We are excited to announce that Ren has been promoted to Partner at Electric Capital. In keeping with our unique approach of hiring engineers instead of investors, Ren is also an engineer and will continue to ship code along with his investment responsibilities.
Ren is an engineer who supports founders to build new, sustainable crypto protocols.
Ren invests in emerging technologies that expand what is possible for users. He drove our investments in Tonk, Monad, Ellipsis, and Solana. Tonk uses zero-knowledge tech to enable developers in a variety of applications. Monad gives users fast finality at very high throughput by building the world’s best parallelized EVM. Ellipsis is the #1 CLOB on Solana and offers users better liquidity opportunities at low costs.
Ren represents our philosophy of using deep technical expertise to help founders. He frequently works with founders on user experience, user journeys, and other technical challenges. Ren is also a contrarian who prefers to support ecosystem-changing teams instead of the latest hot narrative. For example, Ren advocated for our investment in Solana during the depths of the last bear market, recognizing early that Solana offers unique scalability and security benefits that users need and that the Solana developer community is resilient and retained. He thinks about how to meet users’ infinite computing demands without sacrificing user ownership, which requires major innovations in scalability and security. Ren is currently researching BTC, L2s, game theory, and other approaches to how blockchains will evolve to meet user demand.
Ren joined Electric in 2021. He initially reached out to us after digging into Electric’s Developer Report. His crypto-native technical skills and quantitative research experience were a perfect fit for our engineering-first investment approach. Ren has since helped build Codeslaw, which is used by thousands of security researchers and engineers.
Before joining Electric, Ren was one of the youngest people to work in public policy at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. He also researched and implemented quantitative trading strategies and models for energy commodities at AQR and Citadel.
We invest in visionary founders. Our expertise helps them build iconic companies.
Unlike many venture firms, we do not hire investors. We hire engineers who can support the visionary founders with whom we work. We hire software engineers to deploy capital because we believe that crypto is software eating money. Crypto infrastructure will eat all of the money movement and capital markets of the world, including venture capital. In such a world, the people who most deeply understand software will be best positioned to understand how to help founders succeed.
We demonstrate our commitment to this approach by building in public alongside the ecosystem. Our engineers build systems that help builders advance crypto, like the Developer Report, an index of open source developers in crypto, Codeslaw, a search engine for smart contracts made for developers, and open source tools to audit and inspect the blockchain.
Ren exemplifies our values and our engineering-first investment approach, which is why we are delighted to have him be a partner at Electric Capital.
About Electric Capital
Electric Capital is one of the largest crypto-native venture capital firms. Electric manages nearly $2 billion in assets, and invests in early-stage crypto companies and protocols with investment sizes generally ranging from $1m to $50m. Electric is unique in its ability to provide founders with deep expertise in engineering, product design, cryptography, community governance, incentive mechanisms, and distributed systems. Two-thirds of the Electric Capital team are engineers and former founders with successful exits. Electric Capital's investments include Bitwise, Eigenlayer, Ellipsis, Espresso, Frax, Magic Eden, Monad, NEAR, Solana and more.
For more information, please visit electriccapital.com.
This post is for general information purposes only. It does not constitute investment advice or a recommendation or solicitation to buy or sell any investment and should not be used in the evaluation of the merits of making any investment decision. It should not be relied upon for accounting, legal or tax advice or investment recommendations. Any information and/or opinions expressed is subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://electriccapital.com/disclosures for additional important information.