Insight
Bromberg: In Well-Built Token Networks, No Value Accrues to the Company
“If the network's built well, we would argue that no value actually accrues to the company itself. The purpose of the token is to remove the centralized party. And so the company itself, the LLC or the corporation shouldn't get transaction fees. They shouldn't …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Bromberg: Massive Number of Token Companies Will Fail Running Out of Money
“The reality of the situation is that a massive number of token companies are going to crash and burn because they run out of money and their network will never really reach its potential.”
Prediction Held up
Bromberg: Regulators Will Classify Almost All Token Sales as Securities
“I think that what will happen is that the regulators are going to say, these are almost all securities. You can't just sell these tokens to anyone on the public markets.”
Insight
Bromberg: The venture market consistently trends toward faster liquidity
“The arc of the market bends towards liquidity. And we'll see this over time starting early and going all the way to now that liquidity and faster liquidity, ah, is something the market's always pushing towards.”
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Bromberg: Startup liquidity timelines will revert to moving faster again
“Certainly in the last few years we've seen, ah, the speed to liquidity go down, ah, we think that's gonna revert back and we're gonna see that, that come faster again.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Bromberg: Early VC required founders to self-fund hundreds of thousands
“We saw that for basically the first 40 years of venture, you had to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars of your own money or scrounge it up from someone. Before a venture fund would invest in you.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Bromberg: ICO Industry May Need JOBS Act-Style Safe Harbor Legislation
“In the same way we saw the Jobs Act in 2012, I wouldn't be surprised if the ICO industry needs something similar. If there's a non-exemptive safe harbor or some legislation around, ah, codifying some of the rules and guidelines around ICO, ICO fundraising.”
Assertion Contradicted
Bromberg: ICOs raise $10M to $200M via SAFTs
“Token fundraising ICOs, mostly raised on what are called SAFTS, Simple Agreements for Future Tokens... Mostly raised from hedge funds, venture funds, institutions, and again, angels putting money into these ICOs. But they're raising 10 to two hundred million d…”
Insight
Bromberg: A token is an incentive layer on a network
“A token's an incentive layer on top of a network... We can layer markets on these decentralized networks.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Bromberg: Early ICO rounds will increasingly resemble traditional seed funding
“I think we'll see more bifurcation between really early ICO rounds and later ICO rounds, where in the early rounds it'll look a lot more like traditional seed funding than it does today.”
Assertion Supported
Bromberg: European ICOs have raised as much capital as US ICOs
“Right now, it is a very global phenomenon, so about as much money has been raised by ICOs based in Europe as based in the United States”
Prediction Held up
Bromberg: Crypto and Venture Capital Will See Much More Lobbying
“I think, especially given the attention given to regulation in the space, we will see way more lobbying happening in crypto and in venture capital over the coming years.”
Opinion
Bromberg: ICOs Are Similar to Seed Rounds, Not IPOs
“I don't think I, ICOs are anything like IPOs. I think it's a really actually unfortunate naming convention that we have called them the same thing. They're much more similar to seed fundraising.”
Assertion Supported
Bromberg: ARDC returned 500x on DEC over 11 years
“ARDC really had what we consider to be the first venture win. So they invested in Digital Equipment Corporation and returned about 500 X in 11 years there.”
Assertion Supported
Bromberg: CRV launched at $5M and Kleiner Perkins at $7M in the 1970s
“In 1970, CRV was a five million dollar fund, and KP was a seven million dollar fund. Ah, those are smaller than most investments those funds make today in raw dollars, but that was the entire fund size at that point in the 19 seventies.”
Assertion Partly supported
Bromberg: VC had $12B AUM in 1996, but saw $120B invested in 2000
“In 1996, the venture industry as a whole had an AUM of about twelve billion dollars.
In the calendar year 2000, LPs put a hundred and twenty billion dollars into venture.”
Assertion Partly supported
Bromberg: Dot-com era VC funds commanded 30% to 40% carried interest
“Carry changed.
Funds were getting 30, sometimes even 40% carry on these deals, because there was liquid so quickly, and people couldn't put enough money into the space”
Assertion Supported
Bromberg: Between 2002 and 2009, VC returned just $220B on $205B invested
“2002 to 2009, it was about two hundred and five billion invested in venture and about two hundred and twenty billion returned”
Assertion Partly supported
Bromberg: Early-stage deals historically used only equity before convertible notes
“Historically, all of these deals had been done with just equity, straight equity, selling preferred stock.”
Assertion Contradicted
Bromberg: Startup seed rounds crested $1M for the first time around 2010
“In 2010 after the recession more angels, more seed funds investing smaller and smaller amounts. At the same time, we saw seed rounds crest a million dollars for the first time”
Assertion Supported
Bromberg: 1980s VC funds exploded from a few dozen to over 650
“There were a few
Dozen funds in the early eighties.
There were more than 650 at the end of the eighties.”
