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Andreessen Horowitz Launches $300 Million Crypto Fund Co-Led By Its First Female General Partner

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Andreessen Horowitz

One of venture capital’s highest-profile venture capital firms has named a splashy first female investment partner as the co-leader of a new $300 million crypto fund.

Andreessen Horowitz announced on Monday that it had hired Kathryn Haun as a general partner and one of the two lead investors of a16z crypto, a new $300 million fund that will invest in cryptocurrency companies, coins and protocols. Chris Dixon, the firm’s longtime crypto-focused investor behind Coinbase and Polychain Capital, is the other leader of the new fund.

In an interview, Haun and Dixon said that a16z crypto will operate as a separate legal entity to the firm’s other funds. That’s because Andreessen Horowitz had previously run close to the limit on the percentage of its capital it could allocate to crypto deals, Dixon says. Both investors are also general partners in the overall firm, with the partner meetings and economics that come with it.

“This is doubling down, committing to crypto and building a team that is focused on it,” says Dixon. “We want to maintain our flexibility,” adds Haun. “We both share the view that this is evolving and in early days. A lot of what we are investing in hasn’t been invented yet.”

Andreessen Horowitz formally disclosed the fund only last week, so while it has deals in the pipeline, a16z crypto hasn’t made any investments yet, the partners say. When it does, portfolio companies will have the same operational and back-end support as companies backed by Andreessen Horowitz’s other investment vehicles, they add. The firm’s existing crypto deals will stay in their funds, says Dixon. The new fund will be stage and geography agnostic, but will likely invest mostly in early-stage “classic venture capital” equity rounds in new crypto technologies, he says, with each partner investing broadly across the space. While the firm will be able to invest in coins and tokens through the fund, the focus will be on potentially widely used protocols and not on speculation, Dixon wrote in a blog post on the news.

While the dedicated crypto fund is a milestone moment for venture capital’s push into crypto—and for the development of the crypto ecosystem—Haun’s appointment has its own significance. Haun is the first female general partner in Andreessen Horowitz’s nine-year history, instantly minting her as one of the most powerful investors in tech.

Though this is her first formal role in VC, Haun comes with a high-profile background. Since 2015 she’s lectured at Stanford University, where she taught in the business school on topics including crypto and regulation. As a former longtime federal prosecutor, Haun led the first government task force on cryptocurrencies. She also was in charge of the investigations into Mt. Gox and agents accused of corruption on the Silk Road task force. More recently, she has served as a board member of Coinbase, the popular crypto exchange backed by Andreessen Horowitz and where she met Dixon. She’s also made some venture investments in and out of crypto and joined the board of bug bounty startup HackerOne.

Haun says that Andreessen Horowitz stood out to her as an early believer in crypto and “continuous learning” with a stable of top-tier entrepreneurs. Asked about cryptos—and venture’s—relative lack of diversity, she says: “Like anything, I think it’s something that can be improved, but I don’t think it’s unique to crypto, and it’s certainly not unique to tech.” Haun says her speakers in a recent class at Stanford ended up balanced by gender without a conscious effort. “There are a lot of great females in the space,” she says.

Andreessen Horowitz

But Haun’s hire helps close a chapter in Andreessen Horowitz’s history that saw it become one of the best-known VC firms without a female investment partner. In the reporting for Forbes’ April cover story on All Raise, a group of dozens of female partners across firms working to improve diversity within founders and funders in tech, Andreessen Horowitz was one of 50 male-led firms contacted to share its diversity and hiring plans. At the time, cofounder Ben Horowitz responded by email to say that the firm focused on networking and recruiting with four underrepresented groups, including African American people, women, Hispanic people and military veterans; the firm noted its employee base of about 130 people was 52.5% female at the time. And Andreessen Horowitz said it had no gender-based or race-based hiring criteria. “We hold the firm accountable to a fair and inclusive process rather than specific numbers or quota,” Horowitz said.

Gender-based hiring criteria or not, Haun’s hire will take some heat off the firm to demonstrate such inclusion, while adding an investor already known as an expert within the crypto community.

She and Dixon will now look to build out their fund along the playbook the firm established in late 2015, when it brought on partner Vijay Pande to lead a $200 million biotech fund. The firm added a $450 million second bio fund in December 2017 along with another general partner, Jorge Conde.

That Andreessen Horowitz was looking to establish a dedicated crypto fund was an open secret in the venture capital world. Recode first reported in April on the firm’s planning for the fund, citing several job listings for crypto-focused roles.

Now Andreessen Horowitz is out in the open with its new fund and new partner. Where the firm goes from here—and where Dixon and Haun invest first with its new crypto dollars—will be closely watched in the industry.

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