Katie Haun hadn’t planned on becoming a VC. The former federal prosecutor spent over a decade at the Department of Justice, where she led investigations into organized crime, prison gangs, and cartels. Today, her firm manages roughly $1.5 billion across two funds at Haun Ventures, focusing exclusively on what she calls “the internet-native asset class.”
Haun says her investigative background plays a role in her approach to venture investing. “Don’t take everything at face value,” she says, describing some key lessons from her DOJ career. “Trust but verify. You have to understand the importance of asking follow-up questions, just things like, ‘Why is that the case? Tell me more about that.’
“One thing I learned is you have to figure out people’s motivations. Different people are motivated by different things and you have to really find out what those things are.”
When Haun launched her eponymous venture firm in March 2022, she broke records for the largest ever first-time fund raised by a solo female VC, with the $1.5 billion raised split between two vehicles: a $500 million early-stage fund and a $1 billion acceleration fund. The timing, just before several high-profile crypto collapses, including Terra and FTX, might have seemed unfortunate. However, Haun viewed the challenging market conditions as an opportunity.
“The majority of our deployment has been during the depths of the bear market,” she says. Her firm’s approach is grounded in a belief in genuine use cases and long-term mass adoption rather than hype. “Looking back in hindsight, that was a decision we feel very good about today,” she continues.
The Infrastructure Challenge
Enthusiasts often contextualize the long-term outlook for crypto and blockchains in terms of Web3, or Web 3.0. The idea is that the initial dot-com boom of the 1990s brought about Web 1.0, followed by a paradigm shift in how we communicate online due to social media. Our current social media era is Web 2.0. Web 3.0 will fundamentally be about decentralization: an internet where users, rather than large centralized companies, have direct control over their data and digital assets, in large part enabled by blockchain technology.
Haun maintains that Web3’s core innovation lies in open-source software and decentralized protocols. However, she acknowledges significant technical hurdles remain before mainstream adoption becomes possible, including balancing decentralization and transparency of activity on a blockchain with privacy concerns.
“Blockchains as they were originally architected are public by default,” she wrote in a recent analysis. “This is not suitable for most applications. Imagine if your email, banking, and social data were public for everyone to see on a blockchain.”
Performance and scalability present additional challenges. Haun points to emerging technologies like zero-knowledge proofs and rollups as potential solutions that can address these issues “without compromising decentralization.” Zero-knowledge proofs allow one party to prove something is true without revealing the underlying data, while rollups bundle multiple transactions together off-chain before settling them on the main blockchain to increase speed and reduce costs. While these breakthroughs remain in the early deployment stages, Haun believes they represent the kind of “important work that happens behind the scenes without any coverage.”
The Investment Thesis
Haun Ventures has taken a broader view of defining crypto, considering it to be any technology that uses “cryptographic proofs paired with economic incentives.” This framework encompasses everything from financial services to new computing platforms.
“Certainly, that would include bitcoin,” says Haun. “But it’s much broader than financial services or financial products. It’s actually things like distributed computing, frontier technologies.”
Haun Ventures’ $500 million early-stage fund leads preseed, seed, and Series A rounds, while the $1 billion acceleration fund targets more established projects and companies.
“Internet-native asset class: These are the words that I think about as we describe our fund,” says Haun. “We think about crypto and Web3 much more broadly than just a currency component.”
The fund has also invested heavily in stablecoin infrastructure, an area Haun sees as increasingly significant. She notes that stablecoins are now the 18th-largest holder of U.S. Treasurys, surpassing entire nations like Germany and South Korea.
Regulatory Outlook
Haun’s background as a prosecutor gives her particular insight into crypto’s regulatory challenges. She emphasizes the importance of keeping development and innovation within the United States rather than pushing it offshore. “The lesson of these recent events for policymakers should not be that Web3 is bad and must be constrained,” she wrote in 2022 after the FTX collapse. “It should be that pushing innovation offshore is bad.”
The increasing political salience of crypto policy in recent elections has been encouraging. “Crypto was an issue in not only the presidential race, but also in many Senate races that are coming, many house races that are coming,” she observes. “If you think about four years ago, that wasn’t the case. To us, this just makes the space more inevitable than ever.”
Building for the Long Term
In 2024, Haun sees the crypto industry at an inflection point. Many of the well-publicized failures in the space have involved centralized companies operating trading, lending, and speculating businesses. Meanwhile, the underlying protocols have demonstrated resilience.
“Web3 is about giving control of data and assets back to the people and taking it away from large centralized companies,” Haun wrote. “But the transition from Web2 to Web3 has been slow and messy and many of the early Web3 companies have been copycat versions of what came before them.”
The addition of Diogo Mónica as general partner reinforces Haun Ventures’ technical focus. Mónica, who spent two decades working in distributed systems and security before co-founding Anchorage Digital, brings operational experience to the team. “We’re actually the only crypto fund that has a crypto founder as a GP,” Haun notes.
She remains focused on the long-term potential of Web3 infrastructure going forward. The headlines may focus on trading and speculation, but Haun keeps her attention on the underlying software innovation that continues “unabated.”
As Haun says, “We see this as an internet-sized opportunity.”
