Reference article: “Andreessen, others, invest in U.S. digital currency fund”
Every day seemingly brings with it an announcement about some new crypto fund launching. Just as 2018 is seeing an influx of the professional entrepreneur class into the blockchain space, the angels and VCs that had been waiting around the edges are now diving in with gusto.
A new fund called Multicoin today announced a slew of new investors totaling some $50m on its way to a $250m overall fund. The fund’s thesis is organized around a 3-4 year liquidity horizon, which is simultaneously a longer horizon view than the sometimes months-only turn around of the swarth of “crypto hedge funds” and still a massively shorter timeline than traditional VC. For the reason these shorter theses work check out this piece “Companies Don’t Have To Be Mature For Economies To Be Robust.”
What’s more interesting, however, is who is investing and how they’re doing it. Multicoin’s investors read like a veritable who’s who of venture capital, but they all investing as individuals. While some firms (like Andreessen Horowitz, whose named partner Marc Andressen is participating in Multicoin as an individual) are shifting focus to crypto, others have investment agreements barring them from the class, which is creating an opening for the some 226 new funds specifically focused in the area.
In his note about why they invested, multi-successful entrepreneur and VC David Sacks (Yammer, PayPal) pointed to the quality of the managing partners thinking, expressed in digital essays, as a major basis for their investment. He’s right on, and I highly recommend reading the full slate of writing on Multicoin.Capital, and taking a minute to think about how awesome it is that quality of thought is a path to capitalization.
The lesson of the last year is that technology eventually disrupts everything, even the risk capital designed to invest in disruption. We’re watching the live creation of a new asset class unfold in front of us.
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