![]() “When everyone switched to Zoom for a year, I felt like Bane in The Dark Knight Rises when he’s telling Batman, ‘You merely adopted the darkness. “Our job is to not flip the car.”īefore showing off Cerebro over his hotel’s iffy Wi-Fi-including the status of an intro to a famous entertainment figure turned investor and more intel gleaned from tennis pre-match schmoozes we agreed not to name-Ohanian argues that having worked a “semi-remote” work life for the past decade, he’s well equipped to launch a post-pandemic new-look VC firm. “We often joke that he’s the gas and we’re the brake,” says Holloway. The biggest difference from Initialized: Seven Seven Six operates on Ohanian time, which means being fully remote, asynchronous and what to the outside world can seem a chaotic, if creative, blend of time zones and projects. “We built something really great with Initialized and he will continue to have a big impact on tech,” he adds, shouting out Tan’s now-popular YouTube channel. ![]() “They are stellar investors and we are excited to continue our close partnership over the years by co-investing and supporting the next generation’s world-changing startups.” “I care a lot about Garry,” Ohanian says. “I’m a proud supporter of the team at 776,” Tan wrote to Forbes this week. Parties involved and those close to the two describe a drifting apart on fund strategy (such as an early-stage focus versus multistage approach) and operations (Ohanian, reached for this story over Zoom in a hotel room in Europe, is known for a wide array of ideas and projects, which he shares, often over Twitter, shooting from the hip.) In April, Tan called the split a “conscious separation.” That meant a split from Initialized, where Ohanian and Tan had built up a successful firm behind the likes of Coinbase, Instacart and Ro after starting to invest while partners at accelerator Y Combinator. Ohanian’s chief of staff at Reddit and Initialized, Lissie Garvin, says the goal is to be “super-thoughtful and intentional” in building a firm from scratch. “Having the opportunity to start from zero, where you can be super-thoughtful and intentional, was really appealing to me.” “Alexis and I were having a lot of these conversations where I was just like, ‘What can we do?’” says Garvin, who served as Ohanian’s chief of staff at Reddit and Initialized, the firm Ohanian cofounded with Midas List investor Garry Tan. All three were profoundly affected, they say, by the murder of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter protests and racial justice conversations that swept across the U.S. Ohanian and Garvin set out to launch Seven Seven Six, named after the original Olympic Games, last summer and were joined by Holloway several months later. “We really want to encourage other venture firms to do the same.” “I think that we can better hold one another accountable, and make a lot of progress by sharing what’s working and what’s not,” says Holloway, who was formerly vice president of people and culture at Reddit in Ohanian’s second stint at the social media company, then joined him as a partner at Initialized Capital. Ditto its program to commit 2% on top of every first check at preseed and seed stage as nondilutive capital to support founders in “personal growth” and “caregiving.” For its recent operators-in-residence program, which commit to have three tech practitioners with different skill sets than Seven Seven Six’s founders spend a year working with its portfolio and building its software, the firm ran an open application and published the results. This is “building in public,” a push for transparency-and a way to stay in the eyes of potential customers, in this case, entrepreneurs-that the firm is embracing throughout. When the responses are in, Seven Seven Six plans to share all the data on its website. “We’re asking folks to self-report anonymously. “We’ve ended up with some esteemed institutional investors as well as family offices who have never invested in venture before,” Ohanian adds. More important to Ohanian: Of the investment teams as its backers, Seven Seven Six targeted a base of 50% women and 15% Black or indigenous investors. Seven Seven Six is backed by a mix of endowments, foundations, funds of funds and family offices, Ohanian says, though he declined to name any. Katelin Holloway says working with Ohanian is working "to not flip the car." Seven Seven Six
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