Paradigm has appointed two new general partners, what impact will it have on its investment strategy?

Original author: Runsheng, ChainCatcher

Original author: Runsheng, ChainCatcher

During the bear market, when many encryption companies laid off employees and cut salaries, the personnel movements of Paradigm, the top VC fund in encryption, attracted attention. According to The Block, Paradigm recently promoted venture partner Charlie Noyes and research partner Dan Robinson to general partners, with Dan Robinson also serving as research director.

Prior to this, Paradigm did not set the title of general partner. Except for the founders Fred Ehrsam and Matt Huang, the rest of the members were investment partners or partners. General Partner (General Partner, GP for short), generally refers to the management institution or natural person of an equity investment fund. It has full management and control rights over fund affairs, and enjoys special rights in profit sharing and annual management fees. The partnership enterprise bears unlimited joint and several liabilities for its debts.

How will the promotion of Dan Robinson and Charlie Noyes change Paradigm? This takes time to verify. However, at least one or two can be found out from the background information of the two.

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Lawyer-turned-programmer Dan Robinson

Dan Robinson joined Paradigm in January 2019 and was a Research Partner and Head of Research at Paradigm prior to his promotion to General Partner. According to LinkedIn information, Dan has a good academic background and work experience. He received his BA and JD degrees from Harvard University in 2010 and 2013, respectively.

After his Ph.D., Dan worked as an associate partner at Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP, a well-known attorney specializing in securities litigation. In 2016, Dan started to enter the blockchain industry and transformed from a lawyer to a programmer. He worked as a product and protocol architect in Chain, Interstellar and other companies, mainly researching blockchain protocols and smart contract languages.

Dan joined Paradigm partly because of his personal friendship with Matt Huang. According to Dan’s blog, Matt Huang is his closest friend who has known him for more than 20 years. It was also recommended by Matt Huang that he first came into contact with Bitcoin. On the other hand, it is also related to Paradigm's research-focused investment style.It is rumored in the circle that Paradigm's investment philosophy is to find a new paradigm that disrupts the industry, and the capture of the paradigm shift urgently requires talents with deep insight and research into the industry. Matt Huang is not only optimistic about Dan's talent, but also has the foresight to embed research institutions into investment companies. Together, the two have finally achieved Paradigm's research-oriented investment style and excellent investment results. As a representative figure of Paradigm in the research direction, where is Dan's personal ability reflected? Maybe you can get a glimpse of it in the case of investing in Uniswap. According to CoinVoice’s last year’sParadigm's investment strategy and the way to the top

"The article describes:

After completing the key investment in Uniswap, the research team led by Dan continued to participate in the development of the Uniswap protocol. Dan himself spends almost every day in the Uniswap Discord, helping to solve the intractable problems on Uniswap liquidity and smart contracts. Noah, the head of Uniswap development, once said on Twitter, "Dan is a core contributor to the design of the Uniswap v3 mechanism, and all this would not have been possible without him."

At the beginning of joining Paradigm, Dan wrote in his induction speech, "One of the reasons that attracted me to join was Paradigm's long-term vision and its commitment to push the entire industry forward by investing in fundamental research. In addition to providing advice on investment , one of my explicit responsibilities is to contribute to the research and development of open source protocols and projects."

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Employee #3 Charlie Noyes

Charlie Noyes joined Paradigm in July 2018. He was a venture partner at Paradigm before being promoted to general partner. According to the data, Charlie dropped out after studying computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) for one year. According to reports, he won the Intel International Engineering Award, the US Security Agency Research Council Award and other honors for his research on blockchain technology when he was in high school, and participated in multiple projects based on blockchain protocols.RootDataAfter dropping out of school, Charlie joined Pantera Capital, an encryption venture capital fund, as an investment manager (Principal) in early 2017. Encrypted Data Platform

It shows that Pantera focuses on investing in blockchain technology and digital assets, and has participated in investing in 172 encryption projects such as Coinbase, Circle, and FTX.

According to the data, under Charlie's participation and leadership, Paradigm's investment has achieved outstanding results. RootData shows that Paradigm has invested in 74 encryption projects such as Uniswap and FTX, most of which are well-known projects. In the past year alone, Paradigm has invested in 25 projects such as Magic Eden and Jambo. Charlie is also a personal seed investor in crypto prime brokerage service providers Tagomi and Uniswap, and has also invested in lightweight blockchain Mina.

It is reported that Charlie was known by Fred Ehrsam, the co-founder of Paradigm, through MIT alumni channels, and joined Paradigm as No. 3 employee. Charlie specializes in quantitative research such as analytics and algorithmic trading, with an emphasis on market microstructure, blockchain tokens, and more. Paradigm's official website shows that Charlie and his team have published papers on Uniswap, MEV, Cosmos and other fields, showing extraordinary research capabilities.

Charlie and Dan are both research-led cryptography figures and have co-authored several research papers. Both of them are old employees who have served for more than 4 years and have made outstanding contributions to the development of Paradigm.