Tag Archives: Fred Wilson
Venture Capitalist Brad Feld On Bitcoin: Likes the Platform, Not the Currency
Brad Feld has been an early stage investor and entrepreneur since 1987. Prior to co-founding Foundry Group, he co-founded Mobius Venture Capital and, prior to that, founded Intensity Ventures. Brad is also a co-founder of TechStars.
His investments include successful exits like Zynga, MakerBot, and AdMeld, as well as hot startups like Fitbit, 3D Robotics, and Moz.
In a blog post on his personal site, Feld shared his current thoughts about Bitcoin. “I think bitcoin is interesting on several levels, including as a real-life experiment with a semi-decentralized currency,” he said.
Feld explained that he has concerns with the concept of Bitcoin as a currency to displace fiat currencies like the dollar, because, he feels, Bitcoin is inherently deflationary and that is “bad” if you were to ask an economist.
On the other hand, Feld was optimistic of Bitcoin as a protocol, albeit only a few years old.
As a software person, I think of this as a platform. A new electronic payment platform that may have significant advantages over most of the existing ones. To get broad adoption, platforms need killer apps. So far, there aren’t killer apps for bitcoin. But there are some possible raw materials for killer apps. Cheaper international payments. Completely anonymous electronic payments. But the great thing about platforms is that it’s often quite hard to predict early on what the killer apps might be. Particularly for the really disruptive ones.
Feld said in the comments to his post that he owns 10 Bitcoin as an experiment.
This public statement by Feld follows other seasoned venture capitalists who are publishing their own thoughts on the currency. Recently, Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures stated that he owned 7.39 Bitcoin, but has purchased 175 over time and given most away.
CC image by Rocky Mountain Joe.
