How Katie Haun Built a $1.5B Crypto Investment Platform

Katie Haun first encountered cryptocurrency in 2012 as a federal prosecutor tasked with investigating bitcoin. A decade later, she stands at the helm of one of crypto’s largest venture funds, managing $1.5 billion in assets at her eponymous firm, Haun Ventures.

“The more I did some diligence and looked into it, I found that some of the myths I’d been hearing were just not true,” Haun recalled in a 2018 debate with economist Paul Krugman. Through firsthand exposure and research, her early skepticism transformed into conviction in crypto’s potential to reshape digital commerce and ownership.

Starting Haun Ventures

After leaving the Department of Justice, where she created the government’s first cryptocurrency task force, Haun made an unconventional career pivot. She joined the board of Coinbase in 2017 as its first independent director, then became Andreessen Horowitz’s first female general partner in 2018, co-leading the firm’s crypto investments.

But Haun’s most audacious move came in March 2022, when she departed a16z to launch Haun Ventures with the largest debut fund ever raised by a solo female founding partner. The firm splits its capital between a $500 million early-stage fund for leading pre-seed through Series A rounds, and a $1 billion “acceleration” fund for more mature projects.

“Web3 is the new era of the internet, and it deserves a new era of investors,” Haun explained when launching her fund. Her timing proved prescient. While the crypto market entered a severe downturn shortly after, it allowed her team to deploy capital during market lows, and the market has since rebounded.

Investing in ‘Internet Native Asset Classes’

Haun Ventures currently maintains a deliberately lean structure, with just 10 employees. This compact size lets the firm stay nimble while focusing intensively on each portfolio company. Rather than building a large in-house operations team like some venture firms, Haun opts to leverage an extensive network of external experts who can assist portfolio companies on demand.

The firm’s investment thesis centers on “internet native asset classes” — a broader category than just cryptocurrencies. As Haun explains it, this encompasses everything from consumer-facing applications to deep infrastructure technology. Her team evaluates investments through both traditional venture metrics like market size and founder quality, while adding a crypto-specific overlay examining factors like token economics and regulatory considerations.

“We think of crypto as meaning something differently than just cryptocurrency,” Haun says. “What we mean when we say crypto is cryptographic proofs paired with economic incentives.”

The results of this approach are already visible in the firm’s portfolio. Early investments span from Bridge, a payments platform built on stablecoins, to Chaos Labs, which provides risk analysis for decentralized finance protocols. On the later-stage side, the firm has backed established players like blockchain analytics company Chainalysis.

From Prosecutor to Entrepreneur 

Haun’s background investigating cryptocurrency crimes gives her a unique perspective on the sector’s risks and opportunities. As a prosecutor, she led investigations into corrupt agents on the Silk Road task force and the Mt. Gox hack. This experience taught her that contrary to popular perception, cryptocurrency’s transparent nature can actually aid law enforcement.

“If you want to cover your tracks and you were a good criminal, bitcoin or cryptocurrency is one of the last things you should use,” she pointed out in the debate with economist Paul Krugman, noting that blockchain transactions leave permanent digital evidence trails.

Her prosecutorial role also forced her to take a deep look into the blockchain technology underlying crypto transactions, and this was enough to convince her to keep an open mind about this technology’s potential. The goal of blockchain is to enable reliable, trustworthy, decentralized transactions and hand power back to users. This practical application can sometimes get lost in speculative investing in tokens, but Haun Ventures has taken a longer view grounded in a deeper belief in use cases of blockchain and crypto.

The firm’s strategy emphasizes patience and selective deployment rather than rushing to invest. “We said we were not going to be one of those funds that deployed in months. We would pick years,” Haun explains. This measured approach helped the firm take advantage of market downturns to invest in both early-stage companies and publicly traded tokens at attractive valuations.

In the near future, Haun sees cryptocurrency technology enabling new economic models, particularly around digital ownership and creator monetization. She points to examples like musicians potentially selling fractional royalty rights directly to fans, or digital artists capturing ongoing revenue from secondary sales of their work.

For Haun, building her own venture firm represents both a natural progression and a chance to put her philosophical vision for crypto into practice. After prosecuting crypto’s risks, then investing through an established venture firm, she now aims to help shape the sector’s institutional development while maintaining the innovative spirit that first drew her to the space.

As she puts it, “We’re able to size up, but we’re also able to still get meaningful ownership where we collaborate with others.”

A decade after first investigating bitcoin, she’s built an investment platform working to fulfill cryptocurrency’s promise of expanding economic access and ownership, while maintaining the prudence and diligence she developed as a prosecutor.

“One of the things I learned in the last four years at the firm is: I’m actually an entrepreneur,” Haun reflected when she launched her fund in 2022. “It was time to go out on my own. It’s pretty much that simple.”

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