Startup Lawyer & Outside General Counsel | Varun Gupta Law

About

Why I practice law

The law is a craft that needs practice, experience and judgment. I have spent more than three decades in law for the satisfaction of getting a difficult problem exactly right for someone who is counting on it.

Where it started

I began as a CPA at Ernst & Young, after earning an accounting degree with high honors at the University of Florida. Auditing taught me to read a company through its numbers, and that financial fluency is still the reason cap tables, financing terms, and diligence findings come naturally to me.

I then went to Georgetown Law, graduated magna cum laude, and served as an editor of The Georgetown Law Journal. While there I worked in two divisions of the U.S. Department of Justice, the Antitrust Division's Civil Task Force and the Tax Division's Northern Criminal Enforcement Section, and after graduation I clerked for Judge Susan H. Black on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. Those years in government and the federal courts taught me how the law is actually decided, which is knowledge I still bring to every risk assessment.

Training that cannot be found elsewhere

I started my law firm career at Cravath, Swaine & Moore on Wall Street, among the most demanding training grounds in the profession, and became a partner at Latham & Watkins, an outcome few associates ever reach. In 2003 I took a risk that shaped everything after it and moved to Moscow, where I spent eleven years advising Russian companies on listing overseas, in an emerging market where very little was routine. I became Head of International Capital Markets at Allen & Overy and later head of Russian capital markets at Akin Gump, leading landmark IPOs on exchanges in London, New York, and Russia.

Becoming the client

In 2014 I made the second large bet of my career and left law firm partnership to become the founding Chief Legal and Compliance Officer and a board member of BitFury, a bitcoin mining company that grew from a startup to a valuation above $1 billion while I led its legal and compliance function across more than twenty countries. In 2018 I became the founding General Counsel of CasperLabs, where I built the legal function through a $60 million pre-token fundraising and the launch of a token with a network value above $1 billion.

Running those legal departments from the inside, as a member of the founding team, showed me what outside counsel looks like from the other side of the call. It is the reason I know which questions a founder is actually asking, and which ones they have not yet learned to ask.

Launcing Varun Gupta Law

I launched Varun Gupta Law in 2021 to make accessible that Big Law experience and full life-cycle judgment to startup founders. I practice the way I used to practice in Big Law and how I wished my own outside counsel had practiced when I was a general counsel waiting on a draft: prepared, direct, and accountable for the result. The feedback I hear most from clients and former colleagues is that they can rely on me for objective, honest advice, that I am meticulous about detail, and that I advocate forcefully for their interests while working as part of their team. I regard integrity as the foundation of all of it, because advice is only as useful as the trust behind it.