In Web3, where constant innovation meets high stakes, new leaders are always emerging to build the next generation of web3 products for the industry. Steven Willinger stands out as one such influential figure, expertly bridging the gap between pioneering ideas and tangible ventures. As the Founding Partner of the new $28 million Blockchain Builders Fund, a co-lead of the Stanford Blockchain Accelerator, and the former lead at Coinbase Ventures, Steven offers a unique perspective on the digital asset industry’s past, present, and future. In this interview, we dive into his strategy for fostering the next generation of blockchain startups, the critical convergence of AI and crypto, and the invaluable lessons gleaned from his extensive journey at the heart of the digital asset ecosystem.
Ishan Pandey: Steven, welcome to our “Behind the Startup” series. It’s a pleasure to have you here. You’ve navigated the worlds of Google, Coinbase, and now the frontier of venture capital with the Blockchain Builders Fund, all while deeply embedding yourself in the academic heart of innovation at Stanford. To start, could you tell us a bit about your personal journey and the core conviction that led you to launch a dedicated fund for web3 entrepreneurs?
Steven Willinger: My crypto journey began in 2016, shortly after returning from working at Google in Asia. Living and traveling abroad, I saw firsthand how rapidly technology was improving lives but also how financial infrastructure remained frustratingly outdated. It was painfully clear how valuable a shared global operating system for value and finance could be.
What drew me in—and continues to drive me—is the belief that blockchain, despite its cycles of hype and grift, is fundamentally liberty tech. When built and deployed thoughtfully, it brings decentralization and transparency to the digital world—serving as one of the few real counterweights to technology’s natural tendency to centralize value, truth, and power. That vision has always resonated with me, and it’s one I share deeply with my co-founders, the Stanford accelerator teams, and the broader network supporting Blockchain Builders Fund.
Fast forward six years: I was leading the venture team at Coinbase during the 2021–2022 bull cycle and had a front-row seat to massive advancements in scalability, security, usability, and liquidity. I saw nearly every major innovation cross our desk. It became clear that, after years of foundational building, we were just a few steps away from realizing one of the most consequential global technology upgrades of our lifetime. The missing pieces were largely structural—regulatory clarity in the U.S. and time to rebuild trust after the FTX collapse. That was the backdrop in 2023 when we launched Blockchain Builders Fund.
Ishan Pandey: At Coinbase Ventures, you had a ringside seat to the entire crypto ecosystem. How did that experience, witnessing hundreds of founder journeys, shape your investment thesis for the Blockchain Builders Fund? What were the critical gaps and insights you saw that you now aim to fill?
Steven Willinger: At Coinbase Ventures, we operated with a “let 1000 flowers bloom” mandate, which made us extremely active. This gave us an excellent vantage point into the teams, technologies, and models that could hit escape velocity—both in terms of product-market fit and investor attention.
But by the time most startups got to our pitch desk, they’d already run a tough gauntlet of early fundraising and commercialization. Coinbase’s biggest value-add was usually through brand association as well as strategic partnerships with internal products like Base, Wallet, etc. However, the pace and scale at which deals were being done, limited how involved the Ventures team could be with any one portfolio company.
At the same time, I was volunteering at the Stanford Blockchain Accelerator. As both a student and alum, I’ve always believed Stanford is the best founder ecosystem in the world. The access to emerging tech research, entrepreneurial training, mentors, and capital is unmatched. But much of the university startup support system was still stuck in Web2 and didn’t always map well to crypto’s fast-evolving models.
I kept meeting teams that were off-the-charts in terms of technical talent, vision, and drive—but needed real help with strategy, fundraising, and GTM. My co-founders and I realized we had exactly the right experience and networks to help. Pairing that with the level of talent in the Stanford ecosystem made it a no-brainer. That’s what led to the creation of the Fund.
Ishan Pandey: You’re deeply involved with the Stanford blockchain ecosystem, co-leading the accelerator, teaching, and running the BASS series. Your $28M fund has a clear focus on ventures with ties to Stanford and other top institutions. Beyond the exceptional talent, what makes this university-centric approach a strategic advantage in the often unpredictable world of crypto investing?
Steven Willinger: Universities serve as a nexus of multi-disciplinary research and innovation, and Stanford specifically excels across the sciences, engineering, business, economics, law, policy; with a deep legacy of entrepreneurship. Similarly, blockchain fuses cryptography, economics, and distributed computing, in a technology layer for real world use. These dynamics make universities the ideal breeding ground for the cross-sector applied innovation core to blockchain.
Moreover Stanford founders are built different. Its deep integration with silicon valley’s big tech successes and venture funds, many founded and funded by Stanford alum and who continue to nurture its ecosystem, drives a feedback loop for producing category-defining entrepreneurs. And because so much groundbreaking research originates at Stanford, students and researchers there are often the first to identify and master paradigm-shifting technologies, with access to a support structure for bringing them to market.
Even more importantly, Stanford has a self-selecting culture of ambition and risk-taking—it’s a natural incubator for entrepreneurship.
Our initiatives create a full-stack founder funnel. At the top is our course, MS&E 447: Blockchain Technologies and Entrepreneurship. It gives students a foundational industry view and brings in guests like Vitalik Buterin, Toly Yakovenko, Chris Dixon, and others.
