Blockchain Capital – Venture Capital in the Blockchain Industry
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Welcome to Almost Here, Around the Corner Future Technology Podcast with Richard Jacobs. Future technologies, ways to transform our lives for better or worse, are the focus of this podcast. Almost Here means these technologies are now here and starting to be used. We're just around the corner, from Bitcoin to artificial intelligence, 3D printing, blockchain, virtual reality, and more. Hi, this is Richard Jacobs with Future Tech Podcast.

almost here, around the corner technology. And I'm speaking with Bart Stevens, co-founder of Blockchain.Capital. Bart, how are you doing? I'm well today. I want to thank you, Richard, for the opportunity to speak on the Future Tech Podcast today. Yeah, it's great to have you. So, you know, sometimes I mess up these introductions. It's always better if the interviewee gives them. So would you tell folks what Blockchain.Capital does today?

Sure. So Blockchain Capital is about a four-and-a-half-year-old firm. We're a San Francisco and Los Angeles-based venture capital firm that is focused on one sector, and that's what we call the blockchain technology sector. Blockchain is the kind of infrastructure that enables the Bitcoin network –

But part of our investment thesis is we think the blockchain is an incredibly powerful technology. It's the most secure, decentralized database in the world. And we think it will be used for all sorts of things besides just Bitcoin transactions. We are big believers in Bitcoin, but we think that the story of the blockchain, which allows for the secure exchange of value…

is as important of an invention in technology as the internet. I like to say that the internet allows for the secure and instantaneous exchange of data, and the blockchain allows for the secure and instantaneous exchange of value or assets. So Bitcoin is the proof of concept, if you will, but there are approximately 80 trials worldwide going on that

are leveraging blockchain technology for the trading and settlement of traditional assets like stocks or bonds, currencies or commodities. And a lot of our investment focus is looking at how the blockchain can be used in other industries as well past financial services. So we've made investments in blockchain healthcare companies, blockchain identity companies, companies that are using the blockchain for international trade and logistics.

It's often thought of as a kind of fintech technology, but we actually believe that it has incredible, robust applications in all sorts of industries with financial services really just being the first.

Yeah, that's great. I've spoken to some of the companies that are in these different spaces, gem.co with healthcare, you know, certainly plenty of Bitcoin companies, cryptocurrencies, and then, you know, there's smart contracts where people are trying to leverage blockchains for money.

They've changed in all kinds of value. It's a fascinating industry, I've got to tell you. A lot of people were, in the early days of the industry, were very focused on Bitcoin, which is a digital currency. Some people think of it as a digital asset. Some people think of it as a peer-to-peer payment system. And the truth is, it's all of those things. At Blockchain Capital, we like to think of it as an ultra-secure distributed database.

that is free to use and one way to think of it is that it is essentially the largest database the world has ever seen. It's much larger than the top 500 supercomputers in the world combined in terms of the computational resources that are dedicated to securing and processing transactions on the network.

And so we really think it's a fascinating piece of technology. The hardware is essentially crowdsourced and available for free. So-called Bitcoin miners provide the computational resources for free. The software is also free. It's a large open-source software project. And in the history of our investing, both in public and private markets,

We found that better, faster, cheaper usually wins. We're passionate believers that blockchain technology offers a better, faster, cheaper way to move assets around the world in between institutions and individuals. It's in the early days of the industry. We're one of the few firms that's dedicated exclusively to investing in small companies and helping them grow into hopefully very large companies.

Yeah, I see Bitcoin and blockchain diverging. Bitcoin, yes, of course it uses a blockchain, but that's one use case of it. And then blockchain itself, like you mentioned, is proliferating into all kinds of industries. And I think it's a good thing because Bitcoin is recovering from its Silk Road black eye from years ago. It's gaining traction. Then blockchain, I think

I think it's good it has its own identity because it can really go into all kinds of areas. Yeah, I think that's an astute observation. I mean, I like to say that Bitcoin and the Bitcoin blockchain are inextricably linked, but they're not limited. And by that, I mean, you know, the Bitcoin network is functioning incredibly well.

and the blockchain infrastructure that enables it is this robust kind of infrastructure layer. But when I say it's not limited to Bitcoin, we're seeing all sorts of large financial incumbents is the term that we use, but large financial institutions are taking a look at this technology

technology some people call it distributed ledger technology uh... for the trading and settlement of traditional assets uh... everyone's familiar with the stock market in the bond market uh... but there's also a very large markets that are really kind of the the back office is stuck in the sixties and and these are often

credit derivatives or syndicated loans or leveraged loans. These are massive markets. Hundreds of billions of dollars are traded in these things. And oftentimes, the trading and settlement takes two weeks or 30 days for these instruments to settle. And when you have a reduced settlement time like that, it adds to uncertainty and financial firms need to put up collateral during that time. So anything that speeds the settlement up

of a traditional asset offers incredible cost savings for financial institutions and also reduces systemic risk in the system. So regulators have really come around to seeing this technology as their friend, not their foe. To your point, in the early days of Bitcoin, there was a lot of concern that it was being used for illegal activity.

