"The ownership economy has the opportunity to address one of the biggest and most morally troubling issues of our time: economic inequality," Jin said. Its growing stockpile of capital will be spent on the so-called ownership economy, which refers to companies making tools that are owned and operated by users themselves, Jin wrote in a blog post. Variant writes first checks of $1 million to $2 million on average, Walden said. The $110 million fund is impressive but not outrageous, considering the average fund size in the third quarter of this year is higher than ever at about $195 million, according to PitchBook.įounded in 2020, Variant has invested in about two dozen companies to date, including Uniswap, a decentralized crypto exchange, and Foundation, a marketplace for creating and collecting NFTs. Those firms have raised billions of dollars for crypto investing in recent years as institutional investors scramble to get in. Their new fund is the latest dedicated to crypto, created in the spirit of big, bold firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm, founded by former Sequoia Capital partner Matt Huang and Coinbase cofounder Fred Ehrsam. And the size of their new fund demonstrates a strong investor appetite for their experience, even as emerging fund managers. Together, Walden and Jin, alongside a third general partner, Spencer Noon, bring best-in-class training and an elite alumni network - not to mention their financial firepower - to one of the hottest investing categories. In October, Variant took the wraps off a second, $110 million fund and welcomed a new general partner, Li Jin, who overlapped with Walden at Andreessen Horowitz before starting her own investing firm, Atelier Ventures. While there, he learned the art of startup investing, and now is running his own firm, Variant, aimed at backing the next generation of crypto startups. "You got to get back to crypto," Chris Dixon, now co-head of Andreessen Horowitz's crypto funds, told him.Īt Dixon's urging, Walden quit Spotify to join the legendary firm, one of crypto's earliest and biggest boosters. Before long, he got a call out of the blue from one of his investors. In 2017, serial startup founder and venture capitalist Jesse Walden, sold his blockchain company to Spotify and went to work for the
Their breakout success could encourage others to quit their jobs and start their own firms.They left to raise their own funds and then came together at the year-old venture firm Variant.Jesse Walden and Li Jin learned the art of startup investing at Andreessen Horowitz.
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