A Conversation About Crypto-currencies and ICOs

Bromberg describes starting web design and marketing projects in high school, then joining Stanford’s Bitcoin Group after taking a practical entrepreneurship class. He left Stanford in 2014 to build Sidewire, a platform for public conversations among political experts. Although the platform attracted about 1,000 prominent contributors, it struggled to bring readers back and shut down in 2017.

Bromberg says he and co-founder Tucker raised a seed round, largely from angels, and found that aligned, supportive investors mattered during both good and difficult periods. Sidewire tried subscriptions and enterprise offerings, but the alternatives did not appear likely to become venture-scale businesses. He links retention challenges to the effort required to read longer discussions and build a news habit.

After deciding in 2014 that the future of cryptocurrencies was too uncertain, Bromberg returned to crypto in 2017 and helped build CoinList with Protocol Labs and AngelList. He describes a token as a scarce digital asset, and compares blockchain infrastructure to the internet: a broad foundation for different applications that need to be evaluated on their own terms. Using Filecoin, he explains a decentralized storage market where customers pay storage providers, providers stake tokens, and verifiers check that files are stored correctly.

Bromberg says token sales made sense for a small number of startups at the time. CoinList had supported five sales after receiving more than 2,500 inquiries, many rejected as scams, frauds, or poor fits; he estimates ICOs had raised about $15 billion in 2018, while warning that the young market lacked reliable diligence data. He argues tokens are most useful when a product depends on parties transacting without trusting a central intermediary, and explains that CoinList handles sale logistics such as compliance and payments.

Bromberg contrasts token holders, who generally have no formal relationship with the issuing company, with equity investors, whose interests are more directly tied to the company. He recommends looking for investor alignment, a constructive working relationship, and useful support, and doing reference checks. In the Q&A, he says token networks are difficult to build and govern, and predicts relatively few blockchains but many tokens as infrastructure develops.