The rise of a Stanford youth in venture capital.

Written by: a16z crypto

Translated by: Blockchain in Plain Language

From a Stanford rower to one of the youngest general partners (GP) at the world-renowned venture capital firm a16z Crypto, Jad Wahab's rise breaks all conventions in Silicon Valley. In an industry wrapped in speculation and hype, he penetrates the fog of cycles with a "crypto-punk" technological background and a cold, quantitative perspective.

In Jad's view, blockchain is not a fleeting asset carnival but a "cloud computing moment" that traditional finance and Wall Street are experiencing — stablecoins reshape trillion-dollar settlements, decentralized networks break through AI computing power and energy bottlenecks, and every iteration of technology at the underpinnings silently disrupts the profit distribution of the old world. While most people are still debating the rise and fall of coin prices, top capital has already bet on a decades-long infrastructure revolution. In this long game of technological ideals versus commercial realities, where exactly are the tenfold opportunities of the future hidden? What kind of person can create a great product that can transcend cycles? The following in-depth conversation will lead you to unpack the foundational cognition and ultimate deductions of this helmsman.

Originating from Stanford and Institutional Markets: From Rower to a16z General Partner

Host: The entire world has been deeply transformed by the internet and computers, with everything operating on code and networks, yet the underlying logic of the traditional financial system seems extremely disconnected and even somewhat crazy. The significance of stablecoins and blockchain for the financial system and Wall Street is akin to what cloud computing meant for the digital transformation of enterprise software back in the day. The two pillars of Western economy are largely information technology and financial markets, and blockchain represents the true convergence of the two. Its ultimate form must allow the public to naturally operate on blockchain while enjoying financial or internet services, coordinating all products with underlying protocols. When the industry truly succeeds, people may no longer specifically mention the term "cryptocurrency."

Host: Today, we have on the line Jad Wahab, the newest General Partner of a16z Crypto. Welcome to the show!

Jad Wahab: Thank you, I'm very glad to be here.

Host: Today, let's dive deep into your experiences. You were recently promoted to General Partner, becoming one of the four GPs at a16z Crypto. Before this, you worked as an investment partner. However, digging into your background reveals that when you first joined a16z, you weren't even in the Crypto team but as an intern in the go-to-market team for institutional markets. How did you step by step transition from a non-technical core role in institutional expansion to being deeply involved in this complex and wild cryptocurrency investment world today?

Jad Wahab: I grew up in the suburbs of Philadelphia. My main hobbies and sports in high school were rowing, which was also one of the key reasons I eventually got into Stanford University. When I first entered Stanford, I didn't immediately focus on computer science. I had written a bit of basic programs as a child, but it was never my true focus in life. I attended a very traditional prep high school on the East Coast, where there were no computer science or formal programming courses offered.

After entering Stanford University, I gradually developed an intense interest in cryptocurrency. Around my sophomore year, I started looking for summer internships. During my freshman and sophomore years, I worked as a research assistant in the economics department, studying the cost-benefit related topics of nuclear energy policy, which is a highly specialized field. During that time, I read a large number of budget reports from the energy sector, when much of the raw data was even recorded on paper, and I was responsible for organizing and digitizing them.

Host: Many may not know this background. You later promoted the investment in decentralized physical infrastructure (DePIN) at a16z, particularly the distributed energy project Daylight, which seems deeply connected to your early academic and research experiences.

Jad Wahab: Yes, I have always been fascinated by the concept of "networks" — whether it's the internet in a physical sense, energy power transmission networks, or the global financial settlement network. This exploration of network mechanisms connected most of my academic interests during university, which naturally became a direct opportunity for me to enter the crypto space.

In my sophomore year, the school held a career fair specifically for student athletes. At that time, someone directed me to talk to Ben Gardner and Ronnie Harris, who were part of a16z's market expansion team and were recruiting two interns, one of whom was planned for a Stanford football team member. I had a very good conversation with them, established a long-term relationship, and since there were other colleagues in the team who were friends of mine, I eventually received the offer. I worked as an intern in the institutional market team at a16z for two summers and a full academic year in 2018.

