Katie Haun trudged up a winding path around the Stanford Dish in the hills over Palo Alto. The three-and-a-half-mile trail is a favorite of the prosecutor turned venture capitalist, but Haun wasn’t out for leisure. Instead, her small team of 11 needed to invigorate themselves for a high-stakes show-and-tell to persuade the wealthy backers of her [$1.5 billion firm] that—even as the crypto industry lay in tatters—everything was going according to plan.
Katie Haun’s Journey in the Crypto Industry
Fresh off the hike, Haun, her crew, and a few limited partners who had tagged along returned to Haun Ventures’ sublet office in Menlo Park, where the team settled in among 70-odd assembled LPs and founders from Haun’s portfolio companies. Star dealmaker wat pulled up a display of the Gartner Hype Cycle, long used to assess tech trends, to reassure attendees. The message: troughs in the cycle are when real building takes place.
Benefits and Features of the $1.5 Billion Crypto Fund
Crypto may go in cycles, but this was a far steeper trough than the investors had signed on for, exacerbated by the spectacular collapse of many of the crypto industry’s leading projects. As for Haun—who had hopped from a Supreme Court clerkship to an influential Justice Department stint to the top of the VC world—crypto’s implosion threatened the first serious setback to her meteoric career rise and carefully cultivated.
Navigating the Ups and Downs of the Crypto Industry
The timing was awful. Launching a new crypto fund in the spring of 2022 was akin to starting a new movie theater chain right before the pandemic. In the space of a few months, an extravagant bull market—which saw Bitcoin hit $69,000—turned sour; high-profile projects like Terra collapsed; and the VC industry got battered by rising interest rates.
Insights and Recommendations for Crypto Investors
Then came November, which saw industry leader FTX collapse in a massive fraud and U.S. regulators embark on the most ferocious crackdown in the history of the industry.
The upshot was that Haun had raised $1.5 billion—a hefty amount even for Silicon Valley VCs—but many of the best opportunities had dried up. In the course of raising the money, which was spread across a pair of funds, Haun had touted a deployment schedule of around two years, according to a fundraising document. But that timeline was now out the window.
