China may censor YouTube. China may censor Twitter. They won't be able to censor Bitcoin. There's no central authority. There's no one you can go to and say, 'We're going to turn Bitcoin off.'
Humans don't 'need' math-based cryptocurrencies when dealing with other humans. We walk slowly, talk slowly, and buy big things. Credit cards, cash, wires, checks - the world seems fine.
Cryptocurrencies are an emergent property of the Internet - almost a fifth protocol in the Internet suite. If Satoshi Nakomoto did not exist, it would still be necessary to invent them.
Just as the web democratized publishing and development, Bitcoin can democratize building new financial services. Contracts can be entered into, verified, and enforced completely electronically, using any third-party that you care to trust, or by the code itself.
Take a very small amount of money, your throwaway money, treat it as if it's already gone, you've mentally set it on fire, and put it in some distribution of a few truly legit layer 1 blockchains.
If you go to a venture firm, what you're doing is you're buying money from them in exchange for equity. They have a commodity that they're selling and they have to differentiate themselves.
At the end of the day, what makes Silicon Valley work is technology and the outcome of making money. Those two things have to be healthy. It has to matter a lot more than who is the celebrity and who is famous and who goes to the best parties.
We just think it's important that everybody have some technical training and background. Even though not everybody is coding but even our deals team and our designers all have GitHub accounts and they go into the code base.
Our model is very, very different to LinkedIn. We only deal with very small companies. We don't have any support for recruiters. In fact, recruiters are not supposed to be on AngelList Talent. It's a direct market where we connect CEOs and the founders and the head of products with their talent directly.
I don't like having managers.
When the venture industry started, it was enough to just have money and then it was enough to sort of have this big fuzzy brand. But now startups are getting a lot smarter.
Startups often want to control the timing of their financing announcement and prefer not to reveal amounts raised for competitive reasons. If more of the Form D information was confidential rather than public, compliance rates would jump dramatically.
With tech startups, it's all loose-goosie. You raise money as you go, often from friends, family and investors.
Unlike a normal venture fund, we never stop raising capital. We can always absorb new capital on the platform and into the next deal as long as we feel it won't distort the allocation and the pricing.
In an ideal world, you raise a lot of money and then there is a downturn, before you start investing so you get better deals. But it doesn't always happen that way.
All of the marketplaces like Prosper, LendingClub, etc., as they get larger, they flip from being retail capital to institutional capital.
On AngelList, we get 100 new companies created a day. That's an insane flood.
Getting in the middle of financial transactions is a regulatory minefield.
