Fred Ehrsam

Fred Ehrsam, born Frederick Ernest Ehrsam III, is an American business executive and investor who is the co-founder and managing partner of cryptocurrency investment firm Paradigm. He is also the co-founder of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase.
Education and early life.
Ehrsam was born in 1988 Boston, growing up in Concord, Massachusetts. He played video games professionally in high school, and was an avid World of Warcraft player, which introduced him to the concept of in-game digital currencies.
In 2010, Ehrsam graduated with distinction from Duke University, earning a B.S. in computer science with a minor in economics. At Duke, he was a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity.
Career.
After graduating from Duke, Ehrsam became a foreign exchange trader at investment bank Goldman Sachs in New York. He learned about Bitcoin from a Georgetown University professor's paper, and began trading in his free time.
Coinbase.
In 2012, Ehrsam and Brian Armstrong co-founded Coinbase in an apartment in San Francisco, as a way for cryptocurrency enthusiasts to trade bitcoins and other digital currencies. The two met on the Bitcoin subreddit forum. Ehrsam served as Coinbase's first President. Ehrsam reportedly reached out to his alma mater Duke to invest in Coinbase's 2015 Series C, an investment which reportedly increased Duke's investment by 100 times. In January 2017, he announced he was leaving the company, but would remain on its board. He also reportedly still owned 8.9% of Coinbase stock, as of April 2021, and was assigned to the company's audit committee before its April 2021 public offering.
Paradigm.
In 2018, Ehrsam co-founded cryptocurrency investment firm Paradigm with former Sequoia Capital investor Matt Huang. They founded the company to invest in cryptocurrencies and the companies that focus on that market, and became the firm's managing partners. As of October 2020, the company had made 28 investments in cryptocurrency related companies.