The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanThe Butter Thesis
At USV, we talk a lot about our investment thesis. The USV thesis is a set of ideas that has guided our investing over the years. It is a tool we u...
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanFrom Crypto-Native to Crypto-Enabled
I’m not one to make big annual predictions, but one thing that seems likely to me is that 2024 will mark the emergence of mainstream apps powered by ...
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanYou Never Know When You've Had a Good Day
Many years ago, when I had just started working at USV, I remember there was kind of a complicated situation that unfolded in a seemingly bad way, and I'll never forget what Brad said in response. He said:you never know when you've had a good dayI didn't really understand what that meant, so he told me a story that went something like: back around the year 2000 at the height of the dot-com boom, there was a guy who was a senior exec at a successful startup. That person had a falling out with ...
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The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanThe Butter Thesis
At USV, we talk a lot about our investment thesis. The USV thesis is a set of ideas that has guided our investing over the years. It is a tool we u...
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanFrom Crypto-Native to Crypto-Enabled
I’m not one to make big annual predictions, but one thing that seems likely to me is that 2024 will mark the emergence of mainstream apps powered by ...
The Slow Hunch by Nick GrossmanYou Never Know When You've Had a Good Day
Many years ago, when I had just started working at USV, I remember there was kind of a complicated situation that unfolded in a seemingly bad way, and I'll never forget what Brad said in response. He said:you never know when you've had a good dayI didn't really understand what that meant, so he told me a story that went something like: back around the year 2000 at the height of the dot-com boom, there was a guy who was a senior exec at a successful startup. That person had a falling out with ...
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In case you missed it, today Brave raised $36M for the Basic Attention Token. They had allocated 30 days for the token sale, but sold out of 1B BAT in 24 seconds.
The Basic Attention Token (BAT) ICO just raised 30 million dollars in 24 seconds. VC's didn't even have time to put on a sweater vest.
— briantobal (@briantobal) May 31, 2017
Clearly there is a lot of attention on this space right now - it's no secret that there's something going here. In this case, the reason the sale went so quickly is that there was a very small number of very large buyers -- as of right now, the top 100 holders of BAT own 98.8% of the float:
Which raises the question, is this the right way to do things? In the idealized version of an open, public token sale, the idea would be to spread the ownership as much as possible -- since tokens are really meant to be about use rather than simply speculation. I suspect that we will see variations in the model that attempt to correct for this. Nick Tomaino suggests doing something akin to a private sale to large investors in advance of the public pre-sale:
best idea I've heard is from @ljxie: take indications from all, then raise a fixed amount giving % allocations based on those indications.
— Nick Tomaino (@NTmoney) May 31, 2017
While this doesn't completely solve the problem, it does feel like an improvement over the BAT process -- where large investors can participate without crowding out smaller investors and individual users.
In case you missed it, today Brave raised $36M for the Basic Attention Token. They had allocated 30 days for the token sale, but sold out of 1B BAT in 24 seconds.
The Basic Attention Token (BAT) ICO just raised 30 million dollars in 24 seconds. VC's didn't even have time to put on a sweater vest.
— briantobal (@briantobal) May 31, 2017
Clearly there is a lot of attention on this space right now - it's no secret that there's something going here. In this case, the reason the sale went so quickly is that there was a very small number of very large buyers -- as of right now, the top 100 holders of BAT own 98.8% of the float:
Which raises the question, is this the right way to do things? In the idealized version of an open, public token sale, the idea would be to spread the ownership as much as possible -- since tokens are really meant to be about use rather than simply speculation. I suspect that we will see variations in the model that attempt to correct for this. Nick Tomaino suggests doing something akin to a private sale to large investors in advance of the public pre-sale:
best idea I've heard is from @ljxie: take indications from all, then raise a fixed amount giving % allocations based on those indications.
— Nick Tomaino (@NTmoney) May 31, 2017
While this doesn't completely solve the problem, it does feel like an improvement over the BAT process -- where large investors can participate without crowding out smaller investors and individual users.
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