And so Bitcoin did kind of suffer a black eye is the term that you use. But we've really moved away from that. The largest users of Bitcoin are no longer criminals. The Silk Road is obviously shut down. It's actually the large banks and financial institutions are using it the most now. So even though it's

It's often common that bleeding edge technologies are misappropriated by criminal activity in the early days, but in the case of Bitcoin and blockchain, it's essentially gone mainstream at this point, and most of the players in the ecosystem are working with large banks, including most of the companies in our portfolio.

I know that you, as a VC, want to get in on obviously the most exciting and best deals, but what can you comment on? What business models have you seen that are really interesting that the public may start seeing in 2017, ones you can talk about?

Sure. So we've got 42 companies in the blockchain capital portfolio. So we are a very active investor. We're one of the few firms that's focused exclusively on this rapidly developing industry. And I really think that gives us an edge. We have three full-time partners. My partners at Blockchain Capital are Brock Pierce. He's also chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation and a noted investor.

kind of keynote speaker and thought leader in this space. The third partner here is my brother, Brad Stevens. Brad is a former hedge fund manager. He worked at Fidelity Ventures, and Brad and I ran a hedge fund for 10 years together. I actually started my career in fintech at E-Trade. So we have three full-time investment professionals and another large advisory group that help us to find the most cutting-edge companies.

A lot of our companies are well-known in the consumer space. Coinbase is a portfolio company of ours. It's the largest Bitcoin exchange and wallet company, and they're doing incredibly well. Chain would be another one. Chain's got a great group of investors and is helping large financial institutions leverage blockchain technology to address new markets, to reduce costs.

You mentioned GEM earlier, a very exciting LA-based company that is looking at healthcare applications. And a lot of our investment activity is focused on new areas of blockchain technology adoption. We're in the process of financing a very exciting company called Wave. Wave uses blockchain technology to replace the bill of lading in international trade and shipping and logistics. The bill of lading is a 500-plus-year-old piece of financial technology where you have a physical piece of paper that

gives you ownership of, say, a cargo container. And if you can put that on the blockchain, you can very much facilitate international trade and trade finance. So we're seeing a really robust startup ecosystem where people from all sorts of industries are experimenting with blockchain technology to see if they can reduce costs and grow their markets and essentially create new businesses based on this technology.

free to use, ultra secure, distributed database technology. Okay. Any other interesting or unusual companies? Maybe ones that you decided not to fund but that you think may have a good chance of succeeding?

There's lots of companies that are in their early stages that are taking a look at borrowing certain aspects of blockchain technology. They might not use the Bitcoin blockchain. We're kind of blockchain agnostic. Most of our investment activity to date has been focused in the Bitcoin ecosystem. But about a year ago, we actually led the first venture capital investment into an Ethereum startup called ETHCORP.

ETHCOR is led by Dr. Gavin Wood, who's the Chief Technology Officer of Ethereum. We led that financing with Fenbushi, a Chinese-based blockchain venture capital firm that has Vitalik as a partner. Vitalik is the creator of Ethereum.

We take kind of an agnostic approach to this technology. We acknowledge that it's in the early days, and part of our investment strategy is to make lots of small bets. And the strategy there, to me, reminds me of the Internet in the mid-'90s. If you were a venture capitalist in the mid-'90s looking at Internet startups, you probably would have been –

better served to make lots of investments. If you picked just one search engine investment in, say, 1995, you might have invested in InfoSeek or Lycos, search engines that don't exist today. But conversely, if you made, say, 20 investments in the Internet, you very likely would have picked up Amazon or eBay or E-Trade or Yahoo, some of the

the first four or five IPOs in the internet. So we've taken a thoughtful and diversified approach to investing in startups in the ecosystem. And most of our investment activities focused at the very earliest stage. So we'll look at companies if it's just two or three engineers in the PowerPoint presentation. But because we're sector focused, we do invest kind of up and down the capital stack and we're multi-round. So by that, I mean, we'll do seed round, A round, B round, et cetera. Interesting. Okay.

