Akash Talyan is a Product Designer at Zip (ziphq.com), a San Francisco-based AI procurement platform valued at $2.2 billion. He leads design for the agent experience team, building the human-AI interfaces that power enterprise procurement automation. With a Master's in Human-Computer Interaction from Georgia Tech and a career spanning Coinbase, Verily Life Sciences, and Lucid Software, Akash brings rare depth to the challenge of making agentic AI workflows feel intuitive to real enterprise users.
Soups Ranjan is the co-founder and CEO of Sardine, an agentic AI platform for financial crime prevention and AML compliance headquartered in San Francisco. With a PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University and career stints at Coinbase (as Head of Risk) and Revolut (Head of Financial Crime), he channeled over 15 years of fraud-fighting expertise into Sardine, which has raised $145.6M and grown to 300+ enterprise customers. Sardine's behavioral biometrics and device intelligence platform now profiles 2.2+ billion devices, making it one of the most comprehensive financial crime databases in existence.
Surojit Chatterjee is the Founder and CEO of Ema, an enterprise AI company building universal AI employees that automate complex workflows for large organizations. A two-decade Silicon Valley veteran, he previously served as Chief Product Officer at Coinbase (where he helped steer the company through its 2021 IPO), VP of Product at Google (where he built Google Shopping into a multi-billion dollar business), and Head of Product at Flipkart. He holds 40 US patents and an MBA from MIT Sloan alongside a B.Tech from IIT Kharagpur. In 2024, Ema raised $61M total with backers including Accel, Sheryl Sandberg, and Dustin Moskovitz.
Ramu Arunachalam is a General Partner at A.Capital Ventures, the San Francisco-based VC firm known for a founder-friendly approach and a portfolio spanning Notion, Anthropic, Databricks, Coinbase, and Replit. An engineer turned product manager turned investor, Ramu brings a rare depth of technical credibility to the table - he helped build VMware's first virtual switch, shaped a16z's Cloud and Big Data thesis during his time as Partner there, and now leads A.Capital's $180M Fund V with a focus on AI and crypto-native companies.
Pankaj Gupta is a serial entrepreneur and seasoned tech executive who built Twitter's early recommendation engine (Who-to-Follow, MagicRecs), led Google Pay's engineering across India and globally, scaled Coinbase's India operations from zero, and co-founded Yupp — a crypto-incentivized AI model evaluation platform that raised $33M from a16z before shutting down in March 2026. A Stanford PhD and IIT Delhi alumnus, he has founded four startups, three of which were acquired.
Stephanie Zinn is Editorial Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads editorial strategy and audience growth across Substack, X, YouTube, and search. With over a decade in tech editorial, she previously built editorial teams from scratch at Coinbase and GitHub - generating 15M newsletter subscribers at Coinbase and launching GitHub's influential ReadME Project. She is one of the rare operators who treats clear writing not as a nice-to-have but as a core business asset.
Katie Haun is the founder and CEO of Haun Ventures, a $1.5 billion crypto and frontier technology venture firm she launched in 2022 after co-leading a16z Crypto. A former federal prosecutor who created the DOJ's first cryptocurrency task force, she is one of the most credible voices at the intersection of law, policy, and digital assets - a former skeptic turned crypto believer, converted by the very Silk Road case she was assigned to prosecute.
Tim Draper is a third-generation venture capitalist and founder of Draper Associates, the firm behind early bets on Hotmail, Baidu, Skype, Tesla, Coinbase, and Robinhood. He pioneered viral marketing with Hotmail's email footer tagline, bought 30,000 bitcoins at a U.S. Marshals auction in 2014 for $19 million, and has never sold. The founder of Draper University of Heroes in San Mateo, he frames entrepreneurship as a heroic calling - handing students superhero capes on day one. Twice tried to split California into multiple states. Consistently predicts Bitcoin will hit $250,000. Sings his own original songs at startup conferences. Backed 60+ unicorns from seed stage across four decades.
Fred Ehrsam (Frederick Ernest Ehrsam III) is a serial founder and investor who co-founded Coinbase in 2012 — the crypto exchange that went public on Nasdaq in 2021 — and Paradigm in 2018, the research-driven crypto VC firm that raised a $2.5 billion fund. Now he's chasing his next frontier: Nudge, a non-invasive brain-computer interface startup using focused ultrasound to modulate brain states, which raised $100 million in Series A funding in 2025. A Duke computer science graduate turned Goldman Sachs FX trader, Ehrsam discovered Bitcoin in 2011 and never looked back — quietly becoming one of the most influential architects of the crypto industry while building a reputation as a deep thinker obsessed with pushing the boundaries of human capability.
