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Meet Balaji Srinivasan, the father of "BUIDL," a hawk-eye investor in the crypto space

2023-01-16 22:00

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Srinivasan is better known as the former a16z general Partner and Coinbase's first chief Technology officer.

原文标题：《 Balaji Srinivasan：那个在加密领域出手次数最多的天才投资人》

The author of the original article: Runsheng, ChainCatcher

If you haven't heard of Balaji Srinivasan, you've probably used the word "BUIDL" to express your vision and support for the crypto world. In fact, it was Srinivasan who coined the buzzword, which has since spread so far that it has become a familiar industry term. Srinivasan is better known as the former a16z general Partner and Coinbase's first chief Technology Officer. In addition, he often discusses encryption issues with Ethereum founder Vitalik, and has been voted one of the most influential people in the crypto industry by several media outlets.

Srinivasan is also one of the most active angel investors in the crypto industry. According to encrypted data platform Rootdata, by the end of 2022, Srinivasan had invested in 85 projects and participated in 86 rounds of investment, ranking first among investors. And most of his investments are in the early stages of high-quality encryption projects such as Opensea, Avalanche, Dapper Labs, NEAR Protocol, Celestia, and Farcaste.

So, who is Balaji Srinivasan? What is his legend? What are his core ideas and contributions to the crypto industry? With the above problems, this paper attempts to sort out the public data for a preliminary explanation.

The Inspirational IndiAn-American immigrant

According to public data, Srinivasan was born in May 1980 in the Long Island area of New York. His parents were immigrants from Chennai, India. From 1997 to 2006, Srinivasan received his bachelor's, Master's and doctoral degrees in Electrical engineering from Stanford University. During his doctoral studies, Srinivasan also received his Master's degree in chemical engineering from Stanford University. After graduating with his PhD, Srinivasan stayed on campus to teach computer science and other courses until 2018.

It is fair to say that Srinivasan had a difficult path through education to achieve the rise of the new immigrant class until he graduated from the university in 2006. As he revealed on the Reason podcast in 2018, one of his biggest influences is Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan, who became a famous mathematician at Cambridge University through sheer talent despite coming from a poor family in India.

But Srinivasan's main ambition is not to teach and research in an ivory tower. He believed in the power of technology to improve human well-being, and he chose to build a technology company to live up to that philosophy, which ultimately succeeded. In 2007, Srinivasan co-founded Counsyl, a genetic testing company, with his friend Ramji Srinivasan from his Stanford dorm room. Counsyl aims to improve the way genetic disorders are identified and treated by screening couples in advance to predict and avoid the risk of a range of genetic disorders.

In an interview with the press, Srinivasan is proud of Counsyl's value and sees himself asa social entrepreneur working on home pregnancy trials. Unlike business entrepreneurs who aim to make a profit, social entrepreneurs usually place more emphasis on social responsibility. The desire to improve human society may explain Srinivasan's subsequent behaviour. In 2017, former U.S. President Donald Trump considered Srinivasan asa possible director of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Counsyl was Srinivasan's first startup, but it was a huge hit in Silicon Valley, and the payoff was huge. In 2018, Myriad Genetics acquired the company for $375 million.

2. Serial entrepreneurs in the crypto space

Srinivasan's exposure to the crypto world began with Bitcoin, starting a bitcoin interest group and teaching blockchain classes at Stanford University. Since then, the faculty and students of Stanford University have maintained a strong enthusiasm for the crypto industry, and sent a large number of talents to the industry.

In 2013, Srinivasan co-founded the Silicon Valley bitcoin mining company 21e6 (later renamed 21Inc), which was invested by a16z at its inception. Srinivasan wants to integrate blockchain into existing PCS and other smart devices, or even as part of the future Internet of Things (IoT). After that, 21Inc became Earn.com. Earn.com is a paid information company. Users can log in their information on the website, and others can pay to obtain and contact with the user. Earn enables users to earn digital currency by forwarding emails or completing tasks.

At the end of 2013, when Srinivasan founded 21Inc, he joined a16z as the firm's eighth and youngest general partner. According to Techcrunch, it took a16z six months to recruit Srinivasan.

