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Sam Rosenblum by no means imagined he would work at a crypto-focused funding agency. A Southern California native who spent a “giant portion of my life open air within the solar, taking part in sports activities and hanging out with associates,” crypto was not technically a factor till he was in faculty at UCLA. Stints on the DOJ and as an analyst for a enterprise consulting agency adopted, however it was a subsequent 12 months spent with Visa that opened his eyes to the burgeoning world of digital property — a lot in order that when Coinbase started a recruiting push to tug in Rosenblum and a few of his colleagues in 2014, two years after Coinbase was based, he jumped on the alternative.
It was a great transfer. Coinbase, then a 30-person firm, grew quick within the 5 years that Rosenblum stayed till he determined to affix another Coinbase alums on the crypto fund Polychain Capital. Certainly, armed with a community of contacts from Coinbase and Polychain, Rosenblum was getting ready to boost his personal fund final 12 months when former Andreessen Horowitz VC Katie Haun reached out to see if he would possibly be part of her new agency as an alternative.
Now Rosenblum, together with Chris Ahn, who beforehand spent 4 years with Index Ventures, are serving to Haun make investments the $1.5 billion in capital commitments that her agency — just lately named Haun Ventures — garnered earlier this 12 months. To get a greater sense of how the younger agency works and the way it is considering investing right into a market proper now the place each shares and crypto are being dumped, we jumped on a Zoom with Rosenblum, who lives in Solar Valley, Idaho, late final week. Excerpts of that chat observe, edited for size and readability.
TC: Let’s begin by backing up a bit. Andreessen Horowitz is an investor in Polychain Capital, whose founder was the primary worker of Coinbase. Katie is on the board of Coinbase. She additionally spent a decade as a federal prosecutor on the DOJ, the place you spent your first 12 months out of faculty. With all of those potential intersections, when did you two first cross paths?
SR: Katie and I first met in 2017 when she joined the Coinbase board. We didn’t preserve in notably shut contact after I left Coinbase, however in November of final 12 months, I truly got down to begin my very own enterprise fund, and so I used to be engaged on that and, course, Katie and I’ve fairly a number of associates in widespread, and so a few of these folks I had been form of simply prepping and brainstorming with by way of easy methods to pitch to fund earlier than going out to fundraise. And I believe Katie caught wind that I used to be in technique of that after which reached reached out to me, informed me what she was interested by, and I ended up flying out to Menlo Park for a pair days and we jammed collectively and walked a bunch of laps across the Stanford dish and determined it was a great time to staff up. The remaining is current historical past.
You had been the primary deal lead employed by Katie. What number of workers are there at this level?
We’re now 12 folks whole — the deal staff is at present three folks — and I believe we’ll most likely preserve the entire agency fairly lean and nimble. We’ll add a few extra of us to the deal staff over the course of this 12 months however actually not rather more than that. I believe you possibly can think about Haun Ventures as a 15- to 20-person agency at regular state.
That is most likely a dumb, however to be clear, this can be a conventional fund you’re deploying, in that that is precise {dollars} that will likely be referred to as down. None of those commitments had been in crypto or something like that.
The technique is clearly very crypto ahead however the construction is kind of vanilla. We’re a typical enterprise construction. We ended up deciding to shut on $1.5 billion whole throughout two funds. One car is our $500 million early-stage fund, and the opposite is our $1 billion acceleration fund for barely later-stage stuff.
It’s on the market that Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon are restricted companions. Are there different people or companies you can point out which have backed the agency?
Most of our LPs are establishments, from sovereign wealth funds to college endowments to pension plans to hospital programs. And we even have some particular person LPs — largely simply associates of Katie or myself, associates of the agency, so to talk.
When it comes to backing later-stage outfits, I don’t see the standard nomenclature of “Collection A” or “B” or “C” assigned to a variety of these web3 offers and initiatives. What constitutes later-stage, within the agency’s view?
