Haun Ventures Makes Key Hire to Build Out $1.5 Billion Crypto VC Fund

• Coinbase alum Sam Rosenblum joined Haun Ventures earlier this year to build out its deal team.
• Rosenblum seeks self-starters and “generalists” to look for deals across the crypto landscape.
• Katie Haun hired Rosenblum while he was starting his own firm, wanting his talent and network.

Sam Rosenblum has crypto in his bones.

He landed at Coinbase as an early employee and spun up its venture capital arm before diving headfirst into the industry at Polychain Capital. Last fall, he quit to start his own venture firm, part of a swarm of venture capitalists who were leaving established firms and raising funds on the back of their reputations. Investors lined up to discuss writing the first checks into Rosenblum’s debut fund.

It wasn’t long before famed crypto investor Katie Haun heard about his plans and asked him to chat. She wanted to hire Rosenblum and roll up his talent and network for her newly founded firm, Haun Ventures. 

They talked while walking laps around the Stanford Dish, a radio antenna in the foothills of Stanford, California. Almost immediately, Haun zoomed in on his career goals, according to Rosenblum.

“The most important thing to me was not being at the top of the ladder or having my name on the door,” he told Insider. “The biggest thing was bringing together the highest caliber team possible.”

After talking to Haun, he saw an opportunity to still do that — but at a firm with more financial might than he could muster. In February, Rosenblum joined as a partner and deal team lead at Haun Ventures, whose $1.5 billion in new funds marks the firm’s arrival as one of the most powerful and deep-pocketed players in all of venture capital.

Now, he’s charged with hiring a deal team to spend those funds.

He tells Insider exclusively that the firm has hired Chris Ahn, a former partner at Index Ventures. Ahn spent four years at the firm and pounded the table on investments like Common Room, a software developer, and Fireblocks, an infrastructure provider for digital assets, before mainstream investors thought to invest, Rosenblum said.

That ability to sniff out nonobvious opportunities put him on Rosenblum’s radar, he added.

What he looks for in job candidates

Rosenblum is no stranger to seeking out good talent and developed that muscle during his time at Coinbase. 

The company hired Rosenblum when he was 25 years old. He led business development and flew to faraway countries to educate their central banks about bitcoin and its economic advantages. After a couple years, he stood up the company’s corporate development entity for buying other businesses and investing in them. Coinbase Ventures has amassed stakes in more than 250 companies in its five years, including BlockFi and $7.6 billion Dapper Labs.

The lesson he learned, Rosenblum said, was that early hires at hypergrowth startups can have outsize impact.

“Every day you wake up and do a job you’re not qualified to do,” he said.

He now looks for self-starters and generalists as he assesses job candidates. Each partner at Haun Ventures will look across the crypto landscape for deals, from marketplaces to protocols to digital tokens, Rosenblum said.

He plans to grow the deal team from two people to about five to seven.

“The type of person who’s going to thrive” at Haun Ventures, he said, “enjoys being pulled in multiple directions.”