Be an API, not a bottleneck. Coinbase Ventures acts as an on-demand resource, letting founders engage when value is needed. 
At the Global Corporate Venturing Innovation Summit 2026 in Monterey, California, corporate venture leaders gathered to exchange best practices and refine the playbooks that have long defined the industry. Most conversations centered on focused portfolios, geopolitics, measured pacing, and tight strategic alignment with the parent company.
Then there’s Coinbase Ventures.
With more than 600 investments since 2018, the firm has taken a fundamentally different path. Rather than concentrating capital into a small number of high-conviction bets, Coinbase Ventures has prioritized breadth—seeding the ecosystem it depends on and accelerating the formation of the market itself.
Following his opening remarks on the evolving “Yin and Yang” between VC and CVC, Nicolas Sauvage sat down with Hoolie Tejwani to unpack how one of the most active venture platforms operates and what that level of scale actually requires.
From Curiosity to Conviction
Tejwani didn’t set out to become a venture capitalist. “I never woke up and said I want to be a corporate venture capitalist,” he said. His early career progressed from consulting at Bain & Company to a traditional venture at Obvious Ventures, founded by Evan Williams.
But exposure to frontier technologies shifted his trajectory. While at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he recalls a 2017 Bitcoin airdrop to students. He didn’t claim it, but saw what followed.
“I remember friends taking expensive vacations the next year,” he said. “That triggered me… what is this Bitcoin thing?”
At Obvious Ventures, that curiosity became conviction. Tejwani went deep on crypto early, helping shape the firm’s strategy before the category was widely understood—ultimately leading him to Coinbase.
The Origins of Coinbase Ventures
Tejwani didn’t join Coinbase to build a traditional venture arm. He started in M&A and partnerships, as Coinbase Ventures emerged organically, less a formal fund and more decentralized. Early investing drew from internal networks, with employees sourcing and supporting deals across the company.
“It really started as an experiment,” Tejwani said. “Action creates information—it’s okay to just try things.”
That experimentation wasn’t just about investing; it was about participation. In an emerging category, the goal was to engage early, learn quickly, and build relationships across the ecosystem.
That philosophy extended inward. Departing employees weren’t losses—they were future founders. “When someone… wants to burn the ships and start something… we want to be the first person they’re talking to,” Tejwani said.
This wasn’t portfolio construction in the traditional sense; it was network building.
From Decentralization to a 600-Investment Machine
What began as a decentralized effort scaled into one of venture’s most active platforms. Since 2018, Coinbase Ventures has made over 600 investments—an approach that would break most traditional VC models.
It works because the model is fundamentally different.
Rather than leading rounds, taking board seats, or concentrating ownership, Coinbase Ventures optimizes for speed, access, and optionality. Early on, distributed deal flow enabled volume. Today, a core team of eight runs a more structured Seed-to-Series A strategy—balancing high-velocity checks with more concentrated ($1–5M) investments.
But scale comes with tradeoffs.
At this volume, the firm cannot operate as a high-touch lead investor across its entire portfolio. It relies on other VCs to drive governance and company-building, while it maintains flexibility and broad exposure across the ecosystem.
Speed is non-negotiable. “If five folks are a hard no, but one has done the work and is pounding the table—it’s going to happen,” Tejwani said.
That bias toward conviction over consensus—and a willingness to sacrifice control for coverage—is what allows the model to function at scale.
A Different Model: Founder-First and API-Like
Coinbase Ventures takes a deliberately lightweight approach to portfolio management. Rather than leading rounds or taking board seats, the team typically invests small stakes (2–5%) and acts as an “API into Coinbase”—a resource founders can tap when useful, not a layer of imposed support.
“Our model’s always been, we want to be pull, not push,” said Hoolie Tejwani.
This structure allows larger venture firms to lead rounds, take board roles, and drive company-building, while Coinbase Ventures stays flexible and founder-first—optimizing for access, speed, and ecosystem growth over ownership or control.
For Hoolie Tejwani, the strongest cap tables blend Nicolas’s Yin & Yang concept from both worlds. Traditional VCs bring governance and capital discipline, while Coinbase Ventures adds strategic access and ecosystem leverage, together forming a more complete support system that founders can use as a competitive advantage.
Looking Ahead: Disrupting Themselves, Staying Grounded
For Hoolie Tejwani, the real discipline isn’t predicting markets—it’s questioning your own assumptions. “We frame every investment memo with what you have to believe for a 10 to 100x outcome,” he said. Those beliefs aren’t static. “We don’t always get it right… but it gives a framework to forecast the future.”
What matters is what happens next.
“If you take nothing else away… nothing is rigid,” Tejwani emphasized. “Every 3, 6, 12 months we’re constantly rebooting, refactoring how we operate.”
That mindset is grounded in humility. “The core is having real empathy for that founder journey,” he said. Founders, not investors, drive outcomes.
Combined with a system of evolving “majors and minors,” the approach reflects constant learning: adapt quickly, challenge prior thinking, and improve the process.
In a space defined by uncertainty, Coinbase Ventures’ edge isn’t certainty, it’s the willingness to evolve.
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