Ali Yahya
Today we are excited to announce that we are promoting Ali Yahya to General Partner, focusing with me and Katie on crypto.
Ali studied computer science at Stanford with our friends and research partners Dan Boneh and Tim Roughgarden. After Stanford he joined GoogleX, where he worked on cutting-edge robotics. He then moved to Google Brain, Google’s AI Lab, where he was a core developer on TensorFlow, Google’s primary library for machine learning.
Ali joined a16z in 2017 as the first full-time member of the crypto team. We hired Ali after being extremely impressed with his technical expertise and knowledge of the crypto space, which he’d taught himself on nights and weekends. Since then Ali has worked on many of our early-stage crypto investments, including Dapper Labs, Flow, Compound, Avalanche, Near, Rally, and Dfinity.
Anyone who meets Ali can tell right away that he is not only brilliant, but also deeply believes in the crypto mission and values. Entrepreneurs know that he’ll work tirelessly on their behalf and always give insightful, carefully considered feedback and suggestions.
We are all very grateful for Ali’s contributions to our firm. Ali embodies what we try to be: smart, helpful, and mission-driven. Our partner Ben likes to call Ali the soul of the crypto team. We are incredibly excited for him to join us as our newest General Partner.