KATIE HAUN

Haun spent more than a decade as a federal prosecutor. She chased gangs, organized crime and public corruption.

She helped take down the Nuestra Familia prison gang and worked a Hells Angels murder trial. Then a colleague handed her a strange new assignment.

There is this thing called bitcoin, they said, and we need you to investigate it. She built the government first cryptocurrency task force.

Her biggest case put two federal agents in prison for stealing bitcoin during the Silk Road investigation. Somewhere in all that digging, she stopped seeing crypto as a criminal tool and started seeing what it could become.

In 2017 Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong put her on the company board. In 2018 she joined a16z as its first female general partner.

In 2022 she struck out on her own.

Haun Ventures is the headline. She launched it in 2022 with more than $1.5 billion, one of the largest debut funds ever raised by a solo female founder.

Before that she co-led three crypto funds at a16z. She was also Coinbase first independent board director from 2017 to 2024, sitting through its blockbuster stock market debut.

She has backed crypto and web3 companies across the board and become one of the loudest voices arguing that stablecoins are the technology killer app.

Haun invests like the prosecutor she used to be. She digs into how a thing actually works and where the risks hide before she writes a check.

Her big thesis right now is stablecoins, digital dollars that hold a steady value. She points out that in places like Turkey, people already treat them as money, not as some speculative coin.

She backs the infrastructure and the founders building real products, not the hype-driven tokens. She is patient too.

As she likes to say, just because something is inevitable does not mean it is imminent.

Her signature win as a prosecutor was cracking the case of two federal agents who stole bitcoin while investigating the Silk Road drug marketplace. She followed the money on the blockchain, the very technology she was supposed to distrust, and used it to convict people wearing badges.

As an investor, her biggest win might be Coinbase. She joined its board in 2017, before crypto went mainstream, and stayed through its 2021 stock market debut that valued the company in the tens of billions.

Timing, again. Haun raised her $1.5 billion fund in early 2022, right at the top of the crypto market.

Months later the whole thing imploded. Terra collapsed in the spring.

FTX blew up in November and took confidence with it. Deploying a giant fund into a crashing market is a brutal hand to be dealt.

Haun has held firm on her long-term view, but the launch could not have been timed worse. The lesson is old.

Even the smartest investors do not control the calendar.

Haun thinking is shaped by two careers. As a prosecutor, she learned that any powerful technology gets used for good and bad, and that rules matter.

As an investor, she believes crypto real promise is boring digital money that just works, not moonshot tokens. She is a big believer in clear regulation.

She has argued that clear rules of the road earlier would have prevented a lot of blowups. Her north star is simple.

Build things people actually use, and treat compliance as a feature, not an afterthought.

Haun grew up and studied on the East Coast before heading west. She keeps her home life largely out of public view.

What is public is her comfort moving between very different worlds, the courtroom, the boardroom and the venture office. She has spoken openly about being one of the few women at the top of both law enforcement and crypto, two fields not exactly known for gender balance.

Haun graduated summa cum laude from Boston University in 1997, then earned her law degree from Stanford in 2000. From there she landed a clerkship most law students only dream about, working for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy.

That pedigree set her up for a career in the top ranks of the Justice Department long before crypto entered the picture.

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