The youngest partner in the history of a16z? How did a 23-year-old Chinese girl turn from an intern to a partner within a year?

In Silicon Valley, there is such a stalk:

VC practitioners in Silicon Valley will eventually join a16z as partners.

Compared with other VCs, a16z is more like a big company, whether it is recruiting or promoting partners, it is more frequent, which also gives many young people opportunities. This year, a16z ushered in the youngest Deal Partner ever, a 23-year-old Chinese girl who was promoted from an intern to a partner within one year.

How did she do it? Today I will share with you an article from INSIDER,The encrypted journey of a Harvard dropout girl, Carra Wu.

Carra Wu is a Harvard University dropout. At the end of 2020, she is about to end her internship at Apple. She is constantly weighing the pros and cons of her future job choices.

She can choose to work at Apple, or go back to school, or choose a start-up... Her experience in technology giants such as Apple and Microsoft has become a stepping stone for her future career choices.

On a whim, Carra Wu emailed Arianna Simpson. Arianna Simpson is a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and a partner in crypto. Carra Wu admired her very much, and expressed her intention in six sentences, asking how she could participate in the encryption field.

It was this spur of the moment email that changed Carra Wu's career.

This is the story of an ambitious girl in her 20s who forges her own unique path in life in the face of an uncertain future.

In March 2021, Carra Wu landed an internship at a16z, a VC that understands the crypto market better than any of its competitors and has a $9 billion crypto-specific fund. A few months later, the company promoted her as a transaction analyst, and on her first anniversary, she was promoted to a deal partner (Deal Partner)—making her the youngest check signer of the company and a star in the crypto investment community. Rising star.

At only 23 years old, Carra Wu already has a16z's financial resources and strength behind her. She has helped lead investment in popular crypto startups, such as Friends With Benefits, a crypto social club; Axie Infinity, an online game where players collect virtual pets; Play guilds to earn real money with Yield Guild Games.

The emerging crypto industry is fertile ground for investment circles, offering rare opportunities for young investors on the Internet. Young people are being hired in entry-level positions by VCs like A16Z, Sequoia, NFX, and Paradigm that need someone to call, find startups, and put their multi-billion dollar crypto funds into them.

If all goes according to plan, these start-ups could blossom and grow into businesses sought after by investors. And young investors who discover these ventures get a share of the profits, as well as the approval of their colleagues. In recent years, quite a few of these "child prodigies" have left big companies with their own brands and have their own funds.

bumpy trip

Most individual VCs enter the investing world through these two routes, starting a successful company and then exiting, or leaving private equity or investment banking.

Wearing a white button-down shirt and blue printed trousers, Carra Wu smiled and leaned against the white fence, recalling the experience when she started venture capital, Carra Wu said, "I climbed in through a window".

This is not the first time Carra Wu has dropped out of Harvard. In fact, she has dropped out twice.

In 2018, she took a break from school for the first time to join Apptimize, a start-up analytics company. The company considered shifting its business to encryption, but failed, and Apptimize was sold to Airship the following year. Carra Wu also returned to Harvard to continue her studies, eventually graduating with degrees in applied mathematics, computer science, and economics.

In 2019, before Carra Wu graduated, she became an intern at Microsoft Garage. In this company, any employee has the opportunity to develop their ideas into real-world products. She then joined the student team at Air Force's Kessel Run software factory as a consulting business, advising on how to develop software better and faster.

Halfway through the project, the epidemic broke out and she took a break from school again. That's when she went to Apple for an internship, working on the company's video game strategy as an intern.

During this brief internship, a struggling colleague offered her some advice.

The colleague said to her,"You don't have to know what you're most passionate about in life, you can try a lot of things, find out what you like about each of them, and then slowly dedicate yourself to what you really like."

In 2020, Wu saw red tape frustrating some engineers, and she realized that she didn't want to work for a large technology company like Apple, and a new industry beckoned to her.

From intern to partner in one year

In the first year of the pandemic, the price and usage of bitcoin and other digital currencies rose, opening up a market. People can use tokens to shop. Carra Wu noticed that the opening of the market has attracted new users and attracted a lot of capital. It is setting off a wave of projects in the fields of decentralized finance, consumption, art and games.

So she decided to "go all in" on encryption. That's when she asked Simpson, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, if the firm would let her in as an intern.

Previously, a16z had never hired an intern on a crypto team.

“They want to invest in people who are going to stay and work here for a long time,” says Carra Wu.

As part of her job application, Carra Wu wrote a Uniswap investment memo. Uniswap is a decentralized exchange whose data is open, allowing Carra Wu to see the company’s data set.

"I wrote the code, I made the data dashboards, and I had my own views," she said.

Finally, Carra got an internship opportunity.

At a16z, she can not only focus on her interests - crypto games and DAOs, but also have direct contact with the founders. Simpson later tweeted that Carra Wu's desire to learn made her unstoppable. Simpson has said she doesn't worry about looking silly when she asks questions.

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Carra Wu took a group photo with the BrederDao team

In October last year, Carra tried to contact a start-up company and reached the first investment. She knew that other investors were also in the Pith project. Within hours of seeing the project, Simpson told Carra an offer, and the young investor called the founders after dinner.

She encountered a small problem. The two founders of this project said that they had already had other investors participate in this round of financing, and only a small amount of quota was left.

But Carra Wu knew that the company (a16z) would only invest if it could get a larger percentage of the shares. So she explained this to the founders and pitched them on what a VC like a16z could provide. In the end, the two founders agreed to cut other investors' quotas to make room for a16z.

She received hours of training from other partners in the firm, making her feel "well prepared for this conversation." "It was an important and scary moment for me," Carra said summarizing the conversation.

In March of this year, Carra Wu was promoted again to become a trading partner of a16z, but it is worth noting that a16z is used to exaggerating job titles, and a partner of a16z is equivalent to the investment director (Director, middle level) of another venture capital firm.

Although Carra Wu has only been with a16z for a year, she may see a shorter path to general partner following the firm's turmoil in December, when Katie Haun left, taking some of the firm's staff with her.

For now, strengthening her network of founders and pooling the wisdom of her colleagues is still what she wants to do for Carra Wu, who says she loves being an investor, although she doesn't rule out other career options.

"With the passage of time, I have given up the idea of ​​making grand plans." In the end, Carra Wu left such a sentence.