Deng Tong, Jinse Finance
November 26th news, according to police sources and insiders who spoke to the New York Post, Lachy Groom, a tech investor who had previously associated with OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, had his San Francisco home robbed at gunpoint on Saturday night, losing $11 million worth of crypto assets.
I. Armed Robber Possessing as Deliveryman Steals $11 Million
In a home surveillance video posted on social media by Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, the suspect can be seen wearing dark clothing, sunglasses, a hoodie, and gloves, carrying a white box, and walking towards the front door of the residence. As he approached the door, the suspect turned his head to the side, avoiding the security camera, so his face was never fully visible in the frame throughout the video. He rang the doorbell of the $4.4 million Dorland Street residence.
The suspect asked where “Joshua” was, pretending to have a package for him, and claimed to be an employee of a UPS subsidiary.
The victim (actually Lachy Groom) opened the door and identified himself as Joshua. (Joshua is also a tech investor and lives with Groom in a four-bedroom house on Dolan Street.) The burglar then asked the resident to sign for a package, ransacked his pockets, and then asked to borrow a pen. The suspect then followed the resident into the house, at which point a loud bang was heard. Once inside, the suspect pointed a gun at the resident, bound him with duct tape, and stole funds from his cryptocurrency account. The attacker bound and tortured the victim, beating him while forcing him to hold up his phone on speakerphone, where a foreigner's voice read his personal information. The burglar then poured liquid on the victim and emptied his cryptocurrency wallet over approximately 90 minutes. He also stole the victim's cell phone and laptop. Police arrived at the scene at 6:45 p.m. and found the victim with minor injuries, including bruises. A source familiar with the investigation said the gunman stole $11 million worth of Ethereum and Bitcoin, which is believed to be a deliberate attack by an organized crime group. II. Altman's Ex-Boyfriend, Australian Venture Capital Prodigy? Who is the victim, Lachy Groom? The homeowner, Lachy Groom, 31, is a venture capitalist and the ex-boyfriend of OpenAI founder Altman. The two dated before their marriage in 2024. Groom purchased the property from Altman's brother in 2021 for $1.8 million. Groom once praised Altman on X: "Sam is the most supportive, generous, and inspiring person I know. OpenAI has changed the world forever, and I know that everything that follows will be even greater." Altman also praised Groom: "Groom is one of the four people I consult for career advice." In June 2023, Altman and Groom jointly invested in a life insurance company in Bermuda that was denominated in digital assets. Aside from the label of "Altman's ex-boyfriend," Groom also has his own impressive resume—"Australian entrepreneurial prodigy." Groom began learning HTML and CSS programming at age 11 and founded PSDtoWP at 13, a company that converted Photoshop files into WordPress pages. Nine months later, the company was sold. Next, he founded PAGGStack.com, selling nutritional supplements to customers worldwide. A few months later, he sold that company as well. By age 15, Groom had already founded his third online business—iPadCaseFinder. Launched in 2010, the website allowed users to search for iPad cases and find places to buy them. The website was eventually acquired. He then embarked on two more projects, which he still owns. The first was Cardnap, a website for visitors to buy and sell discounted gift cards. The second was TheWP.co, which provides WordPress website building services and Photoshop file to WordPress conversion services. In 2014, Groom joined Stripe as one of the company's early employees. He worked at Stripe for several years, holding various positions, eventually leading the growth initiatives. This experience allowed him to witness firsthand how one of the most successful startups of the decade grew from a small team into a multi-billion dollar company. In 2018, Groom left Stripe to dedicate himself full-time to angel investing. In 2019, Groom founded the venture capital firm LGF. In less than two years, he invested in some of the hottest companies in the tech world, including Figma and Notion. Surprisingly, Groom doesn't run a traditional fund. He invests his own money, with very strict selection criteria, focusing on truly helping entrepreneurs rather than injecting huge sums of money.