The fact that a lot of these companies, you know, they want to be decentralized organizations where no one's in charge. How does that reconcile with your ability to invest in a company? You know, if it wants to be a decentralized thing where there's no one that's in charge, how do you invest in them? That's a great question. And there's a certain...

There's a certain political or philosophical ethos that is present within especially the Bitcoin ecosystem where it is this notion of a decentralized or semi-autonomous type project where the software is open source, as I mentioned earlier. The hardware is available for free. It's provided by Bitcoin miners that process transactions and transactions.

and secure the network and and that's a really exciting concept uh... uh... the internet is essentially the same way it is it is free to use and owned by nobody it's transnational and super sovereign but also presents some governance challenges uh... there's been a lot written in the kind of bitcoin trade press about uh...

some of the diverse opinions on how to scale the network and how best to secure the network. And this is often described as the block size debate. The block size debate is about how you scale the network from a technical point of view, but baked into that debate is really a governance debate, which is

Who owns this? And the answer is a little bit unclear. Some people would say it's the operating companies, it's the Coinbases of the world or the gems of the world or chains. Other people would say it's the Bitcoin miners. They actually get to vote in terms of changes to the protocol. And other people would point to the core developers, the engineers that really have been incredibly generous in investing

and their contribution of code and their intellectual capital, if you will, to the ecosystem. So many of the companies that we invest in kind of benefit from the hard work and development that's been done today, primarily by what's called Bitcoin Core.

But it is an ever-moving target. And what we try to do is invest in companies with a large total available market and that have some sort of engineering advantage or a new business model that sits on top of all this free-to-use hardware and software.

But it is a challenging industry. There's also an ever-changing regulatory environment. So we spend a lot of time speaking to regulators and letting them know that this technology is essentially their friend. It's not the foe. And I have to say that regulators have really come around to it. I've given talks at the Federal Reserve, both in New York and San Francisco, and they really have come to see this technology as decreasing systemic risk and

and better lubricating the global financial system, for lack of a better term. So there are some challenges from a governance point of view, but we have a high degree of conviction that these will be worked out over time. And if they're not, a lot of the ideas of the Bitcoin blockchain can be adopted by other competing technologies. Ethereum would be an example. So when you invest in a blockchain-based company, what kind of a stake do you take?

I mean, I don't know if equity works, so do you take token, you know, X number of tokens or what do you guys do? Yeah, that's another good question. So, you know, the fund invests in the equity of startups. And so we're usually investing somewhere around $500,000, usually at the seed stage, sometimes at the A round. Our venture firm and the various funds that we manage tend to be, we manage money for

family offices and high net worth individuals. We actually have 25 Bitcoin CEOs who are our clients who have entrusted their capital to us because they want a diversified exposure. We also have done something pretty interesting is we have an angel-less syndicate, um,

Many of your listeners might be familiar with AngelList, but AngelList is a platform that allows smaller investors to kind of get in on the action on top-tier venture capital deals. So even though our flagship fund we're investing out of our second fund now might invest, say, $300,000 into the seed round of an exciting blockchain technology company, we also allow the AngelList to invest side-by-side, the AngelList syndicate, with the funds. So that's

That allows smaller investors or retail investors access to venture capital and Silicon Valley deal flow that previously they might not have ever been able to see. So we really believe that part of the ethos of this system is kind of democratizing the world and providing financial services to those people on a global basis that don't have access to it. And we can,

We think it's important to walk the walk, so to speak. And so our AngelList Syndicate is an opportunity for people that care about this technology and want to have some exposure to invest alongside of our venture fund. And so we think that's a pretty exciting opportunity and another piece of disruptive technology.

So if I'm an accredited investor, I can go on AngelList and I can invest in blockchain-related businesses through AngelList? You can. So you go to AngelList.co and you would search on blockchain capital and you fill out a very short and easy-to-use questionnaire.

and you can kind of follow blockchain capital's investment. And there's no financial obligation. You can sign up to follow blockchain capital, and you can invest if you'd like. There's no financial obligation, and you can kind of cherry-pick the deals that our fund invests in. So we have lots of people that take a look at deal flow from blockchain capital, and you can invest as little as $1,000.

And so it's an exciting way to kind of bring high-quality venture capital investment opportunities to a much larger population that historically hasn't had access to these types of investment opportunities. And so we're really a big fan of the AngelList platform. Interesting. Do you see –

Any ancillary products coming from blockchain applications, you know, in the financial world, let's say options, funds that trade in cryptocurrencies or Bitcoin. Yes.

