BS

Balaji Srinivasan

Formerly CTO at Coinbase, GP a16z. Cofounder of Earn, Counsyl, Teleport, Coin Center. Angel Investor.

Singapore

Invests in

  • Min Investment:

    $10,000.00
  • Max Investment:

    $500,000.00
  • Target Investment:

    $100,000.00

Education

Work Experience

  • Angel Investor

    2012

    Investor in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash, Soylent, Cameo, Superhuman, Shrug Capital, etc.

  • Cofounder and Board Member

    2014

    Conceptualized and set up Coin Center in 2014 with Jerry Brito and Alex Morcos. Coin Center has become the leading non-profit focused on the policy issues facing cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

2018 - 2019

  • CTO

    2018 - 2019

    As Chief Technology Officer at Coinbase, I did the following: - Sourced and closed more than $1.5B in deals for Coinbase Custody (with Sam McIngvale and Juan Suarez) - Supervised the integration of Earn.com into Coinbase and subsequent expansion to 100+ countries (with John Granata and Ada Yeo) - Sourced/closed >$300M in deals for Coinbase Earn, including $120M+ from the Stellar Foundation (with Zach Segal, Dave Bean, and Max Branzburg) - Organized both the business and technical sides of the USDC stablecoin launch, now at $1B+ in market cap (with Jim Migdal, Jacob Horne, Miha Rebernik, Maksim Stepanenko, and the Circle team) - Prepared the slide decks and gave the presentations for the $300M Series E raise (with Shan Aggarwal) - Drove the addition of new assets to the Coinbase platform across all products (with Zach Segal, David Farmer, David Renie, Anna Marie Clifton, Dan Coffman, Juan Suarez, and Brian Brooks) - Supervised the buildout of a wholly new infrastructure for adding assets beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum forks, which enabled support for Stellar, Ripple, and EOS as well as ZEC and general ERC-20 support for 0x, BAT, REP, DAI, etc (with Ali Fathalian and Omar Bohsali) There's more, but that's the highlights! Worked with a number of wonderful people.

2017 - 2018

  • CEO and Cofounder

    2017 - 2018

    Earn.com allows you to make money online by replying to emails and completing tasks. It works on your phone, in any country, with no need for a bank account. Earn.com was sold to Coinbase in early 2018.

2002 - 2018

  • Lecturer, Departments of Statistics and Computer Science

    2006 - 2018

    At Stanford, I've taught courses on Bitcoin/cryptocurrency/blockchain (CS 251P), data mining (Stats 202), statistics (Stats 110), computational biology (Stats 366). I also taught Stanford's Startup Engineering MOOC at coursera.org/course/startup, which enrolled 250,000+ students worldwide.

  • Graduate Student

    2002 - 2006

    Worked on bioinformatics, genome sequencing, computational statistics, and machine learning before it was cool. Authored and co-authored papers on microbial and human genomics, pharmacogenetics, genetics of complex diseases, functional genomics, population genetics, and Mendelian disease.

2013 - 2018

  • Board Partner

    2015 - 2018

    Part-time at a16z and full-time at a portfolio company (21.co) while turning the latter company around. The turnaround was successful, and the new company (Earn.com) was sold to Coinbase in early 2018.

  • General Partner

    2013 - 2015

    Helped Andreessen Horowitz move into biomedicine and blockchain through both investments and recruiting, which eventually led to the a16z Crypto and Bio funds. Select investments include Axoni, Omada Health, OpenGov, Benchling, Tradeblock, SolveBio, HumanAPI, and Medisas.

2014 - 2018

  • Cofounder

    2014 - 2018

    Cofounded Teleport with Sten Tamkivi and Silver Keskkula. Teleport is a search engine for digital nomads which was acquired by Topia in 2017.

2008 - 2012

  • Cofounder and CTO

    2008 - 2012

    Took company from inception in a Stanford dorm room to testing ~3% of all births in the United States. Responsible for scientific codebase, marketing, design, public relations, recruiting, training, fundraising, and technical vision as we grew from an idea on a napkin to one of the largest clinical genome centers in the world. Counsyl was ultimately sold for $375M to Myriad.

Latest Articles

SubstackAug. 2024

The Network School

SubstackJun. 2024

California Is Not A Democracy

SubstackMar. 2024

All It Takes Is All You Got

SubstackNov. 2023

Only Newsom Can Go To China

SubstackOct. 2023

The Network State Conference

SubstackJun. 2023

Going Meta

SubstackJun. 2023

The Balaji Newsletter

SubstackJun. 2023

Too Fake to Tell

SubstackMay 2023

The Fiat Crisis

SubstackMar. 2022

The Network State Book

SubstackDec. 2021

The Mirrortable

SubstackDec. 2021

Great Protocol Politics

SubstackMay 2021

Founding vs Inheriting

SubstackMay 2021

The Location Stack

SubstackMay 2021

The Start Of Startup Cities

SubstackApr. 2021

Add Crypto to IndiaStack

SubstackApr. 2021

How to Start a New Country

SubstackApr. 2021

Refer Task Sponsors

SubstackMar. 2021

Decentralized Task Creation

SubstackMar. 2021

Proof-of-Workout