Rent the Runway Co-Founder Joins Venture Firm Initialized

(Bloomberg) -- Initialized Capital, a venture firm based in San Francisco, has hired Rent the Runway co-founder Jenny Fleiss as a new partner.

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In June, the firm posted it was conducting an open search for a new partner. A public listing is a rarity in the venture capital world — a step the company said it took in order to move toward “more transparent and equitable opportunities” in the industry. Fleiss’s hiring brings the firm’s total number of partners to five, four whom are women.

Fleiss co-founded Rent the Runway, which offers customers the ability to rent designer clothing, in 2009. She later led Jetblack, Walmart’s text-based personal shopping experiment, which the retailer quickly shuttered.

When Initialized posted the job opening earlier this year, it said the base salary for a partner would be $400,000 to $650,000, excluding bonuses and carried interest. Women comprise 60% of the firm’s overall staff of about 33 people, a rarity in the largely male-dominated industry.

Fleiss is particularly excited about investing in artificial intelligence accessibility and personalization, and e-commerce companies.

“The internet has made things so commoditized, we can find almost anything,” Fleiss said Thursday in a Bloomberg Television interview. “Injecting that personalization and essence of experiential thoughtfulness to me is where it is at for this next generation of consumer brands.”

--With assistance from Edward Ludlow, Caroline Hyde and Paayal Zaveri.

(Updates with comments from Bloomberg Television interview in the last paragraph.)

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