During my internship, I was still truly fascinated by cryptocurrency and network protocols, believing that decentralized networks represent the future of the next generation of the internet. So, I tried to assist the crypto team with their matters as much as I could outside of my daily work. I was fortunate to work with Jesse Walden (now founder of Variant, who was then a16z Crypto investment partner) at that time. By early 2019 or summer, Eddy Lazzarin also formally joined the team.

In a major project during my sophomore summer, I tried to establish a structured framework in the enterprise market expansion team to help traditional chief information officers (CIOs) and institutions understand the development blueprint of the crypto industry. At that time, most teams in the entire industry were building Layer 1 public chains, cross-chain bridges, and basic network operating procedures, and very few were truly exploring decentralized networks aimed at actual commercial applications or economic incentive mechanisms.

My core thought at that time was: If the goal of blockchain is to carry completely decentralized applications, then any application built on traditional centralized infrastructure cannot truly possess decentralized characteristics. The actual internet is very centralized at the bottom, with the global network highly dependent on a few tier 1 telecom operators, subjected to strict regulation by sovereign governments. There are countless physical chokepoints in the network, such as transoceanic submarine cable landing stations and core data exchange centers. People think the internet floats in the clouds; in reality, it is firmly bound to a few specific physical nodes on the ground.

Host: That’s indeed true. The public tends to think the internet is open and decentralized, but over the past few decades, it has been moving towards centralized control, with many countries establishing strong national firewalls to reinforce absolute control over the flow of information.

Jad Wahab: Absolutely correct. This prompted me to deeply contemplate: Can we reconstruct the underlying network routing protocol as Ethereum designed decentralized incentive protocols, such as building a decentralized IP protocol or BGP routing mechanism? For this purpose, I led a research project on decentralized network service providers. This project was later included in the very early "Crypto Startup School" by a16z (later held multiple sessions of the crypto startup accelerator CSX). That was around the end of 2019 to early 2020.

The Game of Crypto-Punk and Pragmatism: How Technology Revolutionizes Ideology

Host: Looking back, your promotion path is fascinating: from a non-crypto intern to a startup accelerator participant, then to investment partner, and now evolved into a GP leading the next wave of investment in the industry. You have accumulated an extremely rare global panoramic perspective in institutional and academic circles.

Jad Wahab: I feel extremely lucky that many opportunities converged at the right time. During my studies at Stanford, I worked as an intern while also serving as a teaching assistant for Professor Dan Boneh. Dan is a contemporary cryptography master, teaching core courses on cryptography and blockchain systems at Stanford while serving as a research consultant for a16z. It was a huge honor to learn from such a top scholar.

Before and after graduating from college, I did not directly start a business but brought the research project from the accelerator to the research team at Protocol Labs. The most famous project under Protocol Labs is Filecoin (a decentralized file storage protocol), and the team has top engineering and technical development capabilities. At that time, the Filecoin mainnet was about to launch, and the research team was exploring the company's next long-term project, one of which was codenamed "Paddles," a research initiative jointly promoted with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to explore distributed energy network mechanisms.

Coincidentally, Ali Yahya, the founding general partner of a16z Crypto, had studied with Juan Benet, the founder of Protocol Labs, and co-founded an early company during their university time; the two are not only close friends but also long-term academic partners. During my time at Protocol Labs, I worked closely with research lead Evan Miyazono and Juan to explore the construction of incentive-based network layers.

When this research came to a close, I was in my fifth year at Stanford studying a joint degree. I was very clear that I wanted to firmly root myself in the field of cryptocurrency for the long term, but I was unsure whether to continue academic incubation and entrepreneurship or move into full-time investing. At this time, Eddy Lazzarin, an investment partner who had been at a16z for two years, called me to tell me the team was looking for non-traditional investors with technical and research backgrounds and asked if I was interested in a full-time partner interview. I agreed almost without hesitation.

Host: Wait, this breaks the norm. Everyone generally knows one of the core rules in the early days of a16z was: all core investors and general partners must be extremely successful repeat entrepreneurs or experienced executives of high-growth companies. You, in your early twenties, directly entered the investment team with an academic/internship background, which is quite rare in the traditional venture capital world.

Jad Wahab: Indeed. The investment industry typically seeks those who are in their late twenties or early thirties, who have been core product leaders or business development executives in high-growth startup companies. My background is completely different.

