Haseeb joins Dragonfly Capital
We are excited to announce the addition of Haseeb Qureshi as Managing Partner at Dragonfly Capital. Haseeb joins myself and my founding partner, Bo Feng, to lead and extend our global investment practice into the token economy.
We started Dragonfly Capital with a simple mission: to back the leaders in the crypto economy and bring them into our uniquely cross-border ecosystem. That includes our teams in San Francisco and Beijing, but more importantly our large base of investors for our first $100M venture fund, who are some of the largest crypto companies, Internet companies, investment firms, and global banks in the world (or their founders and CEOs). We collaborate closely with groups like Bitmain, OKEx, Huobi, Bitmex, Coinbase, Baidu, Alibaba, Meituan, A16Z, Sequoia Capital, Bain Capital, Founders Fund, and many more across the globe.
And we’ve had the privilege of backing many incredible founders across regions and asset types. We are the bridge that helps these teams work with markets half a world away, helping our Asia portfolio and investors grapple with the technology being built in the West, and helping our Western portfolio access the thriving Asia crypto market, which leads the rest of the world in crypto adoption.
Haseeb first came onto our radar while he was a General Partner at MetaStable, the oldest and premier technology-focused, fundamentals-driven cryptofund. MetaStable was our first investment at Dragonfly and we’ve worked with them since 2015 when I was a partner at AngelList under Naval Ravikant, the firm’s founder. Dragonfly has co-invested with Haseeb many times in projects like Coda, Spacemesh, and Starkware that are developing some of the most exciting, next-gen technologies in crypto. On every investment, we found that he had one of the most thoughtful perspectives of anyone we spoke with and that founders loved working with him. When Haseeb transitioned to an advisor role at MetaStable earlier in the year we knew we had to keep him close.
One of Haseeb’s superpowers is his ability to go deep into the field of crypto research, immerse himself in the developer ecosystem, and then come back up and explain it to the wider community. Prior to MetaStable, he was a payments engineer at Airbnb, a blockchain engineer at Earn.com (acquired by Coinbase), and then founded a stablecoin project. He has shared his learnings along the way — from when he discovered a frontrunning attack against a top ICO token, to teaching a blockchain class at the Bradfield School of Computer Science, and even publishing an exhaustive guide to getting a job at a tech company that went viral. As a teenager, before getting into crypto and tech, Haseeb was a top 10 globally ranked poker player and was widely known for his popular poker education videos where he explained his winning strategies. Even today, I meet people who tell me that they learned how to play poker from Haseeb’s videos. His eagerness to open source his knowledge and instinct for serving the community has served him well in crypto, where the open source ethos is fundamental and community is everything.
Investing in tokens requires a unique skillset. Tokens are an entirely new asset class from anything we’ve seen before — perhaps the first truly new asset in over a century. While token investing resembles early stage venture investing in many ways, you need to be truly “crypto-native” to grasp the interplay of cryptography, incentive design, and community that goes into a great token. That is why we left the traditional VC world to create a brand new, crypto-dedicated investment platform, and that is why we think Haseeb is a perfect fit to expand our platform. Haseeb is as crypto-native as they come.
Haseeb joins us as a generalist investor specializing in tokens and will also help bring the crypto developer ecosystem deeper into our global platform. Expect to see much more of him in the coming months as he continues to open source his crypto expertise here on our blog.
