“Any technology I've been aware of has definite pros and cons. The societal benefits I see with crypto vastly outweigh the downsides — but you must have the conversation about them.”
Why Katie is the canonical Lawyer
Katie Haun spent over a decade as a federal prosecutor at the U.S. Department of Justice, beginning in 2006 in the Eastern District of Virginia on national security and terrorism cases before moving to San Francisco to prosecute organized crime — Nuestra Familia, the Hells Angels, the Mongols. After finishing Stanford Law School with honors, she had clerked for Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy; the DOJ was the next proving ground. Then, in 2012, she received what looked like a detour: investigate bitcoin. Rather than close the assignment as a dead end, she built the DOJ's first cross-agency cryptocurrency task force. It led to two of the most consequential early-crypto prosecutions: exposing corrupt federal agents who had looted the Silk Road investigation from the inside, and a parallel probe into the Mt. Gox exchange collapse. She also began teaching the first course on cryptocurrencies and cybercrime at Stanford Law School in 2016, translating enforcement knowledge into curriculum. She left the DOJ in 2017, joined Coinbase as its first independent board director, and the following year became a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz — the first woman GP at a16z. In 2022 she founded Haun Ventures, raising $1.5 billion across two funds dedicated to crypto and web3, later expanding into AI agents as the firm's assets under management grew to $2.5 billion.
The career arc is a textbook expression of the Lawyer role in a hype cycle. The Lawyer is uniquely resilient: earnings flow during the boom (helping builders navigate regulation), during enforcement (defending clients), and during the bust (insolvency and litigation). What separates Haun from the compliance-side attorneys who typically populate crypto boardrooms is that she came from the enforcement bench — she had written the playbook regulators would later execute. That vantage point, knowing precisely what the government can prove and where the law remains unwritten, gave her credibility with founders and capital allocators alike. Prosecutor, then educator, then investor: each step monetized the same regulatory complexity from a different angle, and each deepened the asymmetric informational advantage that makes the Lawyer role so durable across every phase of the cycle.
The Lawyer earns from regulatory complexity regardless of technology outcome. See the Lawyer role →
Same role, different wave
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