Groom's Investment CaseIn 2018, Groom participated in Figma's Series A funding round, when the company was valued at approximately $94 million. At that time, most people believed that Adobe had monopolized the design software market. But Groom saw a bottom-up adoption of Figma by designers. Figma was eventually acquired by Adobe for $20 billion. This means a return of nearly 200 times in just four years. Groom invested in Figma not because he predicted that Adobe would acquire it. He invested because designers were spontaneously switching from Sketch to Figma, and Figma could achieve real-time collaboration that existing tools could not match.
When Groom invested in Notion in 2019, Notion was primarily used by individual users to improve personal productivity. However, Groom saw its potential to expand into team and enterprise applications. Groom saw that when individual contributors loved and actively promoted a tool within their companies, they could bypass the traditional top-down sales model and easily achieve enterprise-level sales. Ramp is an enterprise credit card and expense management platform. On the surface, this field appears highly competitive, with companies like Brex and Divvy (acquired by Bill.com) as well as traditional enterprise credit card providers. Groom invested in Ramp's seed round because its founders (who previously founded Paribus, acquired by Capital One) had a deep understanding of fintech and were building a product that finance teams genuinely wanted to use. This reaffirms Groom's investment pattern: thorny workflow issues, bottom-up user adoption, and tech-savvy founders with domain expertise. Lattice develops performance management software for HR teams. Groom invested early in the company when it was still exploring product-market fit (around 2016-2017). This company is interesting because HR software has historically been poor. But Lattice develops software that managers and employees genuinely want to use for feedback and goal setting, not just software mandated by HR. Groom's investment strengths can be summarized as follows: He has accumulated extensive operational experience at Stripe: Groom doesn't just write checks and leave it to chance. He understands how to scale a company from $10 million in revenue to $100 million. His understanding of marketing, pricing, hiring, and product development far surpasses that of most angel investors. He focuses on product-market fit, not vanity metrics: Groom doesn't care if a company has impressive PR or has raised funds from well-known venture capital firms. He only cares if users like the product and spread it organically. This is harder to fake than growth metrics. He only invests in markets he knows: Almost all of Groom's investments are concentrated in B2B SaaS, productivity tools, or developer infrastructure. He doesn't invest in consumer apps, healthcare, or climate technology. He always sticks to his area of expertise.
III. Crypto Robberies Are Frequent: Is Self-Storing Crypto Assets a Good Idea?
Garry Tan, a well-known tech investor in San Francisco, shared surveillance footage on his X account on social media and appealed to the public for help in tracking down the suspects. “We must find the perpetrators; time is of the essence. Self-storing cryptocurrency seems like a good idea, but it’s not. The safest way to hold cryptocurrency long-term is to store it in a vault (such as Coinbase or elsewhere).”
According to Steve Krystek, CEO of personal security company PFC Safeguards, kidnappings of cryptocurrency investors are on the rise. “Many people who have made a fortune like to flaunt it to show how rich they are.”
For example, in March 2025, four robbers broke into the home of livestreamer Amouranth (real name Kaitlyn Siragosa) and demanded her cryptocurrency private keys.
In April 2024, a family in British Columbia was robbed of their cryptocurrency assets. The robbers subjected the family of three to 13.5 hours of beatings, waterboarding, and sexual assault threats before stealing $1.6 million worth of Bitcoin. As more ordinary people hold crypto assets, crypto crime has expanded beyond cyberattacks; home invasions are becoming increasingly frequent, with high-net-worth crypto asset holders being targeted precisely. On one hand, some crypto investors openly flaunt their wealth, sharing investment returns, mansions, and luxury cars, making them easy targets for robbers. On the other hand, many investors choose to safeguard their private keys themselves, but lack necessary security measures, making them vulnerable to theft. Depositing assets into exchanges carries risks from inadequate platform management. Therefore, investors should first maintain a low profile and reduce ostentatious displays of wealth. Secondly, for smaller amounts of crypto assets, investors can deposit them into leading exchanges. High-net-worth investors can split their assets and deposit them into offline custody accounts on leading exchanges, or store them in hardware wallets, which can be placed in safes or other more secure locations.
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