The Engineer Who Refused to Stop Being an Engineer
Most venture capitalists stop shipping code the moment they raise their first fund. Avichal Garg built a firm where that's a firing offense. At Electric Capital, every investor writes code. Not "wrote code once, years ago." Writes. Present tense. Ships. Commits to GitHub. Reviews pull requests.
It's an unusual philosophy for a firm managing over $3 billion. It's also why Electric Capital tracks developer activity across 500+ blockchain ecosystems while competitors chase token prices and Twitter hype. Garg learned something in his years at Google and Facebook that Wall Street VCs missed: the teams that build durable things look nothing like the teams that make fast money.
Garg's origin story doesn't start in Palo Alto. It starts in a small town in Ohio, about as far from Silicon Valley's venture ecosystem as geography and culture permit. Stanford came later. Two degrees in computer science - bachelor's and master's. Then Google, where he worked on search ranking and ads, the money-printing engines that funded everything else Larry and Sergey wanted to build.
But Garg had that itch. The one engineers get when they realize they're building someone else's vision. So he left. Started PrepMe in 2001, an online test prep platform before "edtech" was a category venture firms pretended to understand. Sold it to Ascend Learning in 2011. Started another company, Frost. Sold it to Google.
Then came Spool, the personal internet recorder he co-founded in 2010. The idea was elegant: save content from anywhere on the web, read it later, offline, beautifully formatted. Facebook acquired it in 2012, not for the product but for the team. Garg became Director of Product Management, leading the Local product group - a 400-person army responsible for $3.5 billion in revenue.
The Wu's Husband Incident
When Yin Wu's company Pulley landed on Forbes' Fintech 50 list, Garg posted on LinkedIn: "Looking forward to being mentioned in the press as 'Wu's husband' more often." It was funny because it was true. Wu had built Pulley, a cap table management platform, into a category leader. Garg had found her through the same network he'd spent years building - the robust group of friends and colleagues he credits with most of his best outcomes.
The joke revealed something about Garg's personality. He's ambitious enough to manage billions but secure enough to cheer when his wife's startup makes headlines. That combination is rarer in venture capital than you'd think.
Building Electric Capital: The Anti-VC VC Firm
In 2018, Garg and Curtis Spencer co-founded Electric Capital with a thesis that seemed obvious to engineers and insane to traditional VCs: crypto would be won or lost based on developer activity, not marketing budgets or token economics or which influencer tweeted what.
The firm started tracking GitHub commits. Lines of code written. Pull requests merged. Developer communities growing or shrinking. They built software to compile code, profile blockchain nodes, analyze on-chain data. They measured protocol health the way epidemiologists measure disease spread - through hard data, not vibes.
By 2024, Electric Capital's developer reports had become the gold standard for understanding blockchain ecosystems. The biggest revelation from their 2024 data: India became the largest source of new crypto developers. Not San Francisco. Not New York. Not London. India, Nigeria, Southeast Asia - places where the next generation of builders were writing the future while Western crypto Twitter argued about which dog coin would moon.
Investment Philosophy
- Technical Depth Over Hype - Every partner is an engineer who ships code
- Developer Activity Metrics - Track GitHub commits, not Twitter followers
- Long-Term Orientation - Build things that last 50-100 years
- Preseed to Series A - $1-15M+ checks for frontier tech builders
- Builder-Led Firm - 30% of team are former founders
Portfolio Highlights
- Infrastructure: Kraken, Bitwise, NEAR, Solana, dYdX
- Consumer: Magic Eden, Aven, HealthEx
- Enterprise: SF Compute, Certora
- Pre-Crypto Wins: Notion, Figma, Cruise, Airtable, Boom, Deel
- Recent Bets: Monad ($225M Series A), Bluenote Health
The Facebook Years: $3.5 Billion in Revenue
Forget the Spool acquisition story. The real story from Garg's Facebook years is what he built after they acquired his company. He led the Local product team - 400 engineers working on Facebook's local business products. The team generated $3.5 billion in revenue. That's not a typo. Not $3.5 million. Billion.