In the interview, the team brought all core partners to communicate with me. Looking back afterward, many previously independent points naturally connected to form a line: I worked closely with Stacy as an intern; when I was a teaching assistant, Dan Boneh gave me high praise; when Ali asked Dan for my background check, Dan's evaluation was "he is extremely efficient and reliable"; additionally, my research results at Protocol Labs with Evan and Juan helped the team understand my technical foundation deeply. All of these consensus led to my official joining the a16z Crypto full-time investment team at the end of 2020. When Chris Dixon later announced my promotion to GP, he mentioned that I was like an "omnipresent being" within the team, which also acknowledged my high-frequency delivery state over the years.

Host: In the crypto world, many people are just profit-seeking, yet you exude a pure "cypherpunk" philosophical background. Where does this spirit originate? What initially attracted you so deeply to cryptocurrency?

Jad Wahab: This partly comes from my inherent personality tendencies. I have always had a rebellious spirit since childhood, never being one to blindly follow authority. The idea of reconstructing the internet architecture through pure mathematics, cryptography, and underlying open source code, even completely replacing the outdated and inefficient global financial service system, is immensely attractive to me. The philosophical ideas proposed in Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper of "using code to restrict the excessive issuance of sovereign currencies and hedge against the depreciation of fiat money, constraining centralized power through technological contracts," deeply impressed me intellectually.

I vividly remember during the Thanksgiving holiday at the end of 2017, I played the role of a "tech-savvy college student," frequently being called upon by relatives to fix Wi-Fi routers or set up new digital products. My grandmother suddenly asked me, "Jad, I've seen Bitcoin a lot on the news lately, should I buy some?" At the time, although I had heard classmates mention it, I did not delve deeper. To answer my grandmother, that night I downloaded and thoroughly read the Bitcoin white paper. For the following week, I repeatedly studied that paper daily, re-evaluating the decentralized ledger and proof of work consensus. That white paper became a real enlightenment moment in my life.

I entered this field based on two core anchors: the first is sincere obsession with non-sovereign hard currency represented by Bitcoin and the cypherpunk philosophy; the second is an obsession with open-source decentralized network architectures. Blockchain is not just open-source software; it introduces a native economic incentive layer into open protocols for the first time, allowing uncontrolled global decentralized cooperative networks to become financially self-sustaining.

Host: This touches upon the core contradiction of the entire industry: the tension between cypherpunk idealism and commercial realism. How do you view the evolution of these two forces over the past few years?

Jad Wahab: There is a famous ironic comment about libertarianism: "The good news is they are often right; the bad news is they have always been losing." The history of cryptocurrency development over the past decade or so somewhat aligns with this.

Cypherpunks are absolutely correct: fully decentralized and censorship-resistant systems possess irreplaceable resilience in technical solidity and philosophical purity, achieving lofty social ideological goals. However, in the real competition of the free market, projects that achieve the most massive commercial success and mainstream adoption are often highly pragmatic. To be widely used, they inevitably compromise or sacrifice some pure ideological pursuits to a certain extent.

This evolution is not uncommon in the history of technology; the open-source software movement is the most vivid precedent. Today's maintainers and developers of commercial open-source software have a mindset starkly different from the early devotees like Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) 40 years ago. Today’s Linux system runs on over 90% of cloud servers and mobile devices globally, and although the pure open-source movement has made concessions in ideology, it has achieved a complete victory in the real world.

Every true political revolution or social movement needs a powerful ideology to awaken the masses and break the monopoly of the old system. However, the struggle cannot remain on the streets forever; it must eventually transition to stages of drafting charters, establishing systems, and solving practical livelihood issues — this is true in the history of both the American Revolutionary War and the French Revolution. Technological revolutions follow the same rule: if a new technology cannot ultimately be converted into high-efficiency products usable by ordinary consumers daily, and cannot beat traditional solutions on cost and efficiency, it cannot achieve a qualitative change.

Bitcoin has established a social contract as a neutral value storage asset and gained widespread consensus, while today, an increasing number of blockchain protocols and applications can no longer rely solely on selling philosophical ideas but genuinely lower counterparty risks, risks of platform malfeasance, and costs of capital clearance for users. Idealism and business pragmatism are like two poles of yin and yang, both are indispensable.

