage their marketing spend, DTC businesses with a unique angle on using data to better serve customers, or new use cases for personal or health data, I’m here for it.  Also, consumers will want to see their data managed more responsibly this decade than the last one.

If you’re building something interesting, get in touch - as always my twitter DMs are open.