VC Giant Paradigm Taps Legal Heavyweight to Help Deliver ‘Promise of Web3’ Katie Biber Brings Real World Experience to VC Goliath

Paradigm, the crypto venture capital firm that closed a $2.5B fund last year, has appointed Katie Biber as chief legal officer. 

Biber is the former chief legal officer at Brex, a fintech firm, and a top lawyer for the presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, the Republican Party’s nominee in 2012.

In a blog post announcing her new position, Biber describes the recent price volatility of BTC and ETH as “just noise.” 

Democratize Finance

“The promise of web3 comes into sharper focus with every passing day,” she said. “It’s no longer just a hunch – I am now confident that today’s builders will democratize finance, create a more equitable internet, and bring us tools that help humans exchange goods, services, opinions, and information trustlessly.”

In November, Paradigm set a record for the largest web3 venture fund but deployed some of its capital to diversify outside of crypto. It backed the $1.5B investment round of TradFi market maker Citadel Securities in January.

In a statement, Paradigm co-founder, Matt Huang, said that Citadel plans to extend its operations into new markets and asset classes, “including crypto.”

Paradigm continued to actively invest in new crypto projects in spite of the recent downturn. In the past month, the VC firm announced deals backing DAO management platforms Utopia and Dework, Lightning Network-focussed builders, Lightspark, and made its first investment in Africa by leading the $30M Series A of prospective web3 ‘super-app’ Jambo,

In a late-March appearance on The Defiant Podcast, Ken Seiff, Blockchange Ventures’ managing partner, said the extreme sums of money being raised by web3 venture firms in late-2021 gives him hope that the current downturn may be short-lived.

Allocators

“There’s a lot of capital on the sidelines… We’ve seen extraordinary capital raises… Many of the funds [have] more demand than they could supply, so they became allocators and allocated entry into the funds,” he said. “This could be a great time for investing.”

Paradigm’s goliath fund was dethroned as web3’s largest two weeks ago when Andreessen Horowitz announced it raised $4.5B for its fourth crypto fund. One third of the fund is earmarked for seed funding, while the remaining will be put to work in venture financing deals.