The important thing distinction is simply actually staged within the type of: how far alongside the venture is in its improvement, what kind of utilization there may be. The thought of stage possibly seems to be just a little bit totally different than in conventional tech enterprise. Traditionally, in the event you’re a tech enterprise play, you’re one thing the place a giant consequence can be to have an organization you invested in [become a] billion- or multibillion-dollar firm, and that’s true of sure corporations within the crypto area that greater up within the tech stack. However as you get decrease and decrease, you’re truly speaking about these networks, together with Layer One protocols used for quite a lot of issues, and these networks, whenever you assume of what’s a home-run consequence, somewhat than considering within the billions of {dollars}, you’re truly considering within the trillions of {dollars}. So once we consider easy methods to outline stage for one thing in that class, [we’re taking into account the question of] what’s the terminal measurement ought to this turn into a giant winner? So these are a number of the issues that we have a look at.
What number of totally different tokens have you ever acquired or offers have you ever achieved up to now?
I might say a dozen or so offers at this level that span quite a lot of totally different deal deal buildings or asset sorts.
Two corporations you’ve funded have introduced their rounds just lately, together with Zora, a two-year-old, L.A.- primarily based Ethereum-based market for getting, promoting and curating NFTs that raised $50 million in new funding. Was that an acceleration deal or an early stage deal?
The staff at Zora has been round for a few years, they usually’ve had a few fairly necessary pivots alongside the best way. To your level, it’s one the place it’s form of humorous to outline what sort of spherical it’s. You may’t actually give it a typical classification of Collection A, Collection B, no matter. It finally ends up simply being just a little bit extra loosely outlined. They’ve bought some fairly thrilling issues to announce within the close to future concerning the path that they’re headed in, so I gained’t spoil their information for them, however they’re off to the races in a extremely cool approach.
Had they raised funding beforehand?
Yeah, they’ve raised, and I don’t know off the highest of my head what they’ve publicly stated about who they’ve raised from, however it’s an incredible group on the cap desk or traders that we work with lots and know effectively.
Are these traders the way you discovered the corporate?
I’ve truly recognized the Zora co-founders since 2018 or so. The entire co-founding staff got here from Coinbase.
What about Spotlight, a 14-month-old Bay Space-based outfit that claims it lets creators design and mint NFTs and create a neighborhood round them. What drew you to this explicit firm?
The Spotlight staff is equally spectacular, coming from the web2 world — coming locations from Sq. (now Block) and DoorDash and different well-designed web2 services and products. In the end what they need us to do is got down to allow people who find themselves not already tremendous deep crypto engineers to allow communities with web3 instruments, so it’s a no-code platform for doing simply that.
Based mostly on this very restricted knowledge pattern, it sounds such as you’re monitoring a variety of web2 operators and founders who’re shifting into this web3 world. Is that correct?
We’re equally open to backing founders who’ve labored in crypto for a decade, or possibly they’ve labored in crypto for a 12 months. What we actually care about is their dedication to what they’re constructing and their distinctive insights and intuitions round precisely why they wish to construct it.
There’s a lot whitespace in web3 that I wonder if you concentrate on conflicts of curiosity in the identical approach that traders have traditionally. I’m seeing a variety of NFT minting sort corporations, for instance. Would you fund one other?
That’s a extremely necessary query for crypto enterprise particularly. The overall web2 panorama is one during which a founder or a startup has a really clear set of premises by way of what they’re constructing on prime of, issues like TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP — the dozen or so web protocols that all of us use day-after-day.
The distinctive factor that [founders are] getting down to do in crypto is the inverse of that, the place each single layer of the tech stack is evolving in parallel. Even probably the most primary components to the crypto tech stack — the concept of decentralized consensus — there’s this fixed evolution of forms of decentralized consensus or consensus mechanisms.
So when you will have actually each constructing block evolving, that tends to lend itself to founders and startups that most likely should, if not pivot, at the least bear in mind a variety of new data over the course of their startup neighborhood. . .
We do take the concept of conflicts severely and we do wish to be sure that we’re being actually good companions to our portfolio founders, so we might not wish to put that in jeopardy. However actually, what we’ve already seen is founders possibly begin two totally different startups, beginning in an analogous neighborhood of an concept that find yourself, at instances, even constructing at totally different layers of the crypto tech stack. So there’s fairly a little bit of flexibility within the path issues have gone.
Speaking about NFTs, one of many final offers Katie did for Andreessen Horowitz earlier than leaving the agency was the NFT music rights startup Royal, which raised $55 million led by a16z again in November. Does Haun Ventures have a stake in that firm?
