When Initialized Capital announced layoffs last week, social media hummed with retweets of the TechCrunch story, along with scattered commentary about the changes afoot at the firm.
The changes at Initialized are undoubtedly substantial—along with an undisclosed number of employees, managing partner Jen Wolf and partner and Rent the Runway cofounder Jenny Fleiss will be leaving the firm. In the announcement, Initialized managing partner Brett Gibson wrote out publicly what I usually hear privately—that this just isn’t the marketplace they planned for, and that it’s time to adjust or falter.
“We moved fast and got things done,” Gibson wrote in the Oct. 2 blog post. “Over time, we found success and grew, but we lost a step, added too many layers, expanded the priorities we serviced. It’s time to get back to basics.”
It’s an arresting flash of transparency (in my experience in the private markets, people usually like to hide from their own layoffs whenever possible). It would be easy to focus solely on Initialized—the 2022 departure of Garry Tan marked a new chapter and brought with it the inevitable tensions of a cofounder’s exit. But that would be the proverbial “missing the forest for the trees” scenario. Looking around the VC forest, these kinds of layoffs and restructurings have been happening for some time.
This year alone, we’ve seen layoffs and restructurings at firms large and small, historic and new. In March, Y Combinator cut its late-stage fund and the team associated with it. In July, Sequoia laid off several members of its operations team, while across the pond, London’s Octopus Ventures announced it would lay off eight members of its investment team. There have been cases of VC firms folding, like OpenView in Boston. Techstars did layoffs of its own this year, while Coatue closed its London office just two years after it opened. Everyone, more or less and implicitly or directly, cites “current market conditions.”
And, to be sure, the market of the last few years hasn’t exactly been a breeze. Zero interest rates came to a grinding halt in 2022, exit opportunities dried up, and concerns about an LP crunch intensified.
But we’ve seen this movie. I mean, I haven’t—but I know that many of you out there have. I’ve been looking at documents from previous busts, and it’s pretty clear it’s always been this way. Venture like the startups it backs, expands and then must go “back to basics,” as Gibson put it. I’ve found a 2002 report by Stanford researchers describing venture capital as being in its “biggest ever decline,” and a 1994 paper titled “The Rise and Fall of Venture Capital” from the University of Chicago. (I expect this researcher regretted that title shortly after publication.) Then, of course, there are the stories of firms that no longer exist—Hambrecht & Quist seems like it was quite a story, and ultimately ran its course.
The roller coaster is part of venture, not an aberration. The task is surviving long enough to buckle in for the next ride.
Ask Andy… “Ask Andy” is back! In this week’s column, Bonobos cofounder Andy Dunn answers the question: Should you start a business with a friend? He gets candid about his relationship with his cofounder Brian Spaly—their falling out, and the surprising turns they took from there: “We decided that we would share the details of how our partnership fell apart with the community where our friendship and our company were forged: Stanford Business School.” Read the whole column here.
ICYMI… Ben Horowitz is now supporting Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. Previously, he and a16z cofounder Marc Andreessen publicly backed Donald Trump. Read Horowitz’s X post here, and Axios’s scoop here.
See you tomorrow,
Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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Nina Ajemian curated the deals section of today’s newsletter.
