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Giant assumption that Silicon Valley VCs missed out on Bitcoin. YC invested in Coinbase in 2012. Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures invested in 2013

Giant assumption that Silicon Valley VCs missed out on Bitcoin. YC invested in Coinbase in 2012. Andreessen Horowitz and Union Square Ventures invested in 2013. You don't think their partners bought at least a bit of Bitcoin then as well?

dvt 5y ago
> You don't think their partners bought at least a bit of Bitcoin then as well? I have no way of knowing but I'd wager probably not; VCs invest in highly-speculative moonshot ideas all the time. Back then, crypto was mostly naïve zealotry. And these days, it's mostly greed. It seems people forgot BitTorrent circa 1999-2003 -- it's history literally repeating itself.
- tomhoward 5y ago
  Marc Andreessen was publicly speaking of Bitcoin as an important technology in 2014 [1]. He sounded like a true believer then, not a moonshot speculator. I remember Sam Altman (then YC president) tweeting about him and other YC partners trading Bitcoin in about 2014 too. And I heard of Peter Thiel having big Bitcoin investments several years ago. It’s not so true that VC’s “invest in highly-speculative moonshot ideas”. YC does as their business model is to bet on a huge pool to catch the outliers. But traditional VCs have to defend their investments to LPs so have to be more prudent. Any VC investing in Bitcoin companies in 2013 was doing so because they personally believed Bitcoin had huge potential. [1] https://www.econtalk.org/marc-andreessen-on-venture-capital-and-the-digital-future/ https://www.econtalk.org/marc-andreessen-on-venture-capital-...