Founders Fund backed Jennifer Campbell's startup before she sold it to Coinbase for millions. Now she's looking to 'harpoon' a startup 'whale' as the firm's newest partner.

• Jennifer Campbell left Coinbase to become a partner at Founders Fund.
• She's a rare generalist investor looking for "super audacious ideas" across sectors.
• Before Founders Fund, Campbell built and sold a crypto prime brokerage startup.

Founders Fund's newest partner Jennifer Campbell isn't hunting unicorns, or startups worth more than $1 billion. She's looking to "harpoon a whale," she told Insider in her first interview since she joined the legendary venture capital firm this month. And she has a strategy to do so.

"Everyone's really investing in incremental businesses, but Founders Fund is one of the few that's still looking for super audacious ideas," Campbell said in a video call from an office in San Francisco's Presidio neighborhood. "Who is that founder who has a vision for the future and can will it into existence and let's just relentlessly back 'em."

Campbell is an increasingly rare generalist in the world of venture capital. In the last decade, more investors have tried to corner a category or industry because it gives them an inside lane on the most promising startups in their domain. Startup land is now awash with young companies trying to create the next big thing in artificial intelligence, encouraging many other investors to specialize there.

Campbell, who joined from Coinbase, where she worked on its prime brokerage, said keeping a wide aperture will allow her to source and seed truly revolutionary, early-stage companies, from machine learning to biological design.

"I think most venture capitalists now put themselves in a little box, which is, 'I do dev tools, or, 'I do fintech.' And I think that is a fine approach, but I think if you really zoom out on venture, it's [about] what is this new technology that has come along that will change the world? And I think in order to really capture all the value there, you have to be a generalist. Because it's the technology that changes first, and then you want to try to figure out how to package that and figure out how business changes," Campbell said.

Many of Founder Fund's most successful investments looked "completely insane for venture at the time that we made them," Erin Gleason, the firm's head of comms, said. It was the first institutional backer of private rocket company SpaceX and defense startup Anduril.

Before Campbell invested at Founders Fund, she got funded by them. Campbell cofounded and led Tagomi, a crypto prime brokerage that gave institutional clients the ability to make large trades. During the crypto bull run, the startup raised $28 million across two rounds of funding from investors including Founders Fund, Paradigm, and Quiet Capital, before Coinbase bought it for $80 million, according to a source familiar with the deal.

Campbell started writing angel investment checks more aggressively after the acquisition. She made early bets on Chroma, a buzzy startup making a key technology for generative AI founders, and Cohere, a $2 billion startup that's becoming a chief rival to OpenAI. Before long, she caught the attention of several funds, including her former backers at Founders Fund, circling the same deals.

"I felt like I always knew I wanted to come back to Founders Fund," Campbell said. "There aren't that many places in the world where oddballs fit in."