Andreessen Horowitz enlists Arianna Simpson to help run $ 2.2 billion crypto fund

Andreessen Horowitz Adds Leading New Partner to Help Deploy His $ 2.2 Billion Cryptocurrency Fund.

Arianna Simpson, 30, is promoted to a general partner to business partner about a year after arriving, the company said on Monday.

Simpson has become somewhat of a celebrity in the cryptocurrency world. She quit a global marketing job at Facebook and joined BitGo in her early 20s. Then she started her own venture capital firm at the age of 24 to invest in blockchain and crypto companies. Friends and mentors advised him not to.

“It was an unpopular decision,” Simpson told CNBC in an interview. “But the opportunity cost of not entering this industry was just too high.”

Simpson said she was “blown away” after reading Bitcoin’s white paper and thought it was “the most important innovation” of her life. She continued her research on cryptocurrencies and tried to convince Facebook to launch a crypto project before its foray into space with Libra, now called Diem. It was “four to five years too early,” she said.

Simpson invested early in a bear market. Bitcoin’s value fell 80% in early 2018 and most smaller cryptocurrencies followed suit. His second firm, Autonomous Partners, supported companies such as Celo during these years, overlapping some of Andreessen’s early crypto coins.

Andreessen Horowitz entered the crypto space thanks to his 2013 investment in Coinbase. He started raising dedicated crypto funds three years ago, during the bear market now known as the “crypto winter”. The company, founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, announced its third such fund in June. The last fund of $ 2.2 billion is more than seven times the size of the first.

Simpson joins partners Ali Yahya, as well as Katie Haun Chris Dixon, who are leading the company’s crypto efforts and have met on Coinbase’s board of directors. Haun, a former Justice Department prosecutor, investigated the now defunct Mt.Gox cryptocurrency exchange and the Internet Silk Road black market. Haun and Dixon have compared the potential of blockchain to that of the internet and remain “radically optimistic.”

Simpson first connected with Haun via a direct message on Twitter.

“From the first moment I met Arianna several years ago, I knew she was a force to be reckoned with,” Haun said. “His motivation for cryptography and for connecting people and ideas was immediately clear over a coffee that turned into hours of conversation.”

The company has stakes in companies fueling the recent NFT boom, such as OpeanSea and Dapper Labs. Simpson stressed the company’s emphasis on “decentralized finance.” Known as “challenge,” the term is used to describe traditional financial applications built on the same technology that underlies bitcoin. She also highlighted investments in less obvious crypto-related categories such as games.

As categories like NFTs and Challenges have taken off this year, the price of bitcoin has fallen by half from its all-time high of over $ 60,000 in April. Simpson said prices may be a “lagging indicator – not a leading indicator” for private investment.

“You really have to separate the short-term prices from what is fundamentally being built – we kind of ignore the headlines and just focus on the tech,” she said. “Bear markets are often where the real work happens.”