Initialized Capital adds three new partners to the roster

Initialized Capital, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture firm that was founded by former Y Combinator partners Alexis Ohanian and Garry Tan, has added three new partners.

Eric Woersching comes aboard the five-year-old outfit as a general partner. Woersching formerly managed the trading desk at Peter Thiel’s hedge fund, Clarium Capital Management; he was more recently a portfolio manager and macro analyst at Thiel’s investment advisory firm, Thiel Macro. Like a lot of other Bay Area investors, Woersching has also invested in numerous Y Combinator startups.

He spent his first few years out of college working as a technical product manager at Microsoft.

Vincent Chu, meanwhile, recently joined Initialized as an operating partner focused on the engineering needs of Initialized’s portfolio companies. A physicist turned software engineer, Chu worked with Tan at the blogging platform Posterous, which Tan had cofounded and Twitter acquired in 2012. Chu had stayed on at Twitter for two more years before more recently spending a year as a software engineer at the online lending company Clara Lending.

Last, Jen Wolf has joined the team from her most recent job as the chief product officer at Reserve, the platform that helps people discover restaurants, book reservations and spend extra on personal service. Wolf is joining as an operator partner who will be focused on product and design.

Initialized closed its third fund with $115 million this past fall — a meaningful leap from its second fund, which had closed with just less than $40 million.

True to its name, the firm is focused on working with founders early in the life of their startup, writing checks of between $500,000 and $1 million. Among its past investments is Cruise Automation, the self-driving car technology company that GM reportedly purchased for $1 billion last year. It also wrote an early check to Soylent, maker of a ready-to-drink “meal in a bottle.” Soylent also makes supplemental powder and a snack bar.

Pictured: Initialized cofounder Alexis Ohanian, speaking at Disrupt in May 2015.