Fred Ehrsam

Frederick "Fred" Ernest Ehrsam III is an American business executive and investor who is the co-founder and former managing partner of cryptocurrency investment firm Paradigm. He is also the co-founder of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. Education and early life Ehrsam was born on May 10, 1988, in 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 the 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.