Varun Srinivasan is a co-founder of Farcaster, the decentralized social network protocol built on Ethereum, and currently works at Tempo, Stripe's stablecoin-focused blockchain. Previously, he spent over four years at Coinbase rising to Senior Director of Platform, and co-founded SoundFocus, a Y Combinator-backed mobile audio startup. A Carnegie Mellon graduate and prolific reader, Srinivasan has spent his career building platforms that give users control over their data and identity.
Linda Xie is a crypto investor, founder, and ecosystem builder who co-founded Scalar Capital in 2017 after serving as an early product manager at Coinbase. She raised a $20 million fund backed by Chris Dixon and Fred Ehrsam, championed privacy-focused blockchain projects, co-produced the Ethereum documentary 'Ethereum: The Infinite Garden,' and now leads developer ecosystem growth at Farcaster - a decentralized social protocol she first used as a user in 2021, invested in as a VC in 2022, built on in 2023, and officially joined the team in 2025.
Matt Huang is co-founder and Managing Partner of Paradigm, the research-driven crypto investment firm he launched with Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam in 2018. With $12.7 billion in AUM and foundational investments in Uniswap, Optimism, Flashbots, and dozens of other protocols, Huang transformed venture capital by treating his firm as a hybrid research lab, engineering organization, and fund. The son of a Goldman Sachs derivatives head and a pioneering computer science professor, he turned a $500K bet on a language-barrier pitch from Zhang Yiming into an estimated $500M windfall. In 2025, he added founding CEO of Tempo - the Stripe-Paradigm blockchain for global payments - to his portfolio, while raising a new $1.5B fund to expand into AI and robotics.
Olaf Carlson-Wee is the founder and CEO of Polychain Capital, one of the world's largest crypto-focused investment firms managing billions in assets. A Lutheran minister's son from rural Minnesota who wrote his college thesis on Bitcoin, he was Coinbase's first employee, demanded his salary be paid entirely in cryptocurrency, then left to launch Polychain in 2016 with $8 million that grew to $1 billion in under two years. He is a practicing lucid dreamer, a transhumanist, and the brother of two poets — a fact that tells you nearly everything about the household he grew up in.
Kim Milosevich is the Chief Marketing Officer for Crypto at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z crypto), widely regarded as one of the architects of Web3's public narrative. Over 25+ years she has shaped communications for Yahoo, Skype, and Coinbase, but her deepest imprint is on a16z itself - where she launched the a16z podcast, built its content infrastructure from scratch, and helped bring the crypto fund's story to the world. After guiding Coinbase through its landmark 2021 Nasdaq direct listing, she returned to a16z in 2022 as CMO to continue shaping how the next era of the internet talks about itself.
Balaji Srinivasan is a serial founder, investor, and author who holds four Stanford degrees and has co-founded companies sold for nearly half a billion dollars. Former General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and first CTO of Coinbase, he is best known for writing The Network State — a WSJ #2 bestselling book advocating technology-enabled sovereign communities — and for building The Network School, a live experiment in startup-society living on a private island near Singapore.
Preethi Kasireddy is a serial founder, engineer, and educator who pivoted from Goldman Sachs investment banking to venture capital at Andreessen Horowitz, then taught herself to code at Hack Reactor and went on to build at Coinbase, found TruStory, create DappCamp - one of the most respected Web3 developer bootcamps - and most recently co-found Ferta, a root-cause fertility coaching startup. Her writing on Ethereum and blockchain architecture has become essential reading for tens of thousands of developers worldwide.
Karri Saarinen is the co-founder and CEO of Linear — a $1.25B unicorn project management tool trusted by 66% of Forbes' top 50 AI companies, including OpenAI, Ramp, and Vercel. A Finnish designer-turned-engineer who grew up questioning why everyday objects look ugly, attended 5,000-person LAN parties as a child, and turned that instinct into one of the most respected product careers in Silicon Valley. After shaping the visual language at Coinbase and Airbnb (Cereal typeface, Design Language System, Lottie, Google Material Design Award), he co-founded Linear in 2019 with two fellow Finns from Helsinki — and built it to 20,000+ customers and $100M+ ARR while staying profitable the entire time. His philosophy: quality is the growth strategy, tools embed opinions so choose accordingly, and the best MVP in a crowded category isn't minimal — it's sharply opinionated for a specific audience.