Timothy Lewis

Timothy Lewis is a longtime technologist-turned-crypto investor. By his own account he began working as a consulting engineer at age 14, serving clients including Fimat, Calyon Financial, NewEdge, Northern Trust, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and Kaiser Permanente, where he worked as a data center engineer (~2013–2015). He earned a BA in Business from The Ohio State University (1996–2001) and describes himself as a developer, network engineer, technology architect, and inventor holding multiple patents, with nearly 20 years in IT and digital security.

Lewis pivoted to full-time blockchain development around 2015 (Distributed Network Advisors, Thought Tank Group). In December 2017/2018 he co-founded Ikigai Asset Management alongside Travis Kling (formerly an L/S equity PM at Point72) and Anthony Emtman (former U.S. Air Force captain), serving as Founder and Chief Innovation Officer. Ikigai is a long/short, multi-strategy crypto hedge fund based in the Marina del Rey area of Los Angeles; reporting at various points placed assets under management between ~$110M and $200M+. He has also been associated with EOS block producer LibertyBlock and crypto mining company Atlas Cloud, where he served as CTO, and acted as a blockchain advisor to AlphaNetworks.

In February 2020/2021 Lewis founded DEVxDAO, a grant-giving nonprofit organized to fund open-source and decentralized-systems development (described as having on the order of £250M to distribute). In 2020–2021 he teamed with Max Howell, creator of the Homebrew package manager, to co-found tea.inc (also "tea"), where he serves as Chief Strategy Officer / Chief Innovation Officer. Tea launched publicly in 2022 with roughly $8.9M in seed funding led by Binance Labs, aiming to build a "creator economy for open source." He has also been President of Predict Global and founder of the nonprofit Growcards.

• Invests at the intersection of crypto/blockchain and open-source software infrastructure; an early Bitcoin angel and self-described "Bitcoin evangelist."
• Through Ikigai, exposure spans liquid crypto assets via long/short hedge-fund strategies plus early/pre-ICO and venture-style positions.
• Core stated philosophy on what he funds: "Software wants to be free, but programmers need to be compensated" — the thesis behind both DEVxDAO grants and tea, which he frames as "bringing the creator economy to open source."
• Backs technical, developer-first founders and protocols; his DEVxDAO model favors grant-style, mission-aligned funding for decentralized and open-source projects rather than purely equity bets.
• Personal operating ethos he cites publicly: "If you want to strive for more in life, you have to be open to speaking with people who have more in life" (crediting Napoleon Hill's *Think and Grow Rich*).