Investment Partner at a16z crypto
Check size: a16z crypto does not publish a reliable personal check range for Liz. Her public deal writing spans seed leadership and large later financings, so founders should confirm vehicle, stage, allocation, ownership target, lead/co-lead role, token/equity structure, and reserves with the team.
Liz focuses on the picks-and-shovels and decentralized infrastructure that let crypto mature into useful, open economic systems. Her authored investment work emphasizes market infrastructure for increasingly sophisticated prediction-market traders, interoperable stablecoin clearing, productive Bitcoin collateral, and regulated programmable accounts for autonomous software. Her earlier metaverse framework favors decentralization, durable property rights, self-sovereign identity, composability, open source, community ownership, and social immersion.
Start with the infrastructure bottleneck and why the market is ready now. Show the architecture, performance, security and composability model; identify users and their current workaround; quantify adoption, liquidity or transaction evidence; explain regulatory and trust assumptions; and make clear how the product expands user or developer agency. For a market product, demonstrate participant sophistication and execution quality; for payments or agents, show controls, compliance and reliability.
Technically deep founders building enabling infrastructure before it becomes obvious; products that close a concrete tooling or market-structure gap; fast and composable systems; regulated infrastructure where trust matters; teams with direct domain experience; open systems that give users durable ownership, identity, and agency.
Her public work implies weak fit for closed or extractive platforms, infrastructure without a demonstrated user or market bottleneck, products that merely repackage speculation, systems whose control or property rights can be unilaterally revoked, and teams lacking the technical or regulatory depth required by the category.
Evaluate whether a digital world is decentralized, preserves property rights and self-sovereign identity, supports composability and open source, shares ownership with its community, and enables social immersion.
Identify a category whose users and activity have matured faster than its tools, then test whether new infrastructure materially improves speed, performance, composability, or access.
Ask whether an asset or payment rail can move across issuers, venues, and counterparties at predictable prices and speeds without fragmented manual routing.
For agentic finance, verify programmatic access, delegated authority, spending policies, human control, fraud resistance, compliance, and support across both traditional and onchain rails.
Autonomous software needs regulated, programmable accounts and payment rails with built-in authority and spending controls rather than credentials designed for humans.
Stablecoins need a neutral clearing layer that makes assets from different issuers fungible at predictable prices and speeds as business adoption grows.
Prediction markets are maturing into a broader financial tool, but sophisticated participants need a fast, composable terminal and professional-grade trading infrastructure.
A genuine open metaverse requires decentralization, property rights, self-sovereign identity, composability, open source, community ownership, and social immersion rather than control by a closed platform.
+ 126 more investments. View fund →