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.
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.