Balaji Srinivasan: The genius investor who has made the most investments in the crypto space

Author: Runsheng, ChainCatcher
 
If you haven't heard of Balaji Srinivasan, you must have used the word "BUIDL" to express your vision and support for the crypto world. In fact, this buzzword came from Srinivasan, and has since spread widely and become a familiar industry term in the circle. In addition, Srinivasan is more well-known as the former general partner of a16z and the first chief technology officer of Coinbase. In addition, he often discusses crypto issues with Ethereum founder Vitalik, and has been selected by many media as one of the most influential people in the crypto industry.
At the same time, Srinivasan is the most active angel investor in the crypto industry. According to the crypto data platform Rootdata, as of the end of 2022, Srinivasan has invested in 85 projects in the crypto field and participated in 86 rounds, ranking first among investors. And most of his investments are in the early stages of high-quality crypto projects such as Opensea, Avalanche, Dapper Labs, NEAR Protocol, Celestia, Farcaste, etc.
So, who is Balaji Srinivasan? What is his legendary experience? What are his core ideas and contributions to the crypto industry? With the above questions, this article attempts to sort out public information and provide a preliminary explanation.
 
1. Inspiring Indian American Immigrants
 
Public information shows that Srinivasan was born in Long Island, New York, USA in May 1980. His parents were immigrants from Chennai, India. From 1997 to 2006, Srinivasan received a bachelor's, master's and doctoral degree in electrical engineering from Stanford University. During his doctoral studies, Srinivasan also obtained a master's degree in chemical engineering from Stanford University. After graduating with a doctorate, Srinivasan stayed at the school to teach courses such as computer science until 2018.
It can be said that until he graduated with a doctorate in 2006 and stayed at the university to teach, Srinivasan had walked a difficult road to achieve social advancement through education. As he revealed in a Reason podcast in 2018, Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan was one of the people who had the greatest influence on him. Although he came from a poor family in India, Ramanujan became a famous mathematician at Cambridge University with his pure talent.
However, Srinivasan's main interest is not to teach and research in an ivory tower. He firmly believes that technology can improve human welfare, and he chose to establish a technology company to practice this concept, which was ultimately a great success. In 2007, Srinivasan and his friend Ramji Srinivasan co-founded the genetic testing company Counsyl in a dormitory at Stanford University. Counsyl aims to improve the identification and treatment of genetic diseases by pre-pregnancy screening for couples preparing for pregnancy to predict and avoid the risk of a series of genetic diseases.
In an interview with the media, Srinivasan was quite proud of the value of Counsyl and regarded himself as a social entrepreneur dedicated to home pregnancy tests. Unlike commercial entrepreneurs who aim to make profits, social entrepreneurs usually pay more attention to social responsibility. The determination to improve human society may explain Srinivasan's subsequent series of actions. In 2017, former US President Trump once considered Srinivasan as one of the candidates for the head of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).
Counsyl was just Srinivasan's first company, but it became a huge success in Silicon Valley and received rich rewards. In 2018, Myriad Genetics acquired the company for $375 million.
 
2. Serial Entrepreneurs in the Crypto Field
 
Srinivasan's exposure to the cryptographic field originated from Bitcoin, and he participated in the creation of a Bitcoin interest group and taught blockchain courses at Stanford University very early on. Since then, the faculty and students of Stanford University have maintained a strong enthusiasm for research in the cryptographic industry and have provided a large number of talents to the industry.
In 2013, Srinivasan co-founded the Bitcoin mining company 21e6 (later renamed 21Inc) in Silicon Valley, which received investment from a16z at the beginning. Srinivasan hopes to integrate blockchain into existing PCs and other smart devices, and even as part of the future Internet of Things (IoT). Later, 21Inc transformed into Earn.com. Earn.com is a paid information company. Users can log their information on the website, and others can pay to obtain the user's information and get in touch with them. Earn enables users to earn digital currency by forwarding emails or completing some tasks.
At the end of 2013, when Srinivasan founded 21Inc, he joined a16z as the eighth general partner of the company and also the youngest general partner. According to Techcrunch, it took a16z half a year to recruit Srinivasan.
In April 2018, Coinbase acquired Earn.com for $100 million and turned it into Coinbase Earn. Srinivasan also joined Coinbase as its first chief technology officer. It is rumored that Coinbase’s acquisition was not for the sake of wine, but to recruit Srinivasan.
However, Srinivasan left Coinbase in May 2019 after one year in office. After that, he invested more in entrepreneurial projects in the crypto industry as an individual.
 