Our competitive accelerator, open to Stanford alumni, faculty, and students, gives founders a crash course in crypto entrepreneurship—hands-on support in GTM, hiring, and capital access.
Then we have the Blockchain Application Summit at Stanford (BASS), which provides a real-world stage and gathering place for founders and the broader ecosystem.
The model works. Stanford has become the leading university ecosystem for blockchain startups. And we’re helping export that playbook—like with IC3, a consortium that includes Cornell, Princeton, Yale, and UC Berkeley and a few others.
Ishan Pandey: Your portfolio already includes an AI firm (0G), a supercomputer group (Nexus Labs), and an open-access AI cloud provider (Hyperbolic). This suggests a strong belief in the convergence of AI and blockchain. From a technical and business standpoint, what are the most compelling synergies you see between these two transformative technologies in the next few years?
Steven Willinger: And that’s just a few of our AI investments—there are more. We approach the AI x Blockchain intersection in two broad buckets: AI for Blockchain and Blockchain for AI.
The first is nearer-term. LLMs are now capable of addressing many longstanding problems in the crypto space, especially around usability and developer tooling. For instance, Slate uses LLMs to power an alpha-generation and execution engine that makes trading onchain far more accessible—whether you’re a newbie or a degen.
Security is another area. Audits are costly and inconsistent. Almanax, co-founded by a fellow Coinbase alum, uses specialized LLMs to detect vulnerabilities in smart contracts—recently even flagging a bug in a Vitalik PR.
The flip side is how crypto can support AI. There’s growing demand for high-quality, diverse training data—and crypto provides both the infrastructure and the incentives to create and share it. PublicAI and dFusion are both building tools to source this data and sell it to top AI labs. PrismaX is doing something similar in robotics with a crypto-powered teleoperations platform.
AI’s hunger for compute can also be met through decentralized infra. Hyperbolic and Exabits are building marketplaces for cheap, fast inference compute.
Finally, there’s infrastructure for verifiable, decentralized AI. The default AI stack today is heavily centralized—but if we want trust-minimized, agentic systems to interact with other agents or humans securely, decentralized alternatives are critical. This is a sprawling and futuristic design space and we have a number of great founders working to help solve this problem: 0g, Nexus, XTrace, Cambrian, Bob, Bitmind, BitGPT, PinAI, and others.
Ishan Pandey: You’ve worn many hats: investor, product manager, miner, and yield farmer. How does this hands-on, multifaceted experience in the crypto trenches influence your evaluation of a founding team? What are the non-obvious qualities you look for beyond a polished pitch deck?
Steven Willinger: Tech as a whole, and especially Blockchain, is not a field where you can really understand it in the abstract. The details really matter and fundamental limits of a seemingly “good idea” are always couched in the details. To that end, having some hands on “on chain” experience in the deep history and emerging trends within crypto is critical for the evaluation new opportunities. Conversely, if a founder is building in the space, they had better be 10x more expert in their area of focus than me, even if I know a lot. So, to answer your questions, a founder had better show a mastery of the gritty details and tradeoffs in what their building and an intentionality (high conviction, loosely held ideally) in the decisions made.
Ishan Pandey: The Blockchain Builders Fund has already deployed over half of its capital into pre-seed and seed-stage ventures. In such an early stage of a company’s life, how do you balance the potential of a groundbreaking idea with the practical risks of execution and generating revenue, especially in a sector as volatile as blockchain?
Steven Willinger: Risk in early stage is obviously extremely high. As most investors at this stage will tell you, this risk isn’t that many investments will go bust (they will) its that you miss or do not own enough of the big winners. So to that end, it really only makes sense to try and invest in the teams that want to build for an earth shattering outcome. Power laws dictate that these outcomes will drive all of your returns. So what does that mean practically?
We are extremely experienced and hands on investors and operators so we look for founders who have unique technical talent and insights as well as the requisite ambition to build a category defining company. We then do our best to derisk execution by actively supporting the teams at the earliest stages with formation, hiring, strategy, and fundraising, and giving them a platform through our events and community building.
Moreover, our team’s legacy in traditional venture building and investing is becoming ever more relevant as GTM and real traction become critical for success in blockchain.
Ishan Pandey: Drawing from your course, MS&E447 Blockchain Entrepreneurship, what is the most common misconception that aspiring crypto founders from elite institutions have? Conversely, what is the single most important lesson you try to impart to them before they venture out?
Steven Willinger: The most common and frustrating misconception amongst crypto founders, Stanford or otherwise, is that anything other than finding product market fit is the most important objective of a founder. The industry can, and often does send bad signal to talented founders with pedigree, rewarding them with capital and prestige because of their potential rather than their success. As a result, we often see founders’ reward functions get miswired towards fundraising or vanity metrics versus generating traction and revenue.
Ironically, the momentum that comes from being good at fundraising is often critical to a project’s success. As a result, while we spend a lot of time and effort in support of our teams fundraising efforts, we try our best to impart on theme how critical real traction and PMF will be to their ultimate success.
Don’t forget to like and share the story!
This author is an independent contributor publishing via our
