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brett gibson Profile
brett gibson

@brettdg

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472
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945
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Managing Partner, @Initialized

SF
Joined June 2009
Don't wanna be here? Send us removal request.
@brettdg
brett gibson
3 years
The term “operator” is still so strange to me. No one working at a startup describes themself as such, only VCs who used to work at startups.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
5 years
I remember learning this the hard way as a founder. Thinking you’re out of options is often a function of morale more than anything else.
@AriannaSimpson
AriannaSimpson.eth
5 years
There is always an ace or a wild card to pull.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
5 years
There’s a literal bull at this crypto conference.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
5 years
I'm very much looking forward to watching what happens next with @BisonTrails
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@brettdg
brett gibson
1 year
LLMs are poised to burn whatever commons are left for entirely cold outreach. Unless something comes from a known social graph or publicly verified identity it will be hard to assume it's not mass spam.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
1 year
Been thinking a lot about how LLM powered programming likely leads to smaller software teams and what that implies. A few mixed up ideas 1/n
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@brettdg
brett gibson
4 years
I've started to conceptualize the progression from seed to series a/b/c/d as a continuum from narrative based fundraises to spreadsheet based fundraises.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
1 year
Fun (and often fair) to criticize VCs for inauthentically hopping on trends but feels like we're rapidly headed toward all tech investors needing some AI fluency regardless of their focus area.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
3 years
nobody move
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@brettdg
brett gibson
3 years
After months of playing just for fun, kind of amazing to now actually own the cards I win. Congrats on getting to mainnet @SkyweaverGame !
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@brettdg
brett gibson
5 years
I’m thankful for how well we’re all looking out for this duck.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
5 years
I'm increasingly convinced that gold is about scarcity but money is about distribution.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
5 years
Excited to be joining!
@Stacks
stacks.btc
5 years
We're excited to announce that Brett Gibson, Partner at Initialized Capital, will be joining the investment panel at #BlockstackSummit2019 . Listen to the discussion from 2017 & join us on Oct 23rd: . @brettdg @Initialized
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@brettdg
brett gibson
4 years
Feeling really fortunate for all the ways Garry and I found to work together over the last decade+.
@garrytan
Garry Tan
4 years
FIVE ALIVE... proud to be able to say how glad I am to call Brett Gibson ( @brettdg ) a fellow general partner at Initialized.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
1 year
Delighted to be working with @_aj , @MiguelriosEN and the @ParchaHQ team! I first met AJ during our S08 YC batch, I've always known him to move crazy fast, and have only seen more of the same from him and Miguel at Parcha.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
6 years
Super interesting @ETHSanFrancisco talk by my @Initialized partner @vincentchu about using Whisper w/ WebRTC
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@brettdg
brett gibson
3 years
It’s like I now have a special term to describe a previous state that most of my life I thought of as “having a job”.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
3 years
Learnings: - Raising money for your auction bid via public crowdfunding in a volatile asset is strategically disadvantageous - Sotheby's thinks ETH is money
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@brettdg
brett gibson
5 years
It seems a little crazy to me to be moving forward with Eth 2.0 w/o a precise solution for how phase 2 will address contract composability
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@brettdg
brett gibson
2 years
I finally bit on the LinkedIn premium free trial and I'm entirely at a loss about what is different. I feel like I've been assigned a research project to figure out why I'd want to pay them.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
3 years
Very excited to be able to announce our investment in Hummingbot. Been talking to a few people lately about how disintermediation may have a fundamental relationship with fragmentation. If that’s true liquidity in the long tail is crucial.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
3 months
Different era in that the entire internal dev team was just me for a bit, but writing software at YC was an amazing experience and important part of my career. Few orgs that don't directly monetize software take it as seriously and have it as thoroughly engrained in their DNA.
