Joel Monegro

I'm a partner at Placeholder, a venture capital firm I co-founded in 2017 with my close friend Chris Burniske. Before that, I spent three years as an analyst at Union Square Ventures developing the firm's blockchain investment thesis and portfolio, and prior to that I started the Digital Economy Department at the Ministry of Industry and Commerce of the Dominican Republic (where I'm from), a government office in charge of developing the country's national and technology agenda. I fell down the crypto rabbit-hole in 2013 while researching alternative payment infrastructure technologies we could promote across Latin America and since then it has occupied nearly all my mental space. I'm driven by the opportunity to observe the re-structuring capitalism and governance in the age of information networks.