How times have changed in twenty years…
It was 20 years ago next month that we started JustBooks, creating a marketplace that connected buyers and sellers of used, rare, and out-of-print books. We initially launched in Germany before expanding into the UK and France, and then sold the company to our North American competitor AbeBooks in 2001. My co-founder Hannes Blum and […]
Announcing our investment in Guesser, the easiest way to engage with prediction markets
We are extremely excited to announce our investment in Guesser, the easiest way to engage with Augur prediction markets. Among all the crypto opportunities, we are most excited about crypto native opportunities – and prediction markets are clearly native. We spent some time with Augur right after it launched (you can read about that initial […]
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 […]
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 […]
Announcing our investment in Lolli – Bitcoin for everyone!
When Lolli launched in August, co-founder Alex Adelman wrote, “Over 60% of Americans have heard of bitcoin, but very few actually own any.” For all of us in the tech bubble, this is a good reminder of the relative inaccessibility of cryptocurrency. Many of us have Coinbase accounts (a V1 portfolio company) and don’t think twice […]