ICONOMI.performance fund is launched with the first investment
On Friday the ICONOMI.performance fund was launched with the first investment in Golem, a decentralised global market for computing power. While we believe in the business fundamentals of Golem, our focus is on projects that can deliver value to shareholders faster, and our investment was limited to 5,000 ETH. This completes the first of the two milestones ICONOMI promised for Q4 2016.
This first investment came after months of evaluating potential ICOs and talking to almost 20 different teams. During this process we arrived at two conclusions that were worthy of serious consideration. First, we encountered several teams with great ideas and great technical skills, but which were lacking in areas such as financial modelling and business planning. Second, there are no real established standards for the due diligence review/assessment of ICOs.
The investment standards for the ICONOMI.performance fund are set very high to ensure maximum return on investment for our shareholders. However, since we still recognise the potential in some of the projects, we would like to help them realise it.
With this in mind, we have set two additional goals for the ICONOMI.performance fund. First, to establish and determine the guidelines for the development of the ICO. The second is to help ICO projects clarify their business proposition and business plan, and assist them through the process with marketing, communication and other services.
Our recent blog post