Garry Tan


Garry Tan is the co-founder of Initialized Capital. He previously co-founded Posterous and Posthaven. He was also a partner at Y Combinator from 2011 to 2015.

Early life and education

He attended Stanford University from 1999 to 2003, and graduated with a degree in Computer Systems Engineering. While in high school and college, he served as a software engineer intern at Sapient, TheMan.com, and Sun Microsystems.

Career

From 2003 to 2005, he was a Program Manager at Microsoft for Windows Mobile. From 2005 to 2007, he helped cofound the financial analysis platform at Palantir Technologies.
In 2008, Tan co-founded Posterous, a blogging platform, which raised $5 million and was acquired by Twitter in 2012. He co-founded Posthaven after the shutdown of Posterous. He joined Y Combinator in 2011 as a designer in residence but was quickly promoted to partner, where he stayed until November 2015. While he was a partner at Y Combinator, he helped manage 54 investments, such as Instacart and Coinbase. He also helped compile a directory of "the best and the brightest interaction designers and visual designers". On August 1, 2013, he, along with Harjeet Taggar and reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian have raised $39 million for a separate fund called Initialized Capital, which looks for high-quality founders first and then tries to see if they can help or understand the market of a company.
In 2018, Tan was listed at #21 on the Forbes Midas List.