Investment Paradigms and Timing Philosophy: How Long-Cycle Capital Evaluates Core Traits of Founders

Host: Around 2018, traditional Wall Street institutions often used a politically correct battle cry called "Blockchain, not Bitcoin" when discussing this technology. Now, as the GP managing a fund worth billions at a16z Crypto, how do you balance these two forces?

Jad Wahab: The name of our fund "a16z Crypto" itself carries deep meaning. The term "Crypto" encompasses two dimensions: it represents a class of cryptographic assets based on cryptography that builds native assets and wealth systems, divorced from the trust endorsement of sovereign states or individual commercial companies; at the same time, it constitutes a technical protocol for creating entirely new decentralized internet services using native token economic mechanisms.

In the lifecycle of venture capital and technological innovation, "timing" determines everything. Many applications that can operate smoothly today failed completely 5 to 10 years ago primarily because the underlying throughput, settlement delays, and high gas fees could not support a commercial loop. Back then, the network was limited to Bitcoin and early Ethereum Layer 1, with transactions being extremely slow and very costly.

Today, we have mature Ethereum Layer 2 ecosystems, high-performance public chains like Solana with high concurrency and low latency, and new zero-knowledge proof systems. Data throughput has increased by several thousand times, network response times have been compressed to millisecond levels, and the cost per single transaction approaches zero. This structural leap in the underlying infrastructure allows products to truly win the mainstream market based purely on efficiency advantages, no longer relying solely on users’ enthusiasm for token financial speculation.

Host: Traditional venture capital is usually constrained by liquidity; raising equity typically requires a time span of 7 to 10 years or even longer before exiting through an IPO in the public market. In the cryptocurrency space, decentralized tokens often gain high liquidity in the secondary market very early in the project lifecycle. How has this drastically different liquidity environment reshaped your investment time windows and decision logic?

Jad Wahab: This is indeed a very unique structural feature of the crypto space. Traditional tech companies tend to stay private for longer due to increasingly heavy compliance and information disclosure burdens and the abundant capital support in the equity market; whereas decentralized networks, to achieve global permissionless consensus cooperation and validator economic incentives, often need to issue and circulate native assets very early in the protocol launch.

Early public trading is a double-edged sword: on one hand, it provides a strong global capital formation tool for the founding team at the project germination stage; on the other hand, being exposed too early to the 24/7 fluctuating quotes of the public market subjects teams lacking composure to immense external emotional disturbance and public opinion pressure daily.

Because of this, this high-liquid environment forces a16z to practice long-cycle fundamental investment with even more determination. Projects that truly create great commercial value invariably need 10 or even 20 years of refinement. If a founder's only motivation for entering this field is to cash out at high levels after a token surge, using pure financial cash-out as the only goal, such entrepreneurs will definitely not withstand the brutal tests of transcending cycles.

Host: In the absence of complete early financial statements during the startup phase, how do you accurately identify and screen those founders who genuinely possess "long-termism" genes?

Jad Wahab: We have a set of counterintuitive judgment criteria for evaluating founders. Psychological research shows: a person’s prediction accuracy of their close friends’ personality test results is often inferior to that of a pure stranger who observes them for just 10 minutes in their living room. This is because friends' minds are filled with too many subjective projections, emotional biases, and preconceived false visions; whereas objective and neutral observers often capture the truest behavioral evidence from the most straightforward physical facts.

We have found two extremely clear common denominators in top potential founders:

The first is an unconventional magnetic appeal to talent. This charm is not about being a socialite who talks grandly and captures attention at parties; rather, it’s when top engineers, scientists, and business partners face them, they are genuinely compelled by their vision and character, even desiring to join their voyage and build incredible things at all costs.

The second is a nearly obsessive love for "the game itself," instead of a utilitarian obsession with winning or losing. Tennis legend Andre Agassi confessed painfully in his autobiography that he actually despised tennis but forced himself to excel because of his brutal obsession with winning; while Novak Djokovic, when asked why he started playing tennis, replied simply, "I just purely love the wonderful feeling of the racket hitting the tennis ball." Founders who can transcend the 10-year deadlock and build great companies often fall into this category like Djokovic. They see the day-to-day artisan process of creating an exceptional product as the highest reward. For them, "the only reward for doing a job excellently is getting the qualification to do more difficult work." This intrinsic drive cannot be explained by any purely financial incentive model.

