jakiro
Deng Tong, Bitcoin Vision
According to news on November 26, police sources and people familiar with the matter told the New York Post that Lachy Groom, a technology investor who had a relationship with OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, suffered an armed robbery at his home in San Francisco last Saturday night, losing $11 million worth of crypto assets.
1. Armed robbers pretended to be deliverymen and stole $11 million
In a home surveillance video posted to social media by Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, the suspect can be seen wearing dark clothing, sunglasses, a hoodie and gloves, and carrying a white box as he walks toward the front door of the home.The suspect turned his head to the side as he approached the door, away from the security cameras, so his face was never fully in the frame throughout the video.He rang the doorbell of his $4.4 million Dorland Street home.
The suspect asked where “Joshua” was, pretended to have a package for him, and claimed to be an employee of a company owned by UPS.The victim (actually Lachy Groom) opened the door and claimed to be Joshua.(Joshua is also a tech investor and lives with Groom in a four-bedroom home on Dolan Street.)
The thief then asked the resident to sign for the package, then searched his pockets before asking if he could borrow a pen.The suspect then followed the resident into the house, when a loud bang was heard.
After entering the house, the suspect pointed a gun at the resident, tied him up with tape, and then stole the funds from his cryptocurrency account. The attacker tied up and tortured the victim. While beating him, he made him hold his mobile phone on speakerphone. A foreign voice came from the other end of the phone and broadcast his personal information.The thieves then poured liquid on the victim and emptied his cryptocurrency wallet within approximately 90 minutes.and stole the victim’s cell phone and laptop.Police arrived at the scene at 6.45pm and found the victim suffering minor injuries, including some bruising.
A source with knowledge of the investigation said the gunman stole $11 million worth of ethereum and bitcoin in what is believed to be a deliberate attack by an organized crime group.
2. Altman’s ex-boyfriend and Australian venture capital wizard?Who is the victim Lachy Groom?
The homeowner, Lachy Groom, is 31 years old, a venture capitalist and the ex-boyfriend of OpenAI founder Altman. The two dated before getting married in 2024.Groom purchased the property from Altman’s brother in 2021 for $1.8 million.
Groom once wrote on X praising Altman: “Sam is the most supportive, generous, and inspiring person I know. OpenAI has changed the world forever, and I know everything that comes next will be even greater.”
Altman also praised Groom: “Groom was one of four people I consulted for career advice.”
In June 2023, Altman and Groom jointly invested in a life insurance company based in Bermuda that was denominated in digital assets.
Apart from the label of “Altman’s ex-boyfriend”, Groom also has his own dazzling resume – “Australian entrepreneurial wizard”.
Groom began learning HTML and CSS programming at age 11, and at 13 he founded PSDtoWP, a company that converts Photoshop files into WordPress pages.Nine months later, the company was sold.Next, he founded PAGGStack.com, a website that sells nutritional supplements to customers around the world.A few months later, he put the company up for sale.By the age of 15, Groom had launched his third online business, iPadCaseFinder.Launched in 2010, the website allows users to search for iPad cases and find ways to purchase them.The site was eventually successfully acquired.
He then went on to develop two other projects that he still owns today.The first is Cardnap, a website where visitors can buy and sell discounted gift cards.The second one is TheWP.co, which provides WordPress website building services and also provides services for converting Photoshop files to WordPress.
Groom joined Stripe in 2014 and was one of the company’s early employees.He spent several years at Stripe in various roles, ultimately leading growth initiatives.The experience gave him an up-close look at how one of the most successful startups of the decade grew from a small team to a multi-billion dollar company.
In 2018, Groom left Stripe to devote himself full-time to angel investing.
In 2019, Groom founded venture capital firm LGF.In less than two years, he has invested in some of the hottest companies in the technology world, including Figma, Notion, etc.
Surprisingly, Groom doesn’t run a traditional fund.He invests his own money, is very selective, and focuses on truly helping entrepreneurs rather than investing huge sums of money.