3. Srinivasan’s investment logic and ideas
 
Since 2019, Srinivasan has become one of the most active crypto angel investors. He has participated in the early stages of investing in star projects such as NFT trading market Opensea, public chain Avalanche and NEAR Protocol.
According to the crypto data platform Rootdata, as of the end of 2022, Srinivasan has invested in 85 projects in the crypto field. In 2022 alone, Srinivasan has invested in 49 crypto projects, of which five have raised more than $20 million, namely, 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 Rootdata data platform that Srinivasan mainly invests in infrastructure, tools & information services, DeFi, DAO and DeSoc. Specifically, he has invested in Layer1 and Layer2 star projects such as Avalanche, Celestia, NEAR, Aleo, Arcana, AltLayer, etc., and has also invested in DeFi projects such as lending protocols Solend and Sovryn, decentralized trading platform Hashflow, crypto broker Rain, and NFT project teams such as Opensea and Dapper Labs, the company behind NBA Top Shot. In addition, Srinivasan is also an early investor in Bitcoin and Ethereum.
Source: Encrypted data platform Rootdata
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 has not yet found his specific investment return rate. But as a well-known angel investor in Silicon Valley, Srinivasan's reputation is obviously not entirely dependent on investment returns. Many Silicon Valley people who are familiar with Srinivasan publicly praised his active thinking and new ideas every minute. It is precisely because of Srinivasan's profound thinking about encryption and human society, as opposed to the simple purpose of profit, that makes him different.
Through his investment behavior, we can roughly sort out Srinivasan’s investment preferences, including: Indian crypto startup projects, decentralized social media, network country/city practices and other projects.
 
1. Indian Crypto Startup Projects
Srinivasan has focused on India's relationship with Crypto and India's huge potential in the crypto space in a series of articles. In his Twitter account, he has been commenting and advocating India's political status, diplomatic relations, and economic prospects, but has also criticized the Indian government's crypto ban policy. It is reported that the Indian government imposes a high tax of 30% on all cryptocurrency trading profits, and plans to make cryptocurrency regulation a key issue during its presidency of the G20.
Srinivasan believes that India's crypto ban could cost the country trillions of dollars in potential profits, and based on this, he is "moderately optimistic about India and extremely optimistic about Indians". Srinivasan has a special preference for Indian entrepreneurial teams. According to incomplete statistics from ChainCatcher, Srinivasan has invested in 12 Indian crypto projects (with at least one Indian co-founder in the team), including 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, and decentralized social graph Farcaster.
Interestingly, as an Indian angel investor, Srinivasan often invests in Indian crypto startups with Sandeep Nailwal, Jaynti Kanani, Gokul Rajaram and others. According to the crypto data platform Rootdata, among the top 10 crypto angel investors, 4 are Indian angel investors. In addition to Srinivasan, Sandeep Nailwal ranks second, Jaynti Kanani ranks fifth, and Gokul Rajaram ranks seventh, showing that Indians, unlike the Indian government, have a special influence in the crypto industry.
 
