What’s Next: Growing the CoinFund Investment Team
Will the crypto industry be meaningfully bigger or smaller in five years?
If you follow the data over the last ten years, you will see that crypto is making what we believe is an inexorable march towards global adoption. Digital assets are here to stay, thanks in part to the issuance and success of the U.S. ETFs, and their existence implicates the need for hundreds of other projects, protocols and companies. From developer infrastructure to custody, from tax prep to DEXes, from wallets to borrow/lend protocols, if digital assets exist, these other products will too.
At CoinFund, we have extremely high conviction that the data tells us the crypto industry will be meaningfully larger than the ~$2.1T it is today, probably on the order of five to 10 times larger. And if we are right about that, then there will be scores to hundreds of new investment opportunities that will provide investors with significant and, we believe, asymmetric returns that will place the best crypto venture investors in the top decile of all venture investor performance.
We also believe that the best way of achieving this top decile performance is with highly trained, focused and specialized investors who eat, sleep, breathe and think crypto, meeting the best teams anywhere in the world, going deep into the technical differentiation and innovations, using the products as they are launched, and partnering with these teams to help build a new, decentralized internet.
To that end, we are excited to announce the hiring of three additional investors joining our Seed and Venture Investment team, focused on helping to invest from our current $157M Seed IV (2023) and $320M Ventures I (2022) vehicles.
Seasoned blockchain investor Bobby Beniers joins CoinFund as a Principal Investor focused on opportunities from Seed to Series A. He brings deep crypto infrastructure expertise and a passion for disruptive use cases like DePIN and DeAI. Before CoinFund, he served as an Investment Partner at Polychain Capital where he focused on investments into Movement Labs (Series A), Rio Network (Seed, acquired), and others. Beniers began his investing career at the tiger-cub hedge fund Matrix Capital covering crypto and software. Prior to becoming an investor, Beniers developed his passion for technology as a software engineer. Beniers holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science and Economics from Williams College.
George Christopher has joined CoinFund as a Senior Associate, applying his experience evaluating, investing in, and supporting best-in-class technology companies. Christopher was formerly at Battery Ventures where he focused on investments in growth-stage software. Prior to Battery, he worked as an investment banking analyst at AGC Partners. Christopher graduated from Dartmouth College with a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics.
The firm welcomes Jonathan Rotbard as an Associate. Rotbard brings more than four years of expertise analyzing and investing in the digital asset landscape. Prior to CoinFund, Rotbard served as a Venture Investor at Corner Ventures where he focused on both private and liquid crypto investments. He began his career in blockchain as an Investment Banking Analyst at Moelis where he worked on deals across the crypto ecosystem, including the Voyager and BlockFi bankruptcies. Rotbard holds a Bachelor’s of Business Administration from the University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business.
As I say in our press release, achieving outstanding returns for our LPs is our true north star. I believe we’ve honed an approach over nearly ten years that challenges our investors to think long-term, encourages non-consensus thinking and mixes individual responsibility with the value of a seasoned and proven investing team. It has never been more important to invest in and nurture a free and decentralized internet. CoinFund is an exceptional place to advance your investing career and build a better future. We will continue to grow our investing team, and welcome all outstanding investment candidates to reach out to us at jobs@coinfund.io.
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Disclaimer: The views expressed here are those of the individual CoinFund Management LLC (“CoinFund”) personnel quoted and are not the views of CoinFund or its affiliates. Certain information contained herein has been obtained from third-party sources, which may include portfolio companies of funds managed by CoinFund. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, CoinFund has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation.
This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by CoinFund. An offer to invest in a CoinFund fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety. Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by CoinFund, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by CoinFund (excluding investments for which the issuer has not provided permission for CoinFund to disclose publicly as well as unannounced investments in publicly traded digital assets) is available at https://www.coinfund.io/portfolio.
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David Pakman is a Managing Partner and Head of Venture Investments at CoinFund, focused on leading the firm’s venture investing activities. David developed an early interest in mining Bitcoin before he began building Ethereum mining rigs in 2017.
David is widely recognized for his track record and thought leadership in crypto, consumer, and enterprise technology investing. During his 13 years at Venrock he led the Series A round and sits on the board of Dapper Labs, led the Series A and B rounds of Dollar Shave Club (sold to Unilever for $1B), and led early-stage investments in robotics, AI, consumer and carbon removal tech companies. He personally invested in Coinbase prior to their IPO and was named the 55th top venture capitalist in the world by CB Insights.
Prior to CoinFund, David was a partner at venture capital firm Venrock, co-founder of Myplay, CEO of eMusic and the co-founder of Apple’s Music Group. David is a graduate and a former member of the Board of Overseers at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Engineering and Applied Science with a degree in Computer Science Engineering.