Ultimate Deductions: Full-Chain Wall Street, DePIN for Energy Computing Power and the "Post-Crypto" Era

Host: After discussing the core of founders, let's turn our attention to the current specific investment tracks. Looking at today's crypto market, what direction do you personally and a16z Crypto consider the most promising and where you are investing the most effort?

Jad Wahab: In the short to mid-term, the direction with strong real market product-market fit (PMF) remains financial infrastructure and new generation capital market applications.

The most unstoppable trend right now is the explosion of stablecoins. Stablecoins are essentially a major underlying upgrade of the global financial system. There is immense real thirst for dollar liquidity worldwide, whether in developing countries ravaged by hyperinflation or emerging economies with constrained capital flows; the service gaps from traditional central banks and cross-border settlement systems are widespread. Stablecoins provide a near-zero-friction, anti-devaluation saving and payment mechanism for billions of people who cannot smoothly access Western traditional finance networks. The quarterly real on-chain settlement scale of trillions of dollars proves that it is not just a speculative tool but the most efficient cross-border clearing network so far for humanity.

In terms of the new generation of on-chain finance, we are focusing on the following core directions:

New decentralized trading platforms (DEX) and liquidity underlying infrastructure: including large credit mechanisms, derivative protocols, prime brokerage services, and liquidity aggregation routing;

Prediction markets and advanced derivatives networks: covering options, structured notes, and perpetual contract mechanisms;

On-chain wealth management tools for non-traditional ultra-high-net-worth demographics: serving those who have accumulated substantial on-chain digital assets but are not covered by traditional private banking services.

In addition to pure on-chain finance, another strategic direction where I invest significant effort is DePIN (decentralized physical infrastructure networks), particularly in energy networks and distributed computing power markets.

Current fast iterations of artificial intelligence large models are facing extremely critical physical bottlenecks — power energy shortages and limited supply of advanced process chips. Relying solely on traditional tech giants to build nuclear power and supercomputing centers through centralized balance sheets has significant efficiency ceilings in capital allocation. Decentralized blockchain protocols can coordinate third-party energy producers and idle computing power nodes scattered globally with extremely sophisticated token economics models, achieving the most efficient allocation of capital in the physical world. If third parties beyond the Magnificent 7 tech giants want to secure a foothold in the global energy and computing power market, blockchain is the irreplaceable foundation.

Host: In on-chain financial products, why do perpetual contracts (Perps) exhibit such astonishing growth momentum and user stickiness? What is unique about them?

Jad Wahab: The core of perpetual contracts lies in their extremely simple, intuitive design and high funding efficiency. Essentially, they are "Delta 1" linear derivatives that offer high financial leverage, meaning that if the underlying asset changes by X%, the contract value will strictly change by X% multiplied by the established leverage multiple, without any complex traditional options with delivery periods or decay in time value (Theta) or risk of implied volatility surface loss. Whether for professional high-frequency traders or individual retail investors, they are extremely intuitive risk hedging and directional exposure tools. More importantly, in the on-chain decentralized perpetual contract market, traders directly match with transparent liquidity pools or smart contracts, completely eliminating the default risks of traditional centralized brokers and platform malpractice.

Host: You once made an excellent analogy: blockchain is bringing traditional finance into the digital age. What is the essential advantage of converting traditional financial assets into on-chain assets?

Jad Wahab: The essential advantage is simply two words: efficiency.

Just like the dimensional impact of email relative to paper mail, or the disruption of Excel spreadsheets relative to manual paper ledgers, the differences in flow efficiency brought by digitization are on a scale of magnitude.

Currently, the vast majority of work on Wall Street essentially consists of thousands of inter-agency traders repeatedly verifying and manually reconciling on isolated local Excel spreadsheets. There exist countless fragmented, incompatible private databases and settlement gateways between traditional financial institutions. If suddenly a publicly distributed "super spreadsheet" emerges, open to everyone on the network, achieving global instant consensus and having absolutely certain state updates, all financial institutions would be able to atomically settle on the same underlying ledger without needing to trust each other, eliminating settlement friction costs amounting to trillions of dollars.

