Caroline Friedman

COO at Bastion

Overview

𝕏 Statistics

Details

Caroline is the Head of Operations at Bastion and former Chief of Staff on the a16z crypto team. Prior to joining a16z crypto, she was at Kraken Digital Asset Exchange, where she held a Chief of Staff role and a Regulatory Strategy Counsel role. Before that, Caroline worked as a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia and the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Colorado. She has prosecuted cases related to cyber-crime, international terrorism, and the illegal export of sensitive U.S. technology. Caroline has also worked as an associate at Jones Day, and has experience at INTERPOL and the Bureau of Industry and Security at the U.S. Department of Commerce.

Work Experience

Bastion

COO

Feb, 2023 - Now

Andreessen Horowitz

Chief of Staff

Dec, 2021 - Feb, 2023

Kraken

Education Experience

Arizona State University

Relevance Person

Devan Purhar

Devan Purhar is a co-founder of Firewall and was previously a software engineer at Kraken and a founding engineer at Staked. He graduated from the British Columbia Institute of Technology.

Ronny Conway

Ronny Conway is the Founder & General Partner at A.Capital. Prior to starting A.Capital, Ronny was one of the first Partners at Andreessen Horowitz, where he was the head of seed and early-stage investing and was involved in such high profile investments as Airbnb, Instagram, Optimizely, Pinterest, Dollar Shave Club and Twitter. Before a16z, Ronny spent six years at Google, and was one of the first employees at Google Ventures. Ronny has spent most of his life around venture capital, and received his bachelor’s degree from UCLA.

Sami Kassab

Sami Kassab is a partner at OSS Capital and was previously a Senior Research Analyst at Messari. He graduated from Arizona State University.

Ramu Arunachalam

Ramu Arunachalam is the General Partner at A.Capital. Ramu was most recently a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. A computer scientist by training, Ramu has over a decade of operating experience in product management and engineering at both startups and public companies. Prior to Andreessen Horowitz, Ramu led new product initiatives in Big Data for Aster Data (acquired by Teradata). Earlier in his career, Ramu was an engineer at VMware and part of the team that developed the industry’s first virtual switch for VMware’s flagship ESX server product line. Ramu holds an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, an MS in Computer Science from the University of Maryland and a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering (with University Honors) from Carnegie Mellon University.

Fariz Chowdhury

Fariz Chowdhury is co-founder and head of technology at Proof of Play. He graduated from Arizona State University.

Li Jin

Li Jin is the co-founder of Variant Fund and the founder of Atelier Ventures. Prior to that, Li Jin was a partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

Sunny Ray

Sunny Ray is the co-founder of Unocoin, an India-based startup that aims to make it easy to securely buy, sell, and store bitcoin. He has been involved with cryptocurrencies since 2013, when he directed Business Development for Buttercoin, one of the earliest cryptocurrency trading firms. Sunny operates beyond the level of pure business & always considers relevant social, economic, environmental, political and cultural issues in the local, regional, national & global level. He is incredibly passionate about sales and business development with a drive to create partnerships and opportunities in new geographies. His drive is to work inside emerging and disrupting industries while leveraging his strengths in developing international markets. Since December 2013, he is the President of Unocoin, a leading bitcoin and blockchain company. Unocoin is a platform that makes it easy to securely trade bitcoin, ethereum and other crypto-assets. Unocoin employs more than 100 employees and serves millions of customers. The company is also backed by some of the most reputable investors in the space such as DCG.co (which is backed by CIBC, MasterCard, etc), Boost.vc (backed by Tim Draper, early investor in Hotmail, Skype and Tesla), FundersClub (early investors in Coinbase), etc. He also has a strong interest and international experience in robotics and mechatronic systems. Prior to 2013, Sunny spent nearly 8 years doing sales and international business development in the robotics and mechatronics industry. His clients included Stanford, University of Alberta, Georgia Tech, Universidad de los Andes Colombia, Indian Institute of Technology, etc. Sunny is an advocate for and founder of the Canadian Cannabis Club in Toronto. He looks forward to leveraging his extensive international business development experience and applying it towards the new and emerging Canadian Cannabis Industry.

Nina Suthers

Nina is the chief marketing officer at Variant where she is responsible for the brand, marketing, communications, and events. She also advises projects in our portfolio on their marketing strategy. Nina was previously a marketing partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where she helped build the crypto fund’s brand through media, events and special programs like the Crypto Startup School. Prior to her work at a16z, she was an account director at the OutCast Agency, a marketing agency specializing in comms, creative, and digital.