Those are good questions. We're taking a really hard look at the emerging token market. There's been some white papers that have been released by Coinbase. There's another one from ConsenSys, which is kind of an Ethereum ecosystem incubator or accelerator. And a lot of the newer companies are taking a look at

essentially disrupting the venture capital industry itself by doing what is called initial coin offerings. And that basically is a crowd sale of sorts where investors don't own traditional equity in a startup, but rather tokens. And often these tokens are

allow you to it's kind of an equity-like participation but these tokens often are used in the network itself an example might be auger which is a decentralized prediction market we have an entrepreneur in residence here at the firm named jeremy gardner who's one of the auger co-founders and auger is a ethereum based um you know kind of decentralized system and it has tokens called reps so we're

We're very interested in that market. It is an interesting and early opportunity for a token-based investment into a given network, if you will. The caution there is the SEC and FINRA and some of the traditional security regulators have kind of yet to –

adjudicate on whether these types of token offerings are securities or are they more like a use or an application token. And so there is some uncertainty around token offerings or so-called initial coin offerings. And so most of traditional venture capitalists are staying away from that. We actually think it's an exciting opportunity. And our next fund, our third fund, will have the ability to own these tokens directly in the fund, not just equity and startups.

What would be the hesitation on owning tokens and initial coin offering? What do people worry about there? There's kind of hesitation from traditional investors on two fronts. One is the token market is very new. And so anytime you have a novel invention like an initial coin offering, there's a limited ability to look into the future.

There's also some concerns from traditional investors, not really on our part, that the regulators will look at these closer to like an initial public offering. And a lot of the regulators, they have a dual mandate of protecting the system but also protecting consumers. And so –

I mean, our talks with regulators, there are some concern on the part of regulators that are retail investors gonna be properly protected? The SEC and FINRA and other regulatory agencies really wanna make sure that retail investors in particular

aren't having their money taken from them. And so I think another, an extra level of scrutiny is warranted just due to the brand new aspect of an initial coin offering and also the fact that the regulators haven't fully weighed in on are these things securities or not, or are they use tokens and won't be subject to the regulatory jurisdictions of say an initial public offering that you would see a traditional equity IPO.

Yeah, and it sounds like initial coin offerings are similar to IPOs. There's tremendous volatility, and I'm sure that regulators don't want unsophisticated investors involved.

being able to participate immediately you know it looks very similar initially to what i'm seeing yeah i think there are some similarities i think there's also um some important differences and and the truth is the rules just really haven't been written yet so we're way out there on the frontier but it also makes it an incredibly exciting kind of operating environment as a venture capitalist and as an entrepreneur you know at the at the end of the day our our job is to help our small companies grow into big companies and if

A given company believes that its best opportunity to grow their business and to properly capitalize that business is an ICO. In certain circumstances, we would support that. In other circumstances, it might be more appropriate for a traditional financing. But I can tell you it's never boring in this industry. We're blessed with absolutely fantastic

fantastic entrepreneurs that have been drawn to this new world of distributed and decentralized applications. And the quality of entrepreneurs and the quality of companies that come through our offices here in San Francisco is truly amazing. So it's fun to be out on the frontier and helping entrepreneurs grow their business in hopefully exciting ways.

Do you guys invest in companies outside of the US? We do. We're an investor in BTCC, which is one of the largest exchanges in China. We're an investor in a company in Africa. We've got a company in Spain. We've got a company in Israel.

What's interesting about Bitcoin and blockchain technology is it's a global phenomenon. It crosses borders and sovereign nations. And so one of the advantages of being a sector-specific fund is we've got a laser focus, and that focus is global. So we spend a lot of time on airplanes, speaking at conferences and visiting companies around the world. I would say most of the startup activity is clustered around large technology and financial centers. So

Probably the majority of our companies are in the Bay Area. We have a handful of companies in New York, which makes sense with large financial centers. There's several in London and startups around the world, really. So even though most of them are based in Silicon Valley, where we're based,

We do live globally, and we think there's lots of opportunity in emerging markets in particular, especially with Bitcoin and kind of consumer applications of blockchain technology. All of us or all of your listeners that are here in the United States, we all have Apple Pay and PayPal and credit cards in our pockets that work pretty well.

