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Garry Tan is an entrepreneur, designer, investor, and software engineer born on March 21, 1981 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. He is the co-founder and managing partner of Initialized Capital, and a former partner of Y Combinator. He is also the co-founder of the blogging platform Posterous and Posthaven. According to AngelList, Garry Tan has made 88 personal investments and 28 exits.
On April 2, 2019 Garry Tan was ranked #21 on the 2019 Midas List; an annual list by Forbes ranking "The Best Dealmakers in High-Tech Venture Capital" for the given year.
On April 3, 2018 Garry Tan made the 2018 Midas Brink List; an annual list by Forbes presenting short biographies of the top up and coming venture capitalists for the given year.
Alejandro Cremades, a journalist working for Forbes, ranked the top 50 angel investors in the world based on their investment volume and successful exits according to data he pulled in from Crunchbase. He ranked Garry Tan 28th out of the top 50 angel investors.
Garry Tan was named one of the 20 top performing angel investors in 2014 by CB Insights.
The Silicon Valley Business Journal included Garry Tan in their 40 under 40 in Silicon Valley 2013 list. The list is made up of the the top performing people under 40 years old working in Silicon Valley in 2013.
Garry Tan attended American High School in Fremont, California.
Garry Tan studied computer systems engineering at Stanford University from 1999 to 2003. During his time at Stanford University Tan participated in the following activities and societies: Asia Pacific Student Entrepreneurship Society, Stanford Consulting, and the Phi Kappa Psi Fraternity.
Garry Tan is the co-founder and managing partner of a venture capital firm called Initialized Capital. He co-founded the company in January 2012 alongside the creator of Reddit, Alexis Ohanian. Initialized Capital focuses the companies investments into primarily providing seed and series A funding for early stage startup companies. The company has approximately $500 million in capital under its management and has over 200 companies in its portfolio with 6 exits.
Garry Tan co-founded PostHaven in March 2013 with Brett Gibson. The purpose of founding PostHaven was to work towards creating "the world's simplest, most usable, most long-lasting blogging platform".
In January 2008, Garry Tan co-founded an blogging platform called Posterous.com after participating in the 2008 Y Combinator program. The platform officially launched in July 2008, and experienced strong growth. The company grew 10x in 2009 and 2.5x in 2010, and in January 2011 Posterous.com was acquired by Twitter.
From September 2005 to October 2007 (2 years and 2 months), Garry Tan worked as a lead engineer for Plantir Technologies, and also helped co-found the company when he joined the Plantir Technologies team as their 10th employee. During his time at Plantir Technologies Tan managed a team of engineers to define product vision and design features of a financial analysis platform.
From December 2010 to November 2015 (5 years), Garry Tan was a partner of Y Combinator. He worked with over 700 Y Combinator startups who were included in 10 batches of Y Combinator cohorts, and wrote software for Y Combinator such as the internal alumni social network, Bookface, and the Y Combinator Demo Day website.
From July 2003 to September 2005 (2 years and 3 months), Garry Tan worked as a program manager for Microsoft. During his time at Microsoft Tan worked on mobile synchronization and device management software.
From June 2002 to January 2003 (8 months), Garry Tan worked as a software engineer intern for Sun Microsystems.
From June 2000 to September 2000 (4 months), Garry Tan worked as a software engineer intern.
From June 1998 to January 2000 (1 year and 8 months), Garry Tan worked as a software engineer intern for Sapient. During his time at Sapient Tan worked on web application development.
Garry Tan is married to Stephanie Lim. They have one child together.
