Balaji S Srinivasan is an Indian-American investor and entrepreneur who was the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of crypto exchange company Coinbase and a general partner in Andreessen Horowitz. He is an early investor in several tech companies and crypto protocols. He co-founded several companies such as Counsyl, Earn.com, Teleport, and Coin Center which were later acquired by other companies.
Wiki/Biography
Balaji S Srinivasan was born on Saturday, 24 May 1980 (age 43 years; as of 2023) in Long Island, New York, United States. His zodiac sign is Gemini. In 1997, he pursued a Bachelor of Science degree in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, California. In 2000, he pursued a Master of Science degree in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, California. In 2002, he pursued a Master of Science degree in Chemical Engineering and simultaneously began doing a PhD in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University, California. During his graduation, he focused mostly on genomics research. He wrote and co-wrote papers on a range of subjects including microbial and human genomics, pharmacogenetics, genetics of complex diseases, population genetics, and Mendelian disease.
Physical Appearance
Height (approx.): 5′ 8″
Weight (approx.): 65 kg
Hair Colour: Black
Eye Colour: Light brown
Family
Parents & Siblings
Balaji’s parents are physicians who emigrated from India. He has a brother named Ramji.
Wife
There is not much information about his marital status.
Career
In January 2008, he cofounded Counsyl and later took charge as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of the company. The idea for a genomic startup that later became Counsyl originated in a dorm room at Stanford. Balaji worked in the genomic field for over a decade including five years at Counsyl. At Counsyl, he overlooked scientific codebase, marketing, design, public relations, recruiting, training, fundraising, and technical vision. On 31 July 2018, Counsyl was acquired by Myriad Genetics for $375 million. In November 2012, he quit working with Counsyl and moved away from an executive role to explore other areas of technology.
Balaji Srinivasan as CTO
In 2013, he joined Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm, as a general partner and two years later became one of the board partners at the company. In 2014, he co-founded the company Teleport, a search engine for digital nomads, based in San Francisco, California. It was later acquired by Topia in 2017. In October 2017, he cofounded Earn.com and became the CEO of the company. In 2014, he co-founded Coin Center, a company dedicated to developing and advocating sound government policy toward digital currencies such as Bitcoin and open blockchain technologies, and became a board member at the company. In 2018, Earn.com was acquired by Coinbase, a digital currency wallet and platform where merchants and consumers can transact with new digital currencies like Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin, for approximately $120 million.
Balaji Srinivasan (centre) at Coinbase headquarters
Balaji was then appointed as the first Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Coinbase. While working at Coinbase, Balaji along with Zach Segal, Dave Bean, and Max Branzburg was responsible for sourcing and closing deals worth over $200 million for Coinbase Earn which included over $120 million from the Stellar Foundation. He was also responsible for the launch of USDC stablecoin, which later attained a market cap of over $33.4 billion.
1/2 Really enjoyed my time at Coinbase working with my friend @brian_armstrong. The Earn integration was successful and we’ve closed ~$200M in deals for the new Coinbase Earn. Was also my privilege to help with shipping new assets, launching USDC, & getting staking/voting going.
— Balaji (@balajis) May 4, 2019
Controversies
Doxxing a journalist
In 2013, following the publication of an article by TechCrunch which included Silicon Valley’s links to the anti-democratic neo-reactionary philosophy, Srinivasan sent an email to blogger Curtis Yarvin in which he suggested doxxing a journalist. The email read,
If things get hot, it may be interesting to sic the Dark Enlightenment audience on a single vulnerable hostile reporter to dox them and turn them inside out with hostile reporting sent to their advertisers/friends/contacts.”
Dispute with Taylor Lorenz
In July 2020, Balaji got into an argument on Twitter with the New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz. On 30 June, Lorenz tweeted about Korey’s, Away’s co-CEO, publicly accessible Instagram story. The story criticised the business model and editorial selection of media houses, which Lorenz in a tweet alleged to be “incoherent” as well as “disappointing.” After this tweet by Lorenz, Balaji said,
the New York Times reporter is ‘playing victim’ and is a member of a group of journalists who are sociopaths.”
