Traditional VC to Crypto VC
There’s nothing traditional about being a venture capital ? Wrong.
The institutionalization was first done during 1940s by Georges Doriot who founded the very first publicly owned Venture Fund: American Research, and Development Corporation (ARDC). Before that the wealthy families like the Rockefeller and the Vanderbilt funded ambitious businesses and startups.
With the advent of the rudimentary computer & internet concepts in late 60s, a new wave of VCs cropped up in the next 2 decades. They invested in the ambitious and imaginably insane visions of Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Marc Andreesen and many others. Sequoia, Greylock, Kleiner Perkins were some of the institutional investors at the forefront of technology and what we know today as Web 2.0. Sequoia was founded with a vision of investing in startups a few mile radius of Menlo Park, CA, USA which slowly expanded to the rest of the country, then India, China, Southeast Asia and going forward.
Today, we see a new wave of technological revolution called the Web 3.0 with pillars of blockchain at their core — privacy (cryptography), decentralization (IPFS & P2P) and new mechanisms for incentivization (game theory & tokenization). The design space is wide open and so are all the opportunities for founders. Web 3.0 applications are non-confirmative to geographies, anti-exclusive, open source and community-driven. Founders building in this space are not just building for the residents of Menlo Park or Singapore & SEA or only Tier 1 cities — they are building their products & Web3.0 primitives for the 68.24M wallets that hodl crypto today in 2021 (and growing).
This was a generational opportunity and one that I did not want to miss! Which is why I joined IOSG Ventures’ Investment & Research team.
IOSG Ventures is a global early stage venture capital firm that focuses on the entire blockchain tech stack: Layer 1, Middleware, DeFi and other Web3.o Applications.