In April 2018, Coinbase acquired Earn.com for $100 million and turned it into Coinbase Earn, and Srinivasan joined Coinbase as its first chief technology officer. Rumor has it that Coinbase's acquisition was more about acquiring Srinivasan than wine.

However, Srinivasan left Coinbase in May 2019 after a year on the job. Since then, he has invested in startups more as an individual in the crypto industry.

Third, Srinivasan's investment logic and thought

Since 2019, Srinivasan has been one of the most active crypto angel investors, having invested in the early stages of star projects such as Opensea, Avalanche, and NEAR Protocol.

Encrypted data platformRootdata displaySrinivasan has invested in 85 crypto projects by the end of 2022. In 2022 alone, Srinivasan has invested in 49 crypto projects, five of which raised more than $20 million, These are the modular blockchain Celestia ($50 million), Web3 data index Nxyz ($40 million), decentralized social Farcaster ($30 million), and decentralized trading platform Hashflow ($26 million).

ChainCatcher found through the statistics of Rootdata platform that Srinivasan mainly invests in infrastructure, tools & Areas such as information services, DeFi, DAO and DeSoc. Specifically, he has invested in Layer1 and Layer2 star projects such as Avalanche, Celestia, NEAR, Aleo, Arcana and AltLayer, He has also invested in DeFi projects like Solend and Sovryn, de-centered trading platform Hashflow, crypto broker Rain, and NFT project teams like Opensea and Dapper Labs, the company behind NBA Top Shot. Srinivasan was also an early investor in Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Source: Encrypted data platformRootdata

It can be said that since the birth of Bitcoin, Srinivasan has accurately captured and invested in many hot track opportunities in the crypto industry. Due to the limited disclosure of Srinivasan's personal investment information, ChainCatcher did not query his specific investment yield. But Srinivasan's reputation asa prominent angel investor in Silicon Valley clearly does not rest solely on investment returns. Several Silicon Valley insiders who know Srinivasan openly praise his dynamic mind, which bursts out with new ideas every minute. It is Srinivasan's deep thinking about encryption and human society, as opposed to mere profit, that sets him apart.

Through his investment behavior, we can roughly tease out Srinivasan's investment preferences, including: Indian crypto entrepreneurship project, decentralized social media, network country/city practice and other projects.

Balaji Srinivasan

1. Indian crypto entrepreneurship project

In a series of articles, Srinivasan has focused on India's relationship with Crypto and its huge potential in the crypto space in the future. In his tweets, he has been commenting and promoting India's political status, foreign relations and economic prospects, but also criticizing the Indian government's encryption ban policy. The Indian government has imposed a hefty 30% tax on all cryptocurrency transactions and plans to make cryptocurrency regulation a priority during its G20 presidency.

Srinivasan believes India's encryption ban could cost the country trillions of dollars in potential profits, and based on that, "be moderately bullish on India and extremely bullish on Indians." Srinivasan has a special preference for Indian startup teams. According to incomplete statistics of ChainCatcher, Srinivasan has invested in 12 Indian encryption projects (at least one Indian startup in the team). Included are permanent file Storage protocol Lighthouse.Storage, Web3 privacy infrastructure Socket, DAO management platform Samudai, DeFi lending protocol Timeswap, DAO structure optimization tool DAOLens, DeFi protocol MoHash, Game infrastructure Protocol Lysto, Web3 Data index Nxyz, new public Chain Shardeum, Web3 Privacy infrastructure Arcana, Web3 communication Protocol Push Protocol, decentralized social graph Farcaster.

Interestingly, Srinivasan, who is also an angel investor of Indian descent, is a frequent co-investor in Indian crypto startups with Sandeep Nailwal, Jaynti Kanani, Gokul Rajaram and others. According to the statistics of encrypted data platform Rootdata, among the top 10 encrypted angel investors, Indian angel investors occupy 4 spots. In addition to Srinivasan, Sandeep Nailwal ranks second and Jaynti Kanani ranks fifth. Gokul Rajaram came in at No. 7, showing that Indians have a special influence in the crypto industry, as opposed to the Indian government.