@rchoi
Ryan Choi 🐢💵
3 months
(1/5) We’ve got 3 more full-stack eng positions open here @ycombinator . Being on this team and helping hire for YC has let me work alongside some of the brightest, kindest and most ambitious people I know – and that’s just YC employees! 🥰
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@brettdg
brett gibson
9 months
I wonder how much R&D went into ensuring airpods explode out as far as possible when the case hits the ground. It's impressive and seems to get better each new model.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
5 years
It’s possible widespread crypto adoption requires crypto native generations coming of age while crypto unfriendly generations die out.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
2 years
Amazing news from @Albedo . A pleasure to be able to continue to support this team and have @Breakthrough and @ShieldCapVC on-board.
@Albedo
Albedo
2 years
We are thrilled to announce our $48M Series A co-led by @Breakthrough Energy Ventures and @ShieldCapVC . It’s time to build!
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@brettdg
brett gibson
1 year
Late to it but finally getting around to coding w/ GPT-4 (and a little CoPilot) has me preoccupied with wanting to code a lot more.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
1 year
Seed stage valuations went down but the YC deal did not change. So the YC deal became an even better deal. This does not seem like a setup that would result in YC startup quality going down.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
2 years
Intellectually I tend to entirely agree with all the arguments as to why value capture in generative AI will be difficult for startups. But I can't help also hearing Jeff Goldblum's voice in the back of my mind saying "life, uhh, finds a way".
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@brettdg
brett gibson
5 years
If ever you find yourself waiting out a typhoon with the hotel restaurant and all nearby businesses (rightly) closed, I can recommend @SkyWeaverGame
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@brettdg
brett gibson
6 years
If a fiat backed ERC20 token gets large enough its owners could become the de facto arbiter of Ethereum forks.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
5 years
I'm excited to head to Singapore Nov 12-13 to speak at The Capital @coinmarketcap Global Conference. #TheCapital
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@brettdg
brett gibson
1 year
Putting aside it clearly being some sort of political act, I am struck that putting cones on AVs because they then stop moving seems almost designed to demonstrate that a) AV operation is biased toward safety and b) humans often behave erratically.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
4 years
Thrilled for @JoeLallouz , @aaronhenshaw and the team at @BisonTrails . Watching the breakneck execution since @Initialized invested has been a privilege. Enormous win for @coinbase to bring them in house.
@BisonTrails
Bison Trails
4 years
1/ Today, we’re incredibly excited to share the news that Bison Trails will be joining @Coinbase as a standalone product line: the foundation of Coinbase’s infrastructure suite to advance the crypto ecosystem.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
3 years
The transition to Alliance DAO feels huge, lucky to be a part of it.
@alliancedao
Alliance
3 years
1) 📢 Announcing Alliance DAO 📢 DeFi Alliance and hundreds of other top builders are coming together to form Alliance, the world's first digital startup nation, to accelerate the best Web3 startups.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
10 months
VCs are going to have to start watching foundational model co's product announcements like public market investors watch earnings/jobs/the fed
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@brettdg
brett gibson
5 years
Great to announce our investment in @sparkswap and talk their impressive technical achievement of launching an exchange built on atomic swaps.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
1 year
brb adding "why won't this be supplanted by AI?" to our memo template
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@brettdg
brett gibson
1 year
Allowing investors to do your job for you early on is way riskier than it might feel. Experienced founders never do this for a reason.
@garrytan
Garry Tan
1 year
The classic view is actually make your own space and build your own culture. Coworking spaces are generally with bad startups. The median startup fails. You have to be a superlative startup. Don’t average yourself down to the median. YC won’t infantilize founders.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
5 years
Excited to see the new DDEX platform with margin trading launched! I tried the beta and found it really easy to created margin positions.
