At age 13, Adam enrolled as a full-time student at UC Berkeley, where he studied pure and applied mathematics and conducted research in number theory and machine learning. He went on to work as a mathematician for the Department of Defense and as a researcher at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Stanford InfoLab.

Adam graduated from Stanford with a BS in computer science, with a concentration in systems, and worked as an engineer at Palantir and Dropbox. He was also an early product manager at Rubrik, a Lightspeed portfolio company, where he launched a product line and moonlighted as a technical consultant for HBO’s Silicon Valley.

In 2016, Adam left Rubrik to become a partner at Lightspeed. Since joining Lightspeed he’s focused primarily on investments in blockchain (both equity and tokens), but also has invested in enterprise IT, big data/analytics, artificial intelligence, and frontier technologies.

What does he look for in founders? The first quality is rationality quotient, or RQ—whether or not a person has the humility to recognize what he or she doesn’t know. The second quality is discernment. But ultimately, he believes the most important quality a founder brings to the table is an eye for the future and a clear idea of what it will take to get there.

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