Adam Goldberg
Adam Goldberg is Co-Founder of Standard Crypto, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners.
At age 13, Adam enrolled as a full-time student at UC Berkeley, where he studied pure and applied mathematics and conducted research in number theory and machine learning. He went on to work as a mathematician for the Department of Defense and as a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Stanford InfoLab.
Adam graduated from Stanford with a BS in computer science, with a concentration in systems, and worked as an engineer at Palantir and Dropbox. He was also an early product manager at Rubrik, a Lightspeed portfolio company, where he launched a product line and moonlighted as a technical consultant for HBO’s Silicon Valley.
In 2016, Adam left Rubrik to become a partner at Lightspeed. “My entire life, I’ve optimized for learning,” he says. “Venture is the epitome of learning. You spend all your time with people who are experts in their field. What other job lets you do that?”
Since joining Lightspeed he’s focused primarily on investments in blockchain (both equity and tokens), but also has invested in enterprise IT, big data/analytics, artificial intelligence, and frontier technologies.
What does he look for in founders? The first quality is rationality quotient, or RQ—whether or not a person has the humility to recognize what he or she doesn’t know. The second quality is discernment. “If somebody says every meal they have is the best meal of their life, is their judgement really that great? You want the person who says they’ve had 20 meals this week and can list their top three with a clear mental framework,” he says.
But ultimately, he believes the most important quality a founder brings to the table is an eye for the future and a clear idea of what it will take to get there.
“I’m used to being the youngest person in the room,” he says. “Because of that, I don’t care about your background or where you started. I care about where you’re going. Potential trumps experience every time.”