Lorenz alleged various venture capitalists of Silicon Valley of insulting her on Clubhouse, a social audio app, including Srinivasan.
Awards, Honours, Achievements
- At Counsyl, he developed a pre-pregnancy genomic test that could be used to detect a variety of heritable diseases. This test helped him win the Wall Street Journal Innovation Award for Medicine and became the basis for Balaji’s MIT TR35 Award which names the world’s top 35 innovators under the age of 35.
- His Counsyl test was named one of Scientific American’s Top 10 World-Changing Ideas.
- In 2018, he was featured in the Fortune magazine’s “The Ledger 40 under 40” which is a list of young venture capitalists responsible for transforming the world of finance and technology.
Facts/Trivia
- Balaji has served as a lecturer in the Departments of Statistics and Computer Science at Stanford since 2006. In 2013, he taught in Massive Open Online Courses(MOOCs) that was titled ‘Startup Engineering’ which managed to reach about 250,000+ students worldwide. He has written papers on microbial and clinical genomics and taught bioinformatics at Stanford.
- In January 2017, Balaji met with President Donald Trump to discuss the future of the FDA (The United States Food and Drug Administration). He was also considered for a position in the FDA because of his expertise in subjects such as digital payments and computational biology. After being considered for a position in the FDA, Balaji deleted all his tweets from the past where he had openly criticised the FDA for preventing drug companies and startups from innovating by imposing unnecessary regulations.
- In July 2017, Srinivasan and Leland Lee introduced the Nakamoto coefficient, a measure of the smallest number of independent entities that can act collectively to shut down a blockchain; the higher the minimum Nakamoto coefficient value, the more decentralised the system is. This metric is used in blockchain decentralisation benchmarks today.
- In an interview, while talking about why he entered the field of crypto, he said,
I’m interested in businesses that take digital bits and turn them into interfaces for physical atoms. I’m also interested in drones, Bitcoin and 3D printing. The Internet is programmable information. The blockchain is programmable scarcity.”
- In 2017, he was one of the few influential people from Silicon Valley to back Trump during his presidential campaign.
- Srinivasan has acted as an angel investor and an advisor to companies such as Alchemy, Benchling, Cameo, CoinTracker, Culdesac, Dapper Labs, Deel, Digital Ocean, Eight Sleep, EPNS, Farcaster, Gitcoin, Golden, Instadapp, Lambda School, Levels Health, Locals, Messari, Mirror, OnDeck, OpenSea, Orchid Health, Prospera, Replit, Republic, Roam Research, Skiff, Soylent, Stability AI, Starkware, Stedi, Superhuman, Synthesis, and Zora Labs. Some of his early investments in many important crypto protocols include Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, NEAR, Polygon, Chainlink, XMTP, ZCash, and more.
Balaji Srinivasan delivering a speech about his investment criteria
- In an interview, while talking about the future of Bitcoin and blockchain technologies, he said,
By, say, 2025-2030, I expect that there will be multiple jurisdictions that allow the tokenisation of virtually any scarce resource, all the way down to personal tokens. The rise of all these new tokens and public blockchains means the internet will, in the long term, become by far the biggest ‘stock’ market — once the regulatory issues are worked through — just as it has become the biggest library.”
- In 2020, he predicted the severity and intensity of COVID-19. Later, CoinDesk gave him the title “The Man Who Called COVID.” In an interview, while talking about his predictions about the implications of coronavirus, he said,
I was like, this looks actually very serious. And it is not being covered enough. And it’s being treated as if it’s something that happens to foreigners, haha. I actually hesitated to tweet about it for a while, simply because it was going to be seen as, you know, ‘paranoid’ or whatever. What if this coronavirus is the pandemic that public health people have been warning about for years?”
- In April 2021, during the resurgence of COVID-19 in India, Balaji Srinivasan donated $50,000 in cryptocurrency to help with relief efforts. He promised to donate an additional $50 on Twitter for each retweet of his post, up to a maximum of $100,000.
