Announcing our investment in Celo — a monetary system to create conditions of prosperity for all
Over the past few days, you may have seen news about Celo cross your newsfeed. Today, we are thrilled to share that we were early backers in the company (since January 2018) as it announces it’s most recent $30M raise led by A16z and Polychain. What exactly is Celo? It’s an open and open-sourced crypto-powered […]
Q1 2019 Summary: Portfolio News and Activities
We’re already a full quarter into 2019, and as expected, it’s shaping up to be a busy year. The Version One portfolio is filled with great startups doing incredible things, and here’s a selection of what has been happening (that we can talk about publicly): Company news and product releases: Outreach launched Galaxy, the app […]
Where is the value in tokens?
Crypto / blockchain has always been as much of a business model innovation as a technical innovation… Technical innovation: running a decentralized ledger / platform at scale Business model innovation: issuing tokens to give users / participants in the platform a stake in the project By issuing crypto tokens, platforms gave early users an incentive […]
Investing in hardware and the data layer
Over the past couple of months, we have written about a range of themes that have been interesting to us lately. Through public brainstorming, we have met some inspiring entrepreneurs, been introduced to some cool companies and received some great feedback. All in all, we have been enjoying the process of refining our thesis in […]
The increased risk profile of start-ups
Start-ups, by definition, are risky. But traditionally, start-ups have looked for the least risky position in the value chain. And for many, this is being a platform. Successful platforms build an ecosystem of contributors that create content for the platform. Or, they build a marketplace where sellers decide which products might sell or not. In […]