Who is Balaji Srinivasan? Short bio of the tech investor and Twitter influencer

Balaji Srinivasan is an entrepreneur, tech investor, and Twitter influencer.

He was born on May 18, 1974, in New York, to physician parents of Indian background.

In an interview, he described how he would spend hours tinkering with his family's Commodore 64 computer, taking it apart and putting it back together to learn how it worked.

He credits this early interest in technology with sparking his career in the industry.

Srinivasan did an undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering at Stanford University.

He stayed on to do his Master's in Chemical Engineering, and a PhD in Electrical Engineering, at Stanford.

He wrote his thesis on statistical reconstruction of genetic circuits, and has credentials as an academic.

He has taught courses on computational biology, statistics, Bitcoin and blockchain technology at Stanford.

In 2013 he was named as a "MIT Innovator Under 35".

In 2007, while still in college, Srinivasan co-founded Counsyl with his mathematician brother.

Counsyl became a successful DNA testing company that was acquired by Myriad Genetics for $375 million.

He was an early investor in Airbnb, Uber, and Twitter.

In 2013 he became a partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Marc Andreessen said: “Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I’ve ever met.”

Balaji founded earn.com, a blockchain-based email service that was acquired by Coinbase in 2018. As part of the deal. Balaji became Chief Technology Officer at Coinbase but left after a year, reportedly after clashing with other executives.

Balaji's popular 2013 blog post, "Bitcoin: The Cryptoanarchists' Answer to Cash" argues that Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies have the potential to disrupt traditional financial systems by creating a more secure and decentralized alternative to fiat cash.

In 2013, he gave a talk at the Startup School conference in which he predicted that Bitcoin would eventually be worth as much as $100,000 per coin.

At the time, this was a controversial and bold prediction.

In 2023, in the wake of the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, Srinivasan made a bet that the U.S. would enter a period of hyperinflation, and an era of "hyperbitcoinization" would begin, with Bitcoin going to $1 million.

Learn more about the Balaji-Medlock wager: