The Six-Sentence
Career Move
The email was six sentences long. No preamble, no resume attachment, no apology for cold-contacting a senior partner at the world's most influential venture firm. Just: here is who I am, here is what I want, here is why crypto. Arianna Simpson replied. Within months, Carra Wu was the first intern Andreessen Horowitz had ever hired for its crypto team - and within a year, she was signing checks.
That's the story on the surface. The actual story starts earlier, in a Chicago suburb, with a girl who studied applied math, computer science, and economics at Harvard simultaneously, danced with the university's ballet company on the side, and still somehow had time to take multiple leaves of absence to go build things in the real world - a startup, a military software factory, a HoloLens lab at Microsoft.
By the time Wu sent that email at the end of 2020, she had already shipped AR/VR applications for the HoloLens, consulted for the U.S. Air Force's Kessel Run software unit, and managed game developer relationships at Apple's App Store. She wasn't asking to break into tech. She was asking to finally find the version of it she couldn't stop thinking about.
"As time goes on, I have given up on the idea of making grand plans."- Carra Wu
The irony is that this deliberately plan-averse investor has built one of crypto's most coherent portfolios. Gaming. Media. DAOs. IP infrastructure. Each investment sits inside a thesis that Wu articulated long before the market agreed: that the internet's next chapter is about ownership, not just access. That players should own pieces of the games they build. That creators should be compensated the moment their work is used, not months later through opaque royalty flows.
Her Chinese name, 春晓, means spring dawn - the moment just before the world wakes up. In crypto's endless winter of 2022 and 2023, when the headlines were all ruin and fraud, Wu kept writing checks. She compared DAOs to the Republic of Venice - not a new invention, she said, but a new structure that gathered existing factors into something that could last centuries. That kind of historical depth is unusual in a 20-something VC. It's rarer still when it comes with a HoloLens patent and a ballet background.