Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are already trustless - any machine can accept it from any other, securely. They are (nearly) free. They are global - no central bank required, and any machine can speak the language.
For us, just serving the market in the US and the UK, we can barely make the math work on an interesting business. My sense is that our clones and copycats are very manual. If they make it work, then congratulations to them!
One philosophy I have at AngelList is I would rather have someone working on the wrong thing and do it their way and be motivated, than working on the right thing and do it my way and not be motivated.
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.
I think it just helps to be very aware that fundamentally, there are no adults. Everyone is making it up as they go along. You have to find your own path, picking, choosing, taking and discarding as you see fit.
The ledger, the distributed database - it's called a Blockchain - is held in the cloud by all the parties involved. It can't be broken by any of them. It's cryptographically too strong. You would have to compromise the entire network to take over Bitcoin.
All of the marketplaces like Prosper, LendingClub, etc., as they get larger, they flip from being retail capital to institutional capital.
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.
I think long-term, Bitcoin is a currency of the Internet. So, even if humans don't use it, routers will use it. Web browsers will use it. Web servers will use it.
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 mission is to help founders and anyone or anything that helps founders helps us with our mission.
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.
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.