The Ledger
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Wertz: Crypto Value Will Accrue Primarily at Protocol Level
“A lot of the value will accrue at the protocol level and will be monetized through a token business model, right?”
Wertz: Top Crypto Founders Are Returning to Private Pre-ICO Rounds
“A lot of the smartest entrepreneurs are going back to privately negotiated rounds, at least for the first step.”
Wertz: Most successful crypto projects will combine centralized and decentralized elements
“I actually believe that truth is really in the middle, that centralized platforms are amazing for efficiency. Decentralized platforms are amazing for trust. And I think the most successful project is going to pick the best out of both worlds. And it's not the …”
Wertz: Early-stage marketplaces must almost always focus first on supply
“Ultimately you usually always have to start with supply and kind of getting something onto the platform that key people can buy.”
Wertz: Crypto Technology Maturity Is Currently Equivalent to Internet in 1995
“Technology wise, we feel like it's 95. It's kind of around the emergence of the Netscape browser, which at the time was kind of the first time that, you know, kind of the masses could really use the Internet. And that's really feels we're around that in terms …”
Wertz: Crypto protocol success requires evaluating team execution beyond technical white papers
“I think, first of all, I think it's super important, especially if you can invest at the protocol level to really understand the technical details of a white paper. At the same time, I think to build a successful protocol, build a successful community of devel…”
Wertz: Telegram will probably raise up to $2B in ICO
“They certainly have had a lot of financial interest in the ICO, and will probably raise up to two billion or so.”
Wertz: Native crypto platforms will likely outperform retrofitted platforms
“I think it's going to be generally hard to retrofit in an existing platform, especially an existing platform at the scale of Telegram to crypto. But, you know, jury's out. I personally believe that native crypto projects will most likely be more successful.”
Wertz: VCs require startups to scale to $100M revenue in 5-7 years
“When we look at those opportunities through the lens of a Venture capitalists that needs to make a certain return for their fund and hence kind of has a requirement in, in, in, in, to invest in companies that can scale to, you know, a hundred million dollars i…”
Wertz: On-demand 'Uber for X' startup business models are overhyped
“As much as we're excited about on demand I think it's also a little bit overhyped. At some stage, you know, kind of people said kind of, I'm going to create the Uber for X, for vertical X. So there was a lot of this on demand for here, Uber for X et cetera. I …”
Wertz: Crypto Market Cap ($500B) Lags Far Behind 2000 Dot-Com Peak ($4T)
“When you think Internet bubble kind of burst in March, 2000 at the time, it was about a four trillion dollar market cap. With cryptocurrencies, we're now currently at about five hundred billion.”
Wertz: ICOs Present Global Competition for Venture Capital
“So there's suddenly a tremendous global platform for raising money for startups, and that's certainly a new competition for these VCs.”
Wertz: Most VC LP Agreements Prohibit Direct Token Investments
“A lot of the LP agreements with current funds are not allowing for, you know, actually directly investing in token currencies.”
Wertz: Version One Ventures invested in Polychain and Metastable
“So for example, we invest in Polychain and Metastable.”
Boris Wertz: Version One invested in Coinbase's Series D funding round
“So he invested in Coinbase late last year. And you know, as you know, this was a series D, so it's a little bit later than we usually invest in, but we really thought that Coinbase can be one of these iconic companies of the crypto ages, and you know, we're in…”
Wertz: Transactional buyer-seller relationships make marketplaces easier to scale
“And it's much easier to build up a big marketplace if you have A transactional relationship in, in between buyers and sellers.”
Wertz: Marketplace scale is driven primarily by power sellers, not hobbyists
“You see in almost every marketplace that they usually start out on the supply side with very small sellers, hobby sellers, or people that only put a little bit of their inventory onto the marketplace. Over time, like, most of the development and the scale of t…”
Wertz: Version One went seven months without making an investment in 2016
“Second half of 2016, I had not done an investment for seven months for version one.”
Wertz: Andreessen Horowitz operates internally like an agile startup
“Andreessen Horowitz is kind of a daily example of how they try out things, how they innovate, how they come up with new ideas, quickly test them. So it's amazing to see how it's really being run like a startup that is continuously trying to develop new ideas a…”
Version One Ventures invests from a $35M second early-stage fund
“Fund one was an eighty million dollar fund, and currently we're investing out of our second fund which is a thirty-five million dollar early stage fund.”
Wertz: Content strategy forces VC learning and efficiently educates founders
“You know, when we put out content either in the form of blog posts or kind of a book like that, we're always thinking about three things. The first one is by writing content and thinking through a specific question that we have in our head. We learn a lot. And…”
Wertz: Uber seeded supply by paying idle drivers in new cities
“Uber has done a very good job whenever they launch a city to initially pay their drivers to kind of drive around idle just to have inventory and be quick to pick up the next passenger once there's an order coming in.”
Wertz: Gross merchandise sales and take rate define marketplace potential
“I think gross merchandise sales and take rate. I mean, gross merchandise sales being kind of the top line kind of what is the volume you're creating for your marketplace and then take rate is what do you take out of that? I mean, what are your revenues relativ…”