Background

I grew up on Long Island in New York. Both of my parents were physicians. They were immigrants from India, in a time and culture where long-distance calls were expensive and mail was slow. They were cut off from their home culture. Their cultural conventions worked for 1950s India, completely different from 1980s New York.

My parents were working all the time, you know. We had sick relatives, so a lot of time and money went to them. My parents were focused on their challenges. I escaped into an inner world of fiction and reading, flying through books. That was my life for many, many years.

I was born with certain advantages. My grandfather taught me a lot of math early on, before he passed away. I learned to read at a young age. But the good comes with the bad.

The first thirteen years of my conscious life, school was a prison-like environment. You must go there every day; you cannot leave. You have no control over your environment. You cannot avoid other kids in school, and I was simply not part of the social network. This was pre-internet, so I had no cultural role models. Especially early on, I was dressed up in foreign clothes while all of the other kids were wearing sports t-shirts. I stuck out.

Being the only brown kid among hundreds of people, lots of kids would gang up on you and call you “Gandhi,” and you could say, “That’s not an insult,” and run, but they’d just chase you. I learned that the first guy who comes at me, I need to hit him—bam!—with the book, and just act crazy so the other guys don’t jump on you. Later, at the principal’s office, the assailants would have “crocodile tears” about how the little Indian boy had started the fight. Their parents knew the principal, and he’d say, “Balaji, why did you attack young Jimmy and Jamie?” I learned early on that you’ve got to stand up for yourself, that the fix is in…the state is against you.

In short, the teachers wouldn’t protect me, so I learned to fight. I learned how to deter aggression and how to find a defensible position. I had to develop the reputation of being crazy. I learned the establishment was not on my side.

I ended up in detention a lot. Detention was great, because I could read in peace. At the front of the school were rankings of students on the honor roll and in detention. I was always the top of both.

Eventually I got enough context on American culture to learn how to fit in. I started lifting weights and made the varsity football and lacrosse teams in high school. There was a policy of no cuts if you were persistent, so I made it through “hell week” in the summer and became the n-th string cornerback and midfielder. I’d never be the world’s greatest athlete, but I was in great physical condition by the end of high school and still have the build from years of squats and power cleans.

This was a useful experience for me because I learned to strengthen things that were previously weak areas. I brought an area up from a zero to a five out of ten just by grinding through it. It was also helpful for me to learn my limitations, to learn humility—unlike an academic topic, no matter how much I practiced lacrosse, I’d never be as good as someone who just had the instincts for it. Knowing what I was weak at allowed me to become strong.

Those are my character traits. “Good at math,” “disobedient,” “grind when I have to,” and “harshly assess my weaknesses.” This was a disadvantage early on, but it paid off later in life.

The benefits of disobedience (or “intellectual assertiveness”) kept increasing. It started extremely negative, being kicked out of classes in high school. In academia it started to become positive, because I had observations others didn’t, and it helped me pursue more unique work.

In venture capital and content creation, originality is really, really valued. Whether you call it originality, being disobedient, or being contrarian—the combination of being analytical and not fully obedient has been important.

I come from the generation before the internet was really useful.

I graduated high school in 1997. The search engines weren’t that good, Wikipedia didn’t exist. I feel like my education really commenced in 2001 when Google got good enough for me to start leveling up on the internet, self-educating, drinking it all in.

If you’ve seen a movie where someone is frozen in a block of ice before they thaw and get to experience the world—that’s what life felt like to me before going to college. Everything moved in very slow motion until college. Then things sped up a lot.

At Stanford I got a BS, MS, and PhD in Electrical Engineering and an MS in chemical engineering. It was an exciting time in genomics, because the Human Genome Project was going on. I chose a major to expose me to genomics while also having the maximum amount of math. Chemical engineering was the answer.

The specific work I did in grad school was genetic circuits in microbes, how viruses and microbes are wired. We studied their system diagrams and protein interaction networks, doing statistical and computational analysis of their genome sequences. That kind of work in genetic circuits or systems biology is at the intersection of electrical engineering, computer science, genomics, statistics, and biochemistry.

I did a startup because we could get larger data samples and make a bigger difference to the world as a profitable company than in academia relying on grants. Programming and building businesses were ways to apply these new technologies more efficiently.

We started a genomics company called Counsyl, where I was the CTO and co-founder, which ended up being sold for $375 million. We had to bootstrap for the first few years and eventually got funding from Peter Thiel and Founders Fund. We scaled to do more than one million diagnostic tests and changed the standard of care for Mendelian genetic diseases.

I am also an angel investor. In crypto I was early to Bitcoin, Ethereum, Zcash, and others. In 2013 I became a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) focused on crypto, biomedicine, and online education. I recruited Vijay Pande to the firm, and did some of the earliest bio investments in what became the a16z bio fund, including very successful companies like Benchling. I also worked with Chris Dixon and we did several crypto investments. Some of the logistical problems with investing in Bitcoin at that time eventually motivated the a16z crypto fund. I co-founded Coin Center while at a16z and recruited Jerry Brito; this became the leading nonprofit in the crypto space. I also helped take the firm into regulated industries, at the interface between software, the physical world, and the political environment.

In 2015, I took over one of our portfolio companies at a16z, to turn it around. That became Earn.com, which was acquired by Coinbase, so I became the CTO of Coinbase for a while. There, I integrated Earn.com to create Coinbase Earn with a team of folks. This became a multi-hundred-million dollar business for Coinbase.

Stanford invited me to teach Computer Science and Statistics for several years. I also taught an open online course about Startup Engineering with 250,000 students worldwide. The course fused technology and philosophy. It talked about why to do a startup, difficulties that arise–what I wish I had known as a PhD student starting my first company.

I like to think of myself as a pragmatic ideologue.

I have a long-term horizon; I have my eyes set on the long-term goal of transhumanism. But I'm willing to be pragmatic and execute in the short run. I go down the to-do list toward that North Star. I'm always conscious of the long term.

Every few years, I feel like my life starts anew. I'm in my forties now, but I feel like I've just started because I built up various resources like distribution, network, and capital. Now I can broadcast ideas, invest money, and see big things happen.

The past has all been prologue. Now I've got a canvas to play with. Some people make a bit of money and go sit on the beach. I think of money as a stick of dynamite. It is leverage to go and blow up the obstacles in the path of my next goal.

I’d like to see us ethically and technologically aligned on progress. I’d like to see humanity believing math is good. Believing generating nuclear power is good. Believing getting to Mars is good. Believing expanding is good.

Let’s get on the long-term track toward ascent. In my lifetime, I want to see humanity working together to grow toward infinity.

Immutable money, infinite frontier, eternal life.