But there are 3.5 billion consumers in the world that have a cell phone in their pocket but don't have access to traditional financial services. And by that, I mean there's no Schwab accounts in Southeast Asia or there's low credit card penetration in the Philippines. And so we really see blockchain technology as being able to put a bank in your pocket essentially with these smartphones. And so in developing economies in Africa and Latin America and Southeast Asia and India…

There's really an opportunity for consumer-facing financial services companies that are based on blockchain technology to essentially leapfrog a lot of the infrastructure that's here in the States. And the analogy we like to use is really a telecom analogy. Here in the States, most people over the last 20 years, they had landline telephones and everyone, of course, has moved to mobile telephony.

But if you look at developing economies, they never have landlines. They basically jumped right to 4G smartphones with ultra-fast broadband connections, and we think that's an appropriate analogy for financial services. So if you're in India or if you're in China or if you're in Argentina or Venezuela or Africa, you have the opportunity to basically have bleeding-edge technology.

financial services where you can save and lend and borrow right there on your smartphone. So we do think that there is a huge opportunity to address the so-called unbanked population, the three and a half billion people in the world that don't have financial services but do have a cell phone in their pocket. And so we've seen a lot of enterprise activity based on blockchain technology in the U.S., but we're also really excited about consumer applications of this technology in developing economies.

Okay. Because you see so many companies and startups in the blockchain and Bitcoin space, you have a very unique and wide perspective. What do you think people are going to see in 2017? What's new that's coming? Maybe that's unexpected that you know about, other people don't.

Sure. So we break the market down into kind of the enterprise market, which is really kind of the blockchain market, so using the blockchain for the trading and settlement of traditional assets, and then the kind of consumer market. And last year, in 2016, we saw a tremendous amount of activity based in the U.S. on the enterprise market. So again, this is companies that are using blockchain technology for the trading and settlement of traditional securities or looking at how do you move money from one country to another

without having to pay the high fixed costs associated with traditional money movements. So that's interchange fees or wire or kind of the money grams and Western unions of the world are really expensive if you're a consumer or if you're an enterprise. And so a lot of those kind of deals were signed over the last two years. They're being implemented now. So again,

The jury's still out on how this will work, and we'll get some early feedback from these trials over the course of this coming year. Call it one to two years. But Bitcoin also had a great year last year. Bitcoin had kind of a three-and-a-half-year bear market where people started focusing on the underlying enabling technology, the blockchain. That's good. But Bitcoin had a pretty strong resurgence into the end of the year, as many of your listeners are aware.

are likely aware you know that the stock market the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 13 percent last year and Bitcoin was up 143 percent last year so Bitcoin has had a strong resurgence it still does have a bit of volatility it's down a bit this year we try to not focus on the day-to-day price movements of Bitcoin but rather the adoption of the underlying technology and we see again I think we're gonna see some exciting consumer applications in developing economies in China and India

And we're also seeing a lot of activity in other industries, as we talked about briefly earlier. One of our companies, Tyrion, has created kind of a proof engine that you can think of it almost like a digital notary, where Tyrion is a very robust API, and you can kind of use the Bitcoin blockchain to digitally timestamp something. So you could prove with a mathematical certainty that

A given filing, let's say a regulatory filing happened, and it's timestamped on the Bitcoin blockchain. And so when you think about audits for large publicly traded companies, we see applications for – Kyrian could help prove that a given document was opened or a certification was –

is up to date and current or a data set. If you want to think of clinical trials in healthcare, it really hasn't been modified. One of the great kind of underappreciated aspects of the blockchain is its immutability. When you hash something to the blockchain, you can prove that something hasn't been altered.

And so if you think about a clinical trial for a biotech company, the FDA really wants to make sure that the data set associated with a given drug going through a clinical trial hasn't been altered by the clinical investigators that are seeing if this – a given drug is going to hurt or help a patient. So even though a lot of the startup activity and a lot of the venture capital activity has been focused on financial services…

We're kind of leading the way in looking at how this technology has applications in healthcare and government services and identity, digital notary services, provenance, proof of custody, chain of custody. These types of applications are a little bit farther behind some of the financial services applications, but we're seeing a bunch of interesting startups that are looking at other industries besides financial services, and I suspect our investment activity

in the coming year will be increasingly focused on kind of non-financial services use cases. There's been quite a bit of investment activity in financial services, and so we see lots of opportunity looking at other industries.

