Balaji Srinivasan
Formerly CTO at Coinbase
Balaji Srinivasan
Formerly CTO at Coinbase
Singapore
Overview
Work Experience
Angel Investor
2012 - Current
Investor in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash, Soylent, Cameo, Superhuman, Shrug Capital, etc.
Cofounder and Board Member
2014
Conceptualized and set up Coin Center in 2014 with Jerry Brito and Alex Morcos. Coin Center has become the leading non-profit focused on the policy issues facing cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
CTO
2018 - 2019
As Chief Technology Officer at Coinbase, I did the following: - Sourced and closed more than $1.5B in deals for Coinbase Custody (with Sam McIngvale and Juan Suarez) - Supervised the integration of Earn.com into Coinbase and subsequent expansion to 100+ countries (with John Granata and Ada Yeo) - Sourced/closed >$300M in deals for Coinbase Earn, including $120M+ from the Stellar Foundation (with Zach Segal, Dave Bean, and Max Branzburg) - Organized both the business and technical sides of the USDC stablecoin launch, now at $1B+ in market cap (with Jim Migdal, Jacob Horne, Miha Rebernik, Maksim Stepanenko, and the Circle team) - Prepared the slide decks and gave the presentations for the $300M Series E raise (with Shan Aggarwal) - Drove the addition of new assets to the Coinbase platform across all products (with Zach Segal, David Farmer, David Renie, Anna Marie Clifton, Dan Coffman, Juan Suarez, and Brian Brooks) - Supervised the buildout of a wholly new infrastructure for adding assets beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum forks, which enabled support for Stellar, Ripple, and EOS as well as ZEC and general ERC-20 support for 0x, BAT, REP, DAI, etc (with Ali Fathalian and Omar Bohsali) There's more, but that's the highlights! Worked with a number of wonderful people.
CEO and Cofounder
2017 - 2018
Earn.com allows you to make money online by replying to emails and completing tasks. It works on your phone, in any country, with no need for a bank account. Earn.com was sold to Coinbase in early 2018.
Lecturer, Departments of Statistics and Computer Science
2006 - 2018
At Stanford, I've taught courses on Bitcoin/cryptocurrency/blockchain (CS 251P), data mining (Stats 202), statistics (Stats 110), computational biology (Stats 366). I also taught Stanford's Startup Engineering MOOC at coursera.org/course/startup, which enrolled 250,000+ students worldwide.
Graduate Student
2002 - 2006
Worked on bioinformatics, genome sequencing, computational statistics, and machine learning before it was cool. Authored and co-authored papers on microbial and human genomics, pharmacogenetics, genetics of complex diseases, functional genomics, population genetics, and Mendelian disease.
Board Partner
2015 - 2018
Part-time at a16z and full-time at a portfolio company (21.co) while turning the latter company around. The turnaround was successful, and the new company (Earn.com) was sold to Coinbase in early 2018.
General Partner
2013 - 2015
Helped Andreessen Horowitz move into biomedicine and blockchain through both investments and recruiting, which eventually led to the a16z Crypto and Bio funds. Select investments include Axoni, Omada Health, OpenGov, Benchling, Tradeblock, SolveBio, HumanAPI, and Medisas.
Cofounder
2014 - 2018
Cofounded Teleport with Sten Tamkivi and Silver Keskkula. Teleport is a search engine for digital nomads which was acquired by Topia in 2017.
Cofounder and CTO
2008 - 2012
Took company from inception in a Stanford dorm room to testing ~3% of all births in the United States. Responsible for scientific codebase, marketing, design, public relations, recruiting, training, fundraising, and technical vision as we grew from an idea on a napkin to one of the largest clinical genome centers in the world. Counsyl was ultimately sold for $375M to Myriad.
Education
Investments
Latest Articles
The Network School
America's $175 Trillion Problem
Talks about sovereign debt crisis, US economy and emergency loans
California Is Not A Democracy
Gil Duran Faked A Quote For the New Republic
Talks about fake quote, community note and The New Republic