Groom’s investment case
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Figma
Groom participated in Figma’s Series A round of funding in 2018, which valued the company at about $94 million at the time.At that time, most people believed that Adobe had cornered the design software market.But Groom sees a trend of designers adopting Figma from the bottom up.Figma was eventually acquired by Adobe for $20 billion.That represents a nearly 200x return in just four years.Groom didn’t invest in Figma because he predicted Adobe would acquire it.He invested because designers were voluntarily switching from Sketch to Figma, and Figma enabled real-time collaboration that existing tools couldn’t match.
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Notion
When Groom invested in Notion in 2019, Notion was mainly used by individual users to improve personal efficiency.But Groom saw its potential to expand into team and enterprise application scenarios.Groom saw that when individual contributors love and actively promote a tool within the company, it can easily achieve enterprise-level sales, bypassing the traditional top-down sales model.
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Ramp
Ramp is an enterprise credit card and expense management platform.On the face of it, the space is highly competitive, with traditional business credit card providers in addition to Brex, Divvy (acquired by Bill.com).But Groom invested in Ramp’s seed round because its founders (who previously founded Paribus, which was acquired by Capital One) have a deep understanding of fintech and are building a product that finance teams actually want to use.It reiterates the same Groom investment model: tough workflow problems, bottom-up user adoption, and technical founders with domain expertise.
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Lattice
Lattice develops performance management software for HR teams.Groom made an early investment while the company was still exploring product-market fit (around 2016-2017).This company is interesting because HR software has historically been terrible.But Lattice builds software that managers and employees actually want to use for feedback and goal setting, not just software that HR departments mandate.
Groom’s investment advantages can be boiled down to the following points:
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He has extensive operational experience at Stripe: Groom doesn’t just write a check and leave it to chance.He knows what it takes to grow a company from $10 million in revenue to $100 million.His understanding of marketing, pricing, recruiting, and product development far exceeds that of most angel investors.
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He focuses on product-market fit, not vanity metrics: Groom doesn’t care if a company has an impressive PR campaign or raises money from high-profile venture capital firms.He only cares about whether users like the product and spread it spontaneously.This is harder to fake than growth metrics.
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He only invests in markets he’s familiar with: Almost all of Groom’s investments have been in B2B SaaS, productivity tools, or developer infrastructure.He doesn’t invest in consumer applications, healthcare or climate tech.He always stayed true to his territory.
3. Crypto robbery cases are common. Is it a good idea to keep crypto assets by yourself?
Y Combinator CEO and President Garry Tan shared the surveillance footage on social media through his X account and asked for the public’s help in tracking down the suspect.”We have to find the perpetrators and time is of the essence. Self-storing crypto may seem like a good idea, but it’s not. The safest way to hold crypto long-term is to store it in a vault (such as Coinbase or elsewhere).”
Kidnappings of cryptocurrency investors are on the rise, according to Steve Krystek, CEO of personal security company PFC Safeguards.”Many people who have made a fortune like to show off to show that they are wealthy.”
For example, in March 2025, four robbers broke into the home of network anchor Amouranth (real name Kaitlyn Siragusa) and demanded that the anchor hand over his cryptocurrency private key.In April 2024, a family in Columbia suffered a cryptocurrency robbery. The robbers beat, waterboarded and sexually assaulted a family of three for 13.5 hours, and finally stole $1.6 million worth of Bitcoin.
As more and more ordinary people hold crypto-assets, crypto-crimes are no longer limited to cyber hacking attacks. Home invasions and robberies are also becoming more frequent, and high-net-worth crypto-asset holders are precisely targeted.
On the one hand, some crypto investors openly show off their wealth, sharing investment income, luxury homes, luxury cars, etc., and are accurately targeted by robbers.On the other hand, many investors choose to keep their private keys by themselves, but they lack necessary security measures and are easily stolen. However, depositing them into exchanges also carries risks from poor maintenance on the platform.
Therefore, investors should first keep a low profile and reduce their behavior of showing off their wealth.Secondly, investors can deposit small amounts of crypto assets into leading exchanges.High-net-worth investors can split their assets and deposit them into offline custody accounts of leading exchanges, or keep them in hardware wallets. Hardware wallets can also be placed in safes and other places with higher security.