Any showstoppers that you see here on the horizon potentially for Bitcoin and or blockchain? Yeah, no, that's a good question. For us, we see this technology as here to stay. We think it's not going to be uninvented. I spend a lot of time talking to executives at financial firms, and they often call us or they want to come by our office, and essentially what they want to know is,

is this technology a opportunity or is it a threat? And what I like to tell them is it's both. You know, I say that number one, this technology is here to stay. It's not going to go away. It's very robust. It's one of the largest computer science experiments that's ever been conducted

As I mentioned earlier, it's hard to describe how large and powerful this network is. But with respect to financial incumbents, what we tell them is it probably makes sense for you to invest in some of these companies or trial out this technology to see if it can help you grow your business or create a defensible advantage to your competitors because if you're a bank or a stock exchange,

and you decide to ignore this technology and your competitor embraces it, it's quite possible that in five to ten years,

you find yourself at a competitive disadvantage. So that's why we've seen so many banks and financial institutions, insurance companies, stock exchanges, etc., that are trying out this technology. And that's a very rational point of view for them. And so that's why we're seeing a lot of these proof-of-concept trials that will be unfolding over the next 12 to 18 months. Okay, very good. And then the last couple of questions. So

If someone has a startup and they want to come to a VC company like yours for funding, what do you want to see from a startup that would tell you, yep, this is a good possibility that maybe we should invest in or you guys need to do some work before you ask for money?

Sure. So that's a good question, and I'd encourage any entrepreneurs that have an idea for a Bitcoin or a blockchain startup to go to our website, which is www.blockchain.capital or blockchaincapital.com. Both of them work, and you can submit an email on the site or a PowerPoint presentation. And what we look for really is strength in the founding team.

At the end of the day, we're an investor in people, people and ideas. And so we like to see strong engineering teams with some sort of track record of success. So oftentimes we see a founding team that are leaving PayPal or Stripe or Goldman Sachs or Google. And what we found is entrepreneurs that have a track record of success

that's in their past, that's often an indicator that they'll be successful in the future. So first and foremost, we invest in talented teams. And usually these teams are kind of engineering focused. And as the product or service is developed, they eventually add on product developers and product managers and eventually marketing and salespeople.

But it's usually kind of an engineering-based team, and we have a whole advisory board of CTOs and experts in this technology that help us to vet the code or the given product and service. We also like to see entrepreneurs addressing a new market or applying this technology to an existing market where you might be able to reach a new jurisdiction or address a new set of customers.

These are all important kind of decision criteria for us. And we also do a lot of reference checking on our entrepreneurs to make sure that they are quality individuals that will be hardworking. We have kind of two groups of customers, so to speak. Our job is to help our portfolio companies grow, but we also manage money for other people, for high net worth individuals and retail investors and investors.

our financial objective is to provide a return. So we hope our companies can grow and mature and eventually go public or get sold to larger companies. And so that is our mandate, to help our companies grow and to make money for our own clients. Okay, very good. Anything I should have asked you or that I missed that you want to talk about?

No, your questions have been great. As I mentioned earlier, it's an incredibly exciting time to invest in these companies. It's a very large market opportunity. When you look at financial services alone, it's kind of the largest market in the world. When you talk about applications of blockchain technology and healthcare, that's probably the second largest market in the world. So we're talking about

absolutely gargantuan markets and this technology is incredibly disruptive. So these are the types of things that venture capitals look for. My brother and I ran a hedge fund for 10 years investing in Silicon Valley startups and we looked for essentially the same things. And we always told ourselves that when we saw the birth of a new industry that if we ever thought was as large or as exciting as the internet, we'd stop what we were doing and focus exclusively

on that and that's exactly what we did four years ago when we first discovered Bitcoin and we bought a lot of Bitcoin and we were Bitcoin miners and we started investing in Bitcoin companies and our investment thesis evolved into focusing on a much bigger story which is blockchain technology which again is multi-industry so I'd encourage any entrepreneurs out there to come find us either in San Francisco or on the web and I'd encourage your listeners to keep an eye on this you know Bitcoin is

often misunderstood and misreported in the press. But if you really dig in, I think most of your listeners would appreciate that this is a powerful technology that's here to stay and holds the opportunity to disrupt not just financial services, but other industries across the board. So again, we love our jobs here. We love working with passionate entrepreneurs that are trying to change the world and break things and create new markets and new services.

Well, great. I'm talking with Bart Stevens of Blockchain Capital. Bart, thank you so much for doing the interview. I really appreciate it. Richard, I appreciate the opportunity, and thank you so much for having me on your podcast. You have been listening to Almost Here, around the corner future technology podcast with Richard Jacobs. Subscribe to this podcast, both to review...

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