Rajiv Patel-OConnor

Rajiv Patel-O'Connor is an investor and software engineer with a background in venture capital, cryptocurrency, software development, and growth engineering. He is a General Partner at Framework Ventures, having previously held Partner, Principal, and Associate roles at the firm and worked as a Software Engineer at Coinbase. ^[1]

Education

Patel-O’Connor graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Arts in Biophysics in 2019. ^[4]

Career

Patel-O'Connor began his career as a Software Engineering Intern at 4Catalyzer from May 2018 to January 2019, working on projects at the intersection of machine learning and mobile technology for Butterfly Network. From September 2019 to December 2020, he worked as a Growth Engineer at Eight Sleep in the New York City metropolitan area. He then joined Coinbase as a Software Engineer in May 2021, working on crypto applications with a focus on staking through December 2021. In January 2022, Patel-O'Connor joined Framework Ventures as an Associate, a position he held through December 2023. He became Principal in January 2024 and Partner in 2025, before becoming General Partner in June 2026. His progression at Framework Ventures has taken him from an associate-level investment role to the firm's general partnership. ^{[4] [6]}

Panels

Institutional Opportunity

In a March 2026 panel at the Digital Asset Summit, Patel-O'Connor joined Mary-Catherine Lader (Native Markets), Jake Chervinsky (Hyperliquid Policy Center), and Bob Diamond (Atlas Merchant Capital) to discuss Hyperliquid and the potential for DeFi to support institutional financial markets. The panel examined Hyperliquid as infrastructure for trading real-world assets and derivatives, with the speakers highlighting its performance, low costs, and liquidity while noting the shift in institutional perceptions of DeFi from speculative markets toward financial infrastructure. They also discussed regulatory efforts to provide greater legal clarity for U.S. institutions participating in DeFi and pointed to the growth of real-world asset trading on Hyperliquid as evidence of increasing institutional adoption. The conversation further covered Hyperliquid's developer ecosystem, prediction markets, and the potential for more financial activity to move on-chain, before concluding with a broader discussion of the convergence of DeFi, traditional finance, fintech, and centralized finance and the possibility of a global, 24/7 financial system built on blockchain infrastructure. ^[8]