You’re precisely proper. That was a16z-led deal, the place Katie joined the board as a part of that deal. Katie remains to be on the board of Royal for that, however it’s not a Haun Ventures portfolio firm for the time being.
Does that make it trickier so that you can spend money on one other NFT music rights startup or would you doubtlessly simply soar right into a later spherical for a similar firm?
It’s a great query. I believe all choices are nonetheless open there. Digitally managed royalties and on-chain rights are tremendous attention-grabbing and in addition a extremely difficult class. It’s very complicated area. So I might presume that there’ll be fairly a number of actually gifted founders constructing in that normal class and possibly experimenting with numerous totally different approaches by way of the markets they’re making an attempt to serve and the way they serve them. So it’s actually a market we are going to proceed to try.
Talking of Katie’s board seats, she’s additionally on the board of OpenSea, which brings to thoughts a dialog I had just lately with Sarah Tavel of Benchmark, who stated web3 corporations like OpenSea and Sorare — which Benchmark has backed — are actually centralized corporations which are constructed on a decentralized infrastructure and had been by no means actually meant to be fully decentralized entities. Agree? Disagree?
On the core of the idea of web3 is that this considered decentralization, however I believe lots of people possibly have been much less considerate the place that finally ends up mattering and being necessary. For my part, centralized platforms will and will exist for sure makes use of. The necessary factor in the case of decentralization within the crypto tech stack is that platforms would not have the power to to “lock in” their customers.
To not decide on anybody web2 firm, however you consider a few of these social networks the place each motion you’ve taken — each each photograph you’ve uploaded, your literal social graph, your community of family and friends, is all preserved and managed by a central gatekeeper, and there’s no method to exit that data. The thought in crypto is, positive, you possibly can have a centralized platform the place you develop that content material, however for one thing like your social graph, you possibly can truly depart the platform and take your social graph with you as a result of this stuff are all being constructed on an underlying open infrastructure.
The crypto collapse of the final week or two has worn out $400 billion in market worth from cryptocurrencies, together with Bitcoin and Ethereum. What are your ideas on what’s taking place on the market proper now? It looks like a great time to have $1.5 billion at your disposal with every little thing on sale.
I’ve been working on this area since 2014. I joined Coinbase in an analogous second in time to the place we’re at present, this week, on this present market cycle, the place you most likely have a three-years-or-so slog ahead of getting to be heads down and constructing and possibly not [seeing] the euphoria that we’ve felt during the last 12 months or so within the area.
Crypto bear markets will be actually onerous on folks for lots of causes, financially, psychologically, emotionally. However traditionally, the silver lining is that a variety of the very best initiatives in crypto are born in moments like this. Going again a few cycles, you had Bitcoin’s rise in late 2013, adopted very shortly thereafter by form of a crash in early 2014. I believe the Ethereum pre-sale was in June of 2014, and [that rise and fall] performed out once more within the 2017 and 2018 cycle, the place we had peak euphoria adopted by a crash. Then in 2018, some superb initiatives like [the crypto exchange] Uniswap and [the decentralized margin trading platform] dYdX had been based proper in that interval. So I believe fairly actually in possibly the subsequent a number of weeks to months, you’re most likely going to have some new startups and new initiatives created in crypto that, three or 4 years from now, we are going to look again out and go ‘Wow, that was born out of out of this final crypto winter.’
Is Haun Ventures structured as a registered funding advisor?
We aren’t. We’re a vanilla, exempt enterprise fund.
I puzzled since you and Katie clearly know Coinbase very effectively. Some would possibly argue that Coinbase is on sale proper now. Investor Cathie Wooden simply spent $3 million on shares. Given that you’ve some huge cash at your disposal, I’m curious in the event you would or have taken stakes in any publicly traded corporations which have gotten hammered currently — Coinbase or different.
I’m personally a holder of COIN and I overlook who tweeted this yesterday or the day earlier than, however somebody wrote that it appeared like a generational shopping for alternative for regular individuals who don’t essentially have entry to superb early-stage offers to have the ability to spend money on Coinbase at lower than two instances its Collection C valuation in 2018. I are inclined to agree with that personally. I’m a private holder of Coinbase inventory and positively can be bullish that this week is a reasonably particular shopping for alternative. However clearly folks ought to must do the analysis they should do to make unbiased monetary selections. And as a fund, we’re actually not targeted on the general public fairness markets.
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