2. Decentralize social media

In July 2020, Srinivasan publicly called on web users to gradually quit Twitter and build decentralized media in light of frequent hacking incidents on Twitter and problems with authentication and distribution. to that end, he wrote "How to Gradually Exit Twitter" on his personal website, recommended buying a domain name and starting your own Newsletter, and using decentralized tools to build a personal social network.

Srinivasan's interest in social networking dates back even further. In 2017, Srinivasan renamed 21 Inc Earn.com and called it "the first commercial social network." It is understood that users can simply set up a verified public profile from which senders can send them messages and earn Bitcoins by replying.

Srinivasan's portfolio of de-centered social projects includes: Decentralized social graph Farcaster, Web3 content publishing platform Blogchain, Web3 content platform Mash, Creator economy social token infrastructure Roll, social question-and-answer application Mem Protocol, NFT social platform Showtime, Web3 Communication protocol XMTP and other more than ten projects.

However, Srinivasan recognizes that Twitter will continue to be an important Internet battleground for quite some time due to its current convenient user experience, and that exiting Twitter and building decentralized media will be a long-term project with no guarantee of success. Srinivasan remains one of Twitter's most active users, with 740,000 followers.

This is the awkward problem for de-centered social media. Despite the mushrooming of new projects and new Web3 social networks based on the open social graph, NFT, or token economy model, the track is still in its early stages and the direction is hazy.

3. Network country/city practice Project

In July 2022, Srinivasan published The Network State, vigorously promoting the concept of "network state", proposing the establishment of decentralized digital communities and pooling resources to build new autonomous cities and countries. Srinivasan envisions a cyber state asa highly coherent online community with the ability to act collectively, crowdfund globally and eventually gain diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.

Specifically, this cyber nation is a group of different countries that will be built using blockchain technology with the common goal of using cryptocurrencies. Srinivasan believes that with the help of oracle Network and Ethereum Name Service (ENS), reliable mechanisms can be established to prove its population and off-chain territory to gain diplomatic recognition.

Guided by this philosophy, Srinivasan has invested in Praxis, a crypto city community, Cabin, an online city start-up, and Afropolitan, an African community asa service. In addition to these three crypto projects, Srinivasan has also invested in libertarian Patri Friedman to build autonomous "charter cities" in developing countries.

Taking Afropolitan as an example, Afropolitan is highly consistent with the concept of "cyber state" in terms of social and political ideals. The project's vision is to create a networked nation that will bring the best of what local Africans and expatriates have to offer in the arts, finance, technology, health, energy, sports and media, so that all Africans can live richly.

In fact, Srinivasan has been thinking about cyber states for a long time. Back in 2013, Srinivasan gave a talk at Y Combinator's Startup School called "Silicon Valley's Ultimate Exit," He published "Software Is Reorganizing the World" in Wired, advocating the digital withdrawal of the technology industry from the United States and its relocation abroad. The cyber state is the product of a decade of systematic thinking.

Srinivasan is passionate about political topics and is a longtime contributor to American political journals. Having set his sights on the emerging digital world, he is excited about the possibility of blockchain technology fulfilling the ideals of his online community. It's unclear what the future holds for cyber countries, but we believe Srinivasan will continue to invest more in this area.

Iv. Conclusion

Born in an Indian immigrant family, he studied and taught in the world-renowned Stanford University through personal efforts. Later, he founded a number of technology companies such as Counsyl in Silicon Valley, and joined the leading industries such as a16z and Coinbase by grasping the key point of encryption. Finally, he practiced his social and political ideals through investment in his personal capacity. Balaji Srinivasan has had a rich life.

At the same time, there is a lot of label and controversy surrounding Srinivasan. He is known as a crypto evangelist, serial entrepreneur, polymath and genius investor, as well as a frequent critic of the tech industry and the media, with a steady stream of heated political views. Srinivasan, on the other hand, positions himself asa pragmatist, a technologist, and rejects any kind of political or ideological label.

Srinivasan believes that technology can improve human well-being. Perhaps what makes Srinivasan special is his grand social vision. His technical background, entrepreneurial experience and investment experience are his skills, all in the service of the vision of individual rights and a free society, which is his philosophy.