Ico market will not last forever.What will happen to cofound when ICO bubble is burst?
One thing is "bubble" - so, over-inflated valuations. That will burst, of course. But we believe in the underlying value of the token crowdsale model.
https://blog.cofound.it/is-there-room-for-vcs-in-a-tokenised-world-712bf111a9b1Is there room for VCs in a tokenised world?How blockchain is disrupting the startup ecosystem“There are only two ways to make money in business: One is to bundle; the other is to unbundle.” — Jim BarksdaleThe VC industry is one of the few that were not disrupted by the Internet. The opposite is true — levelling the startup playing field gave the VCs access to startups worldwide, increasing the competition among the startups and consolidating the VC position.
What the Internet couldn’t accomplish, the blockchain might. By enabling a direct connection between the startups and small investors who also serve as evangelists and early adopters, the distributed economy has in effect unbundled the VC industry — and the consequences might be revolutionary.
VC 1.0The current startup ecosystem is composed of companies with ideas and VCs that select and fund those ideas. Both work together to create a product or service that can be sold. After a number of years, if the sales go well, the company is sold to the public in an IPO which allows the teams and VCs to make money.
The key elements of the current system are:
- selection that determines which companies receive funding
- coaching and leveraging the VC personal network to increase their chance of success
- funds that allow the company to function until it is profitable
- a liquidity event which allows the investors to recoup their investment, restarts the cycle and enables the public to buy shares in the company
In this system the key role of VCs is to act as arbiters and a bank (or a gatekeeper to the bank). It is a system that promotes centralisation — good VCs grow bigger and small ones find it ever harder to compete. The only way they can compete is by focusing on small investments — seed or pre-seed. That is the reason why it’s easier for startups to get seed funding or get accepted to an accelerator, and why it’s so hard to follow it up with a Series A.
Why crowdfunding startups doesn’t work
With the rise of Kickstarter, it seemed obvious that crowdfunding could be applied to VC investments as well. There are several platforms like Crowdfunder.com that allow a dispersion of investments, making it more approachable to smaller investors. Traditional startup crowdfunding can solve the “funds” part of the equation — but it does not solve the requirement to wait for the investment liquidity. This means that it can never really go mainstream and remains confined to larger investors who can afford to wait. Additionally, while crowdfunding can help a company raise funds, it cannot provide either the coaching expertise or a business network — both crucial elements in a company’s success.
The tokenised company
The hallmark of a true game-changing technology is that nobody can predict the effects it will have on both business and society. The introduction of blockchain and Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency, in 2009 seemed like a nice new esoteric “internet currency” which could enable anonymise payments, often for shady services. However, additional benefits of blockchain technology soon became apparent. Some of the first commercial applications built upon the extremely low transaction costs to create alternatives to traditional money transfers. Later, the benefits of a network without a central arbiter of trust have been investigated — a potential game changer for industries like banking and insurance that depend on this role.
But the true revolution came recently, when companies realised that they could in effect “tokenise” their service or even the company itself and sell it to supporters before actually building the service, bypassing the need for VC funding. The supporters also serve as early adopters and evangelists, partially filling the “VC networking” role. And the nature of the tokens provided the answer to the key missing piece of the puzzle: waiting for liquidity. In a tokenised company model, the “shares” of the company are liquid from the get-go and can be traded immediately.
VCs in a tokenised world
What functions do the VC serve in a tokenised world?
- selection: still required
- liquidity event: immediate
- coaching and networking: still required
- funds: provided by the supporters
The VC of the future is focused on selection and coaching while leveraging the power of crowdfunding. Early adopters become early evangelists, filling the need for networking. The interactive engagement between projects and supporters in effect makes all of them cofounders.
But the true future lies in a distributed global platform that directly connects innovative projects with supporters while enabling experts worldwide to provide necessary support to teams. And by paying those experts in the very tokens the companies issue, the incentives for all the participants are truly aligned.