@protocol_hydro
Hydro Protocol
5 years
We are thrilled to announce that the New DDEX platfrom is officially live! Try it now at The New DDEX is a decentralized margin trading and lending platform. You can learn more here: #DeFi #Exchange #DEX #Eth #Ethereum
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@brettdg
brett gibson
3 years
Beyond the wanton inclusion of violence, what is weird about this is how mundane or is. If no one was left who thinks Bitcoin is valuable it would cease to be valuable. That’s true of... ...literally anything valuable.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
5 years
If you’re in my life and considering an intervention about my attending blockchain weeks problem, I’m ready to listen.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
2 years
Really interesting take. Thinking about it I'm mildly surprised that it now feels like we have line of sight to many crypto businesses not needing banks.
@js_horne
jacob
2 years
Coinbase is like three features away from being able to bank every crypto startup and employee in the U.S.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
1 year
Wow is the voice impersonation fraud and spear phishing going to get nuts. Having been on a podcast may become a liability.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
2 years
Extremely fortunate to be working with @attiathehun and the team at @Synquote . The pace at which they're shipping stuff is intense.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
2 years
Awesome the news is out about @Initialized 's investment in @papercheckout . A lot of great opportunities here w/ an extremely fast moving team.
@papercheckout
Paper
2 years
We are excited to announce our $9.3M Seed round to accelerate the world towards more accessible and useful NFTs! Want to join us on this journey to build something special? We are hiring across 🔧engineering, 📈growth, and ⚙️operations.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
5 years
I talk to Joe and Aaron pretty often and still found this quite informative. If you're looking for a primer on the validator ecosystem for staking networks this is a good one.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
5 years
This weekend I finally learned that my favorite palindrome is taco cat.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
1 year
Depth of domain expertise and taste in product design grown in relative importance to technical skill for many use cases 4/n
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@brettdg
brett gibson
1 year
Thrilled to announce our investment in @automat_ai . @lucas0choa and @GautamBose18 ’s background perfectly position them to redefine how repetitive work gets automated and they’ve already hit the ground running.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
6 years
I’m relatively bullish on security tokens but what happens when a court rules the blockchain is not the source of truth for ownership?
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@brettdg
brett gibson
1 year
I did not expect to ever pay this close attention to the intricacies of sweep accounts.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
2 years
Is anyone else in SF right now starting to wonder if the wind is about to suddenly tear their roof off?
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@brettdg
brett gibson
1 year
It's a privilege to be working with the @satsumaxyz team. Definitely worth talking to them if you have blockchain data API needs.
@satsumaxyz
Satsuma
1 year
1/ We're very excited to announce our $5M seed round co-led by @Initialized and @archetypevc , with participation from @opensea @ycombinator @homebrew @southpkcommons . See @Yogita_Khatri5 's article on @TheBlock__ :
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@brettdg
brett gibson
7 months
dear god this
@yuris
Yuri Sagalov
7 months
A common LP question that drives me crazy is what excites me (the investor) right now. Completely the wrong question. The question should be what excites *founders* right now. One of my favorite takes on this is from Peter Fenton:
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@brettdg
brett gibson
2 years
I'm truly looking forward to seeing what comes out of DBA
@dba_crypto
DBA
2 years
“The world needs another venture capital fund” - Literally no one, 2009. “The world needs another crypto fund” - Literally no one, 2023. “The world needs another crypto fund” - DBA, 2023.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
6 years
@tokenfoundry
Token Foundry
6 years
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@brettdg
brett gibson
2 years
cool talk from @fengtality about exchanges and bots at #EthCC
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@brettdg
brett gibson
4 years
Great to see this announced! It has incredible to watch what this team is capable of.
@Shogun
Shogun
4 years
Shogun has raised a $35M Series B! Thanks to our amazing team, customers, partners & investors @Accel @Initialized , @vmg_partners , @ycombinator ! These funds will allow us to continue innovating and helping brands build better online experiences.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
5 years
Cool tutorial for running your own private DNS over HTTPS at the edge with @flydotio 's new global app deployment
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@brettdg
brett gibson
1 year
This could change the shape of the power law, thinner head, fatter tail, many more good viable businesses fewer extreme outcomes 5/5
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@brettdg
brett gibson
1 year
More viable to deliver a product and never scale an org past single digits of programmers 3/n
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@brettdg
brett gibson
1 year
We've been chatting a lot with founders about their posture relative to generative AI advancements so I wrote up some thoughts about it:
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@brettdg
brett gibson
3 years
Huge next chapter for Hummingbot. Amazing work from the whole team to get here.
