Ian Masters is a venture capital partner at Hack VC who simultaneously works as a senior quantitative trader and developer at the firm's internal trading operation, Hack Labs, combining hands-on systematic trading with investment decisions rather than operating as a traditional board-focused investor. He transitioned directly from Five Rings Capital, a high-intensity proprietary trading firm where he built low-latency trading infrastructure, bringing a practitioner's understanding of market microstructure and quantitative modeling to evaluating crypto and DeFi investments.