About the Author

Eric Jorgenson writes and podcasts about technology, startups, and investing. His blog at ejorgenson.com has educated and entertained more than one million readers since 2014. Eric invests in early-stage technology companies. (Please get in touch to invest or pitch a company.)

He also is the author of The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, which has been read by millions of people and translated into thirty languages to date. He lives in Kansas City with his brilliant and beautiful wife, Jeannine. Join the author’s email list at EJorgenson.com and subscribe to the podcast Smart Friends.

Balaji S. Srinivasan (@balajis) is an angel investor, tech founder, and author of WSJ-bestselling book The Network State. Formerly the CTO of Coinbase and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, Balaji also was the co-founder of Earn.com (acquired by Coinbase), Counsyl (acquired by Myriad), Teleport (acquired by Topia), and the nonprofit Coin Center. Dr. Srinivasan holds a BS/MS/PhD in electrical engineering and an MS in chemical engineering from Stanford, where he taught machine learning, computational biology, and a software MOOC that attracted more than 250,000 students worldwide.

Balaji has backed a wide variety of startups, including Akasa, Alchemy, Benchling, Cameo, CoinTracker, Culdesac, Dapper Labs, Deel, Digital Ocean, Eight Sleep, EPNS, Farcaster, Gitcoin, Golden, Instadapp, Lambda School (Bloomtech), Levels Health, Locals, Messari, Mirror, OnDeck, OpenSea, Orchid Health, Prospera, Replit, Republic, Roam Research, Skiff, Soylent, Stability AI, Starkware, Stedi, Superhuman, Synthesis, Zora Labs, and many more. Balaji also was an early investor in many important crypto protocols, including Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, NEAR, Polygon, Chainlink, ZCash, and more.