Balaji Srinivasan

Balaji Srinivasan earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, including a BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Chemical Engineering, and was a recipient of fellowships such as NDSEG and NSF during his academic career. He also taught at Stanford in departments including statistics and computer science and has academic publications in venues such as Nature Biotechnology and the New England Journal of Medicine. In 2007, Srinivasan co-founded Counsyl, a genomics company focused on carrier screening and diagnostics that scaled to perform large numbers of tests and received significant venture backing; Counsyl was later acquired and earned industry recognition including the Wall Street Journal Innovation Award for Medicine. Srinivasan became active in crypto and venture investing, joining Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) as a general partner focused on crypto, biomedicine, and education, co-founding Coin Center (a crypto policy nonprofit), and co-founding Earn.com, which was acquired by Coinbase. Following the Earn.com acquisition, he served as Coinbase’s Chief Technology Officer, focusing on product and technology strategy during a period of rapid crypto adoption. In 2022, he published The Network State, presenting a vision for digitally organized, value-aligned communities that can scale to physical presence; he subsequently launched the Network School and has been involved in experiments related to creating physical communities and digital governance.