Blockchain provides permissionless decentralized consensus, fundamentally answering the ownership question of "who has the right to read, who has the right to modify, and how to prevent double-spending fraud." Wall Street institutions might be reluctant to publicly embrace the term "decentralized" due to compliance considerations, but they have an extremely strong practical interest in "eliminating counterparty default risk, smoothing inter-agency settlement delays, and removing single-point collapse risks."

Ultimately, the victory marker of this industry will be thoroughly "de-labeling." When you pick up your phone today, put on your Apple Watch to connect to the internet or shop online, you would never shout at anyone, "I am using TCP/IP internet." Similarly, in the future, when people use cross-border transfers, credit borrowing, or asset allocations, everything at the base layer will automatically execute via smart contracts on the blockchain, and the public may even stop mentioning terms like "cryptocurrency" or "Web3."

Host: How long do you expect this thorough transformation of financial infrastructure will take?

Jad Wahab: This is not a short sprint of two or three years, but a profound paradigm restructuring lasting several decades.

In the next two or three years, we will see a more astonishing transformation of dollar cash and offshore settlement funds into on-chain stablecoins at greater speed globally. Over the next 10 to 20 years, or even longer, the majority of core security assets, fixed income, and derivatives in global capital markets will fully complete chain mapping and tokenized settlements. Since the emergence of the internet in the 1990s, global digitalization is a century-scale historical process, and blockchain is a critical piece in the effort to fortify the core financial settlement network in this process.

The Contrasted Life Beyond Investment: Abstract Painting Intentions and Tailored Masculinity Philosophy

Host: When you step away from the hard-core financial architecture, crypto token economics, and high-intensity project evaluations, what does your everyday life look like? What lesser-known hobbies do you have in your spare time? You mentioned before that letting a complete stranger walk into a person's apartment can often instantly reveal their true character. If someone were to walk into your home now, what would they see?

Jad Wahab: This might surprise many people. If someone walks into my apartment, their first impression might be that it belongs to a sixth-grade art teacher. The walls are covered with various colorful, seemingly casual paintings. Over the past few years, I have been extremely passionate about painting oil paintings, which is the most important outlet for my creativity in life.

Host: What do you paint? Realistic still lifes or natural landscapes?

Jad Wahab: They're all extremely clumsy abstract paintings, many of which I intentionally made that way.

In a career in venture capital, almost all work is rigorously grounded in quantitative metrics, absolute objective facts, logical loops, and market feedback. The commercial market operates under its extremely cruel and cold-blooded objective laws, which do not care about your subjective feelings. In contrast, painting is completely the opposite: when you face a blank canvas, the only important thing is your inner experience and pure joy during the creative process. It doesn't need to cater to any external market judgments; this pure flow that doesn't require alignment with rational markets is a healing process I immensely enjoy.

Host: At the end of the show, I usually ask a question that reveals your personal eccentricities: is there a seemingly insignificant daily detail that you have a strong obsessive principle about?

Jad Wahab: Yes, that is that the vast majority of pants worn by men are extremely ill-fitting, too narrow, and tight.

For the past 20 years, popular culture has been under the absolute rule of specific high fashion trends and tight cuts; many people, regardless of age or body type, wear extremely tight skinny jeans or snug athletic pants. It was only two years ago that I realized I had been wearing the wrong size shoes and ill-fitting pants for the first twenty years of my life. Not only pants, but today’s ready-to-wear men's shirts are often made too long, with hems extending three to four inches beyond normal fit standards, leading many men to have to forcibly tuck their shirts into their waistlines to maintain a proper proportion. The mass-produced standard sizes adopted by the ready-to-wear clothing industry severely deviate from the true physical skeletal proportions of the majority of men.

Host: Haha, I never expected you to have such a systematic and strong personal view on men’s clothing tailoring!

Jad Wahab: I probably shouldn't have discussed this openly on a podcast, as the pants I wore today might not be perfect in cut either, and I will probably face ruthless ridicule from fashion enthusiasts on Twitter after this episode airs.

Host: This has been an extremely transparent and deep conversation. Thank you so much for your honest sharing today!

Jad Wahab: Thank you very much for your invitation, it was a great conversation!