Altman's ex-boyfriend? Investment genius? Who is the Groom that was robbed of ten million dollars?

Deng Tong, Golden Finance

On November 26, news broke that a tech investor, Lachy Groom, who had previously dated OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman, was the victim of an armed robbery at his residence in San Francisco last Saturday night, resulting in the loss of cryptocurrency assets worth $11 million.

1. Armed Robber Disguised as Delivery Person Steals 11 Million Dollars

In a family surveillance video posted on social media by Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan, the suspect is seen wearing dark clothing, sunglasses, a hoodie, and gloves, carrying a white box as he approaches the front door of the residence. As the suspect gets closer to the door, he turns his head to the side, avoiding the surveillance camera, so his face is never fully visible throughout the video. He rings the doorbell of the Dorland Street residence, valued at $4.4 million.

The suspect asked where “Joshua” was, pretending to have a package to deliver to him, and claimed to be an employee of a UPS subsidiary. The victim (who is actually Lachy Groom) opened the door and claimed to be Joshua. (Joshua is also a tech investor and lives with Groom in a four-bedroom house on Doran Street.)

The thief then asked the resident to sign for the package, then rummaged through his pockets, and then asked the resident if he could borrow a pen. The suspect then followed the resident into the house, at which point a loud noise was heard.

The suspect entered the house, pointed a gun at the resident, and bound them with tape, then stole funds from their cryptocurrency account. The assailant tied up and tortured the victim, beating him while making him hold his phone on speaker, with a foreign voice on the other end reading out his personal information. The thief then splashed liquid on the victim and emptied his cryptocurrency wallet in about 90 minutes. They also stole the victim's phone and laptop. The police arrived at the scene at 6:45 PM and found the victim had sustained minor injuries, including some bruises.

A source familiar with the investigation said that the gunman stole $11 million worth of Ethereum and Bitcoin, which is believed to be a deliberate attack by an organized crime group.

2. Altman's ex-boyfriend, Australian venture capital genius? Who is the victim Lachy Groom?

Lachy Groom, a 31-year-old venture capitalist and the former boyfriend of OpenAI founder Altman, dated before they married in 2024. Groom purchased the property from Altman's brother for $1.8 million in 2021.

Gloom once posted on X praising Altman: “Sam is the most supportive, generous, and inspiring person I know. OpenAI has forever changed the world, and I know everything that follows will be even greater.”

Altman also praised Gloom: “Gloom is one of the four people I consult for career advice.”

In June 2023, Altman and Gloom co-invested in a life insurance company based in Bermuda that is priced in digital assets.

Removing the label of “Altman's ex-boyfriend”, Groom also has his own impressive resume - “Australia's entrepreneurial prodigy”.

Groom started learning HTML and CSS programming at the age of 11 and founded PSDtoWP at 13, a company that converts Photoshop files into WordPress pages. Nine months later, the company was sold. Next, he launched PAGGStack.com, selling nutritional supplements to customers worldwide. A few months later, he sold the company again. By the age of 15, Groom had already founded his third online business - iPadCaseFinder. The website went live in 2010, allowing users to search for iPad cases and find purchasing channels. The site was eventually successfully acquired.

Subsequently, he also set about developing two other projects, which he still owns to this day. The first is Cardnap, a website for visitors to buy and sell discounted gift cards. The second is TheWP.co, which offers services for building WordPress websites and also provides services for converting Photoshop files to WordPress.

In 2014, Gloom joined Stripe as one of the early employees of the company. He worked at Stripe for several years, holding various positions, ultimately leading the growth program. This experience allowed him to witness firsthand how one of the most successful startups of the past decade grew from a small team into a billion-dollar company.

In 2018, Gloom left Stripe to devote himself full-time to angel investing.

In 2019, Gloom founded the venture capital firm LGF. In less than two years, it invested in some of the hottest companies in the tech industry, including Figma and Notion.

Surprisingly, Gloom does not operate a traditional fund. He invests his own money, chooses very strictly, and focuses on genuinely helping entrepreneurs rather than pouring in huge amounts of money.