- On 17 March 2023, Balaji became a source for major headlines in the finance sector after he made a huge bet of $1 million on Twitter. The bet stated that he would give $1 million to James Medlock, a Twitter user in case the Bitcoin price did not reach $1 million per coin within 90 days. When Srinivasan made this bet, Bitcoin was trading at $26,000 in a bearish market. It was decided that the payout of the bet would be settled in USDC stablecoin, a digital stablecoin pegged to the United States dollar. According to Srinivasan, the calculated ratio of his speculated outcome was forty to one. Many people questioned this move and associated it with terms such as clout chasing, marketing ploy, and a pump-and-dump scheme. Srinivasan backed his move by citing the hidden downfall and collapse of the US banking structure wherein he also warned about dollar devaluation and the Federal Reserve’s move of money printing which may lead to hyperinflation. He also took the initiative to spread awareness about the devaluation of the U.S. Dollar by offering $1,000 per tweet, for the best 1,000 tweets, to alert Twitter users about the collapse.
The BitSignal
How do you ring the fire alarm on the internet?How do you show it’s not a false alarm?I am putting up the BitSignal.$1M in BTC to alert us to the stealth financial crisis.$1000 per tweet, for the best 1000.Reply with your charts, graphs, stats, memes!Bring… pic.twitter.com/yV7cjCXVcY
— Balaji (@balajis) March 16, 2023
- On 2 May 2023, Srinivasan withdrew his bet and announced that it had ended “by mutual agreement.” Medlock posted a Twitter acknowledgement of the payment. Later, he posted a video on Twitter stating “I burned a million to tell you they’re printing trillions,” in which he explains the condition of the US economy in detail. He then clarified the real reason behind the bet and said that he placed the bet in order to raise a public alarm.
I just burned a million to tell you they’re printing trillions. pic.twitter.com/pX5622rjUO
— Balaji (@balajis) May 2, 2023
- On 4 July 2022, Balaji Srinivasan published his book titled ‘The Network State: How to Start a New Country.’ In the book, Srinivasan shares his theories on how groups of like-minded people can create new societies through online communities that will eventually come together in person and how these groups can be powered by cryptocurrencies. In the book, he proposed the concept of ‘cloud-first, land last.’ The book soon became a Wall Street Journal bestseller.
- On 7 February 2023, he launched his podcast called ‘The Network State Podcast’ in which he speaks with global policymakers and founders about overseeing millions of workers, investing billions of dollars, and building a new kind of country. The podcast is available on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Music.
- In 2021, Balaji moved to Asia from America due to the abundant growth opportunities offered in Asian countries like India and Singapore.
Btw, I rarely post personal news on here, but I moved to Asia awhile back and will be splitting time between India 🇮🇳 and Singapore 🇸🇬.
Why? They are optimistic on technology, they’ve brought hundreds of millions of people online, and they both speak தமிழ் & have great dosas! 🙂 pic.twitter.com/Z7YL0R1NIK
— Balaji (@balajis) January 29, 2021
- In November 2023, Balaji shared a detailed tweet about the positive outcomes of investing in India and its startups. On 26 November 2023, he was acknowledged by Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Twitter for showing optimism regarding the investment environment in India. In the tweet, Modi said,
I love your optimism and will add – the people of India are trendsetters and trailblazers when it comes to innovation. We welcome the world to invest in our nation. India won’t disappoint.”
INVESTING IN INDIA IS IMPROVING INDIA
If you see a startup growing, does that mean it doesn’t have any flaws? That it’s the best in the world? That you’re going to use it for everything right away?
No, of course not. But you might start using it, and putting money into it, and… https://t.co/ht7dzMNL5K pic.twitter.com/2ySxmTK22E
— Balaji (@balajis) November 26, 2023
- Some of the books that he recommends for founders are Where Is My Flying Car? by Josh Storrs Hall, High Output Management by Andy Grove, The Great CEO Within by Matt Mochary, and How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom by Matt Ridley.
Categories: Biography
Source: HIS Education