The trajectory that I’ve taken to joining CoinFund’s Investment team in 2024 was not a straight line. To be precise, this is not the first time I’ve worked at the firm.
Way back in 2018, I left my coveted software engineering role at Google to become CoinFund’s first CTO. Being CTO of CoinFund was a knockout opportunity. Even without the benefit of hindsight, that’s what I felt at the time. The mission was right, too — decentralize all teh things!!!1
But an inconvenient itch to wander had been mounting, to benefit from that intoxicating mix of savings and youth. I left CoinFund, choosing to embark instead on a different adventure. The idea was to meander, to do whatever I felt like. Family time never to be Instagrammed, writing never to be published, passion projects, travel abroad, contemplation. Life, you know.
The road less traveled promised the greatest degree of freedom upfront. I went freelance, I voyaged. I obtained a certain wealth of life experience. I’m even fluent in French! My son will be, too, when he’s bigger than my left thigh.
Still, the CoinFund opportunity had marked me. I reflected on it often. I thought a lot about decentralized technology over the years, and worked with it, too. (Domains included NFT liquidity, arbitrage, and anonymous physical SMS.) It seems to me that pressure has been growing on both the American and European continents to expand surveillance and censorship — a problem naturally addressable by distributed networks built on strong cryptographic assurances. Concerns about AI leading to an obscene consolidation of economic power, likewise, have created a new opening for decentralization. Meanwhile, the growth of tribalistic rifts has made it feel hard for our society to function in a cooperative fashion, which is also known as a coordination problem — a subject dear to the field of cryptoeconomics. All of these phenomena make me eager to support decentralized technology in the years to come. There is a great deal of value here.
One thing that makes me happy, it turns out, even though you’re supposed to like it, and even though you’re supposed to say that you like it when you write blog posts, is having a mission, the attendant sense of worldly impact. When I found out last year that it would be possible to build CESR 2.0 with CoinFund President Chris Perkins, I became obsessed. Partly, I wanted to prove my renewed commitment to the team. I’m also a fan of learning by building. Mission CESR taught me a number of things, including Rust, and the implementation details of Ethereum consensus… and the fact that I absolutely for sure wanted to make my mission CoinFund’s. I have immense confidence in the leadership team, in part thanks to our prior work together, in part because CoinFund has long been prescient about the potential of decentralized technology and a positive force in the crypto space.
Web3 today is in a fascinating place. Will Ethereum defragment? Is a new blockchain gearing up to overtake existing L2s? What is the next use case for mass adoption after DeFi? Everything is primed to take off, from advancements in ZK-enabled scaling to proof of humanity to decentralized AI.
So it is with tremendous excitement that I am rejoining the team, now as Technical Investor, with perhaps a more nuanced worldview. In some sense, it’s a continuation of the road less traveled by: even if my career did begin on Wall Street, I am coming to investment from a product and engineering background. For that same reason, though, I look forward to informing our bottom-up beliefs on the best of what’s being built in blockchain. It’s important to anticipate where companies will sit on the ever-changing technological landscape. Are they building better cars or just breeding faster horses? And the engineering details can be crucial, especially in crypto, for recognizing the quality of a project and its team. At CoinFund, I’m keen on a number of verticals that require deep technical innovation and understanding, such as ZK (Matter Labs, Sindri), modern Layer 1s (Flow and others), and decentralized AI training (Prime Intellect and Pluralis). If you are launching something in the space that you think would benefit from a technical gaze… please do let me know. My email is the same as before: michael@coinfund.io. I’ll see you out there.
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