He also helped build Facebook Connect, which became the foundation for Facebook's entire platform strategy. Every time you've clicked "Log in with Facebook" on another website, you've used infrastructure Garg helped create. That's the kind of leverage that separates product leaders from product managers.
But the Facebook experience taught Garg something else: how to lead through economic chaos. When the 2008 financial crisis hit, he was deep in startup mode. In 2020, during COVID-19, he republished his lessons from that era. The advice was startlingly non-startup-bro: prioritize health and family first, cut costs deeply, hire patiently, maintain integrity during difficult times. If you're healthy and have your loved ones, you'll be fine long term.
The Journey: From PrepMe to Electric Capital
Co-founded PrepMe, pioneering online test preparation before "edtech" was a category VCs understood.
Founded Frost, later acquired by Google. Joined Google as Associate Product Manager, working on Search and Ads ranking.
Co-founded Spool, a personal internet recorder platform. The product was ahead of its time.
PrepMe acquired by Providence Equity-backed Ascend Learning. First successful exit.
Spool acquired by Facebook. Garg joins as Director of Product Management, eventually leading a 400-person team.
Led Facebook's Local product team ($3.5B in revenue). Helped build Facebook Connect, the foundation of Facebook's platform strategy.
Co-founded Electric Capital with Curtis Spencer. Started with a radical thesis: measure crypto by code, not hype.
Joined CNAS Board of Advisors. Became Chairman of Crypto Council for Innovation, leading web3 advocacy.
Electric Capital participated in Monad's $225M Series A. Invested in Bluenote Health. Released landmark developer activity report.
Speaking at HumanX 2026 on crypto VC landscape. Electric Capital tracking developer activity across 500+ blockchain ecosystems.
The Coinbase Prophecy
In an interview with Cointelegraph Magazine, Garg made a prediction: "Probably in the next five years, Coinbase will not really mention crypto as part of their advertising, as people will just know that you can buy stuff on Coinbase."
It's the same pattern every transformative technology follows. Nobody says "search the internet on Google" anymore. They say "Google it." Nobody says "order a ride on the Uber app." They say "Uber to the airport." When crypto becomes invisible infrastructure - when it's just how things work - that's when Garg's long-term bets pay off.
As he puts it: "There's this adage where people overestimate what's possible in two years, and they underestimate what's possible in 10."
Privacy, Politics, and the Future of Web3
Garg isn't just investing in crypto infrastructure. He's thinking about its implications. On privacy, he's written extensively about how it's "a structural condition that enables activities such as free expression, independent reasoning, and routine economic operations." Reduced privacy limits the ability of individuals and organizations to exchange ideas, carry out lawful but sensitive actions, manage internal business processes.
As Chairman of the Crypto Council for Innovation, he's leading the industry's advocacy efforts while simultaneously managing billions in investments. It's a delicate balance - advocating for regulatory clarity while betting on which protocols will survive long enough to need that clarity.
His role on the Center for a New American Security's Board of Advisors adds another dimension. National security implications of blockchain technology. Privacy-preserving computation. Distributed systems resilience. These aren't typical VC concerns. But Garg stopped being a typical VC the moment he required his investors to keep shipping code.
What Makes Avichal Different
The Knowledge-Sharing Obsession
Most VCs hoard proprietary insights. Garg converts recurring email threads with entrepreneurs into blog posts. His writing at avichal.com covers startup ideation heuristics, market timing, product metrics, go-to-market strategies. "Most of my posts are based on email threads and conversations with entrepreneurs," he writes. Why repeat yourself privately when you can scale knowledge publicly?
The Network Effect
Garg credits his "robust group of friends and colleagues built over years" with his best outcomes - including finding his wife. It's networking without the networking events. Building relationships that compound. The people who knew him when he was building PrepMe in 2001 are still in touch. That's a 25-year network. Most VCs started networking three years ago.