2. Decentralized social media
In July 2020, in view of the frequent hacking incidents on Twitter and problems with identity authentication and distribution, Srinivasan publicly called on Internet users to gradually exit Twitter and establish decentralized media. To this end, he published an article on his personal website titled "How to Gradually Exit Twitter", suggesting purchasing a domain name and starting your own newsletter, and using decentralized tools to build a personal social network.
Srinivasan's interest in social networks began even earlier. In 2017, Srinivasan rebranded 21 Inc as Earn.com, calling it the "first business social network." It is reported that users can simply set up a verified public profile where senders can send them messages and earn Bitcoin by replying.
The decentralized social projects invested by Srinivasan include: decentralized social graph Farcaster, Web3 content publishing platform Blogchain, Web3 content platform Mash, social token infrastructure Roll for creator economy, social question-and-answer application Mem Protocol, NFT social platform Showtime, Web3 communication protocol XMTP and more than ten other projects.
However, Srinivasan also realized that due to Twitter's current convenient user experience, Twitter will continue to be an important Internet battlefield for quite a long time. Quitting Twitter and building a decentralized media will be a long-term project, and there is no guarantee that it will succeed. Srinivasan is still one of the most active users of Twitter and has 740,000 followers.
This is the embarrassing problem facing decentralized social media. Although new projects have sprung up like mushrooms after a rain and are building new Web3 social networks based on open social graphs, NFTs or token economic models, this track is still in its early stages of development and its direction is relatively unclear.
 
3. Network national/city practice projects
In July 2022, Srinivasan published the book "The Network State", vigorously promoting the concept of "network state" and proposing to establish a decentralized digital community and concentrate resources to build new autonomous cities and countries. In Srinivasan's vision, the network state is a highly consistent online community with the ability to act collectively, which can crowdfund globally and eventually obtain diplomatic recognition from existing countries.
Specifically, this cyber nation is a group of people from different countries that will be built using blockchain technology with the common goal of using cryptocurrency. Srinivasan believes that with the help of oracle networks and Ethereum Name Service (ENS), a reliable mechanism can be established to prove its population and off-chain territory to obtain diplomatic recognition.
Guided by the above philosophy, Srinivasan has successively invested in the crypto city community Praxis, the emerging network city project Cabin, and the African community-as-a-service company Afropolitan. In addition to these three crypto projects, Srinivasan also invested in the liberal Patri Friedman to establish autonomous "charter cities" in developing countries.
Take Afropolitan as an example. Afropolitan is highly consistent with the concept of "network nation" in terms of social and political ideals. The vision of the project is to create a network nation that provides the best of art, finance, technology, health, energy, sports and media to local residents and expatriates in Africa, so that all Africans can live a rich life.
In fact, Srinivasan has been thinking about the network state for a long time. As early as 2013, Srinivasan gave a speech titled "Silicon Valley's Ultimate Exit" at Y Combinator's Startup School, and published "Software Is Reorganizing the World" on Wired, advocating that the technology industry should digitize and exit the United States and move abroad. The network state is the product of his ten years of systematic thinking.
Srinivasan is passionate about political topics and has been contributing to American political journals for a long time. After establishing a digital emerging worldview, he is full of expectations for the possibility of blockchain technology realizing his ideal of online community. The prospect of the cyber state is unknown for the time being, but it is believed that Srinivasan will continue to increase investment in this area in the future.
 
IV. Conclusion
 
Born into an Indian immigrant family, Balaji Srinivasan studied at the world-renowned Stanford University through personal efforts and stayed on to teach. He later founded several technology companies such as Counsyl in Silicon Valley, and seized the opportunity of encryption to join industry leaders such as a16z and Coinbase. Finally, he practiced his social and political ideals through investment as an individual. Balaji Srinivasan's life experience can be described as rich.
At the same time, there are many labels and controversies surrounding Srinivasan. He is regarded as a crypto evangelist, serial entrepreneur, polymath and genius investor. He also frequently fires at the technology industry and the media, and continues to output quite radical political views. Srinivasan positions himself as a pragmatist and technical expert, and refuses any type of political or ideological label.
Srinivasan firmly believes that technology can improve human welfare. Perhaps, what makes Srinivasan special is his grand social ideals. His technical background, entrepreneurial experience, and investment experience are all his skills, all of which serve his vision of individual rights and a free society. This is his way.
 
Related Links:
Balaji Srinivasan personal website: https://balajis.com/
The Network State website: https://thenetworkstate.com/
Rootdata data platform investor rankings: https://www.rootdata.com/Investors