Tiffani McCoy, general counsel of HBUS.

Tiffani McCoy has worked in-house at some of Silicon Valley's largest companies, in a variety of legal roles.

Now, she's headed to a general counsel role at HBUS, a digital currency marketplace that opened in June, and is the  U.S. partner of Singapore-based cryptocurrency exchange Huobi. In her new role, she'll be reporting to HBUS chief executive officer Frank Fu.

“I wanted to be involved with starting a smaller company and moving it onto that level of success and in particular I wanted to be challenged, challenged to learn something incredibly new,” McCoy said.

In her new role, McCoy said she'll help educate people throughout the company on the crypto regulatory landscape and build up the company's legal team. There are currently some lawyers at HBUS, she said, but that team will grow and change to meet company needs.

McCoy added that education also is one of the most important aspects of her job as GC and will help her gain respect as a business leader, not just a legal one.

“Education is a huge part of how the team can see you as a partner and know that you're helping them to get to where they want to be,” she said.

Prior to HBUS, McCoy was the assistant general counsel of product and regulatory for Mountain View, California-based financial software company Intuit, where she began learning about the digital currency space. McCoy said she was curious about the emerging technology and started speaking with engineers, attending related meetings at Intuit and doing her own research.

Prior to Intuit, she also served as the director of business and legal affairs for the company formerly known as Yahoo Inc. and as senior manager of legal operations at Google. McCoy said she'll bring lessons from those positions as she begins her time as HBUS GC, including businesses management concepts from her time in legal ops.

“It's important to me to have a well-run legal team, a team that thinks through, [implements] knowledge management, manages its outside counsel so that we're all having the same conversation. If you talk to anyone, you have the same conversation, because we're all aligned,” she said. “I hope to bring that here.”

McCoy has previous experience as a GC. According to her LinkedIn, she was GC of Encore Software early in her legal career. She also was previously the manager of business and legal affairs for DMX Music. She holds a JD from the University of Southern California Gould School of Law.