@hummingbot_org
Hummingbot Foundation
3 years
The Hummingbot Foundation is excited to introduce the HBOT token, which lets the Hummingbot user base govern how the open source codebase and ecosystem evolves
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@brettdg
brett gibson
2 years
can we switch back to our devices underlining words they don’t like in red instead of just making up random words they’d prefer we use to amuse themselves?
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@brettdg
brett gibson
1 year
Lower costs to get started means way more competition for everything software based 4/n
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@brettdg
brett gibson
2 years
good thing i'm sticking with paper notes
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@brettdg
brett gibson
1 year
Reactions to this Balaji thing remind me of the old "proponents take him seriously but not literally, while opponents take him literally but not seriously"
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@brettdg
brett gibson
1 year
Custom language models are a major trend that @datasaurai is specifically well positioned to deliver given their expertise in labeling and NLP broadly. So I've really been looking forward to the announcement of what they've been working on with Datasaur Dinamic.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
1 year
Software companies enter (yet another) phase of needing less capital to get going 2/n
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@brettdg
brett gibson
2 years
@BraytonKey @BoostVC Also plenty of junior investors are the internal domain expert so there are scenarios where partners don't care unless they care first.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
2 years
Quite well articulated. The impetus toward everyone being a thought leader all the time leads to an unpleasant place.
@jordancooper
Jordan Cooper
2 years
There’s No Market For This Post
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@brettdg
brett gibson
5 years
Really informative talk tonight by @tgriff3 from @sparkswap about new features in Lightning
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@brettdg
brett gibson
1 year
Amazing team and community to have on your side. A few hours left to apply to this @alliancedao cohort.
@alliancedao
Alliance
1 year
Tonight at 11:59 pm PT is the deadline to apply for ALL11. We're looking forward to reading your applications. Apply at
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@brettdg
brett gibson
6 months
This attitude is huge. A common failing I see is mistaking low leverage work as unimportant because of "efficiency" or something. There's no rule that the most important thing at the moment isn't also tedious.
@Austen
Austen Allred
6 months
I’ve come to believe the attitude “there is no task beneath me” is among the most important attributes of those who are excellent in any company
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@brettdg
brett gibson
2 years
In our memos we've historically used "software margins" as a shortcut for "we can effectively ignore marginal costs". I'm starting to think generative AI will change this.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
1 year
I'm already getting cold emails with errors that look far more likely to be hallucinations than mail merge fails.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
4 years
At some point my default method for cropping screenshots became taking more screenshots. It still feels a little wrong.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
3 months
@garrytan @agarwal @vincentchu This is amazing. I can hear the cacophony of server alerts.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
3 months
Thrilled to be working with @dakshgup @vaishaaant @soohoonchoi at @greptileai . We were struck immediately by their insights about how important code intelligence will be and how fast they'd figured out a better way to deliver it.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
6 months
I’m not convinced this is a good filter for the goal, but I do appreciate the “we all pretend there are rules for this but actually there are no rules” aspect.
@dsiroker
Dan Siroker
6 months
We did our Series A last April at a $350M valuation. Since then we've been inundated by investors who want to meet. We can't meet with everyone so to make sure you are serious and it's a good use of our time, we are requiring a $100 payment to meet. First come, first served.
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@brettdg
brett gibson
5 years
One thing that feels magic about Ethereum DeFi right now is the number of actions that can be mashed into a single transaction
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@brettdg
brett gibson
11 months
Likewise!
@garrytan
Garry Tan
11 months
I bought my Sol Reader this morning LFG
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@brettdg
brett gibson
5 years
Stocking all these Japanese vending machines might be the apex of human operational efficiency
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