Gloom's Investment Case* Figma

In 2018, Gloom participated in Figma's Series A funding, at which point the company was valued at around $94 million. At that time, most people believed that Adobe had already monopolized the design software market. However, Gloom saw the trend of designers adopting Figma from the ground up. Figma was eventually acquired by Adobe for $20 billion. This means a return of nearly 200 times in just four years. Gloom invested in Figma not because he predicted Adobe would acquire it. He invested because designers were spontaneously transitioning from Sketch to Figma, and Figma was able to achieve real-time collaboration that existing tools could not match.

• Notion

When Gloom invested in Notion in 2019, Notion was primarily used by individual users to enhance personal efficiency. However, Gloom saw its potential to expand into team and enterprise application scenarios. Gloom observed that when individual contributors love and actively promote a tool within the company, they can bypass the traditional top-down sales model and easily achieve enterprise-level sales.

• Ramp

Ramp is a corporate credit card and expense management platform. On the surface, this field is highly competitive, with traditional corporate credit card providers in addition to Brex and Divvy (which has been acquired by Bill.com). However, the reason Gloom invested in Ramp's seed round is due to the founders' deep understanding of fintech (they previously created Paribus, which was acquired by Capital One) and their commitment to building a product that finance teams genuinely want to use. This reaffirms Gloom's investment pattern: tackling tricky workflow issues, bottom-up user adoption, and having technically savvy founders with domain expertise.

• Lattice

Lattice develops performance management software for HR teams. Gloom made an early investment in the company while it was exploring product-market fit (around 2016-2017). This company is interesting because HR software has traditionally been quite poor. However, the software developed by Lattice is what managers and employees actually want to use for feedback and goal-setting, rather than just software that the HR department mandates.

The investment advantages of Gloom can be summarized as follows:

• He accumulated rich operational experience at Stripe: Gloom is not just writing checks and waiting for things to happen. He understands how to scale a company from $10 million in revenue to $100 million. His understanding of marketing, pricing, recruitment, and product development far exceeds that of most angel investors.
• His focus is on the fit between the product and the market, rather than vanity metrics: Gloom does not care whether a company has impressive public relations or funding from well-known venture capital firms. He only cares whether users like the product and spread the word voluntarily. This is harder to fake than growth metrics.
• He only invests in markets he is familiar with: almost all of Gloom's investments are concentrated in the areas of B2B SaaS, productivity tools, or developer infrastructure. He does not invest in consumer applications, healthcare, or climate technology. He always sticks to his own field.

3. With frequent cases of crypto robberies, is it a good idea to store crypto assets on your own?

Renowned San Francisco tech investor Garry Tan shared surveillance footage on social media through his X account and requested the public's help in tracking down the suspect. “We must find the perpetrator; time is of the essence. Keeping cryptocurrency on your own seems like a good idea, but in reality, it is 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, incidents of cryptocurrency investors being kidnapped are on the rise. “Many people who have made a fortune like to show off to demonstrate their wealth.”

For example, in March 2025, four robbers broke into the home of online anchor Amouranth (real name Kaitlyn Siragusa) and demanded that the anchor hand over the cryptocurrency private key. In April 2024, a family in Columbia suffered a cryptocurrency robbery in which robbers subjected a family of three to 13.5 hours of beatings, waterboarding, and sexual assault threats, and ultimately robbed a family of three of $1.6 million worth of bitcoin.

As more and more ordinary people hold cryptocurrency assets, crypto-related crimes have expanded beyond just cyber hacking attacks, with home robberies becoming increasingly frequent, specifically targeting high-net-worth cryptocurrency asset holders.

On one hand, some crypto investors publicly flaunt their wealth by sharing investment gains, luxury homes, luxury cars, etc., which makes them easy targets for robbers. On the other hand, many investors choose to self-custody their private keys but lack necessary security measures, making them vulnerable to theft, while depositing in exchanges carries risks from poor platform custody.

Therefore, investors should first act low-key to reduce displays of wealth. Secondly, for small amounts of cryptocurrency assets, investors can deposit them into leading exchanges. High-net-worth investors can split their assets and deposit them into offline custody accounts of leading exchanges or store them using hardware wallets, which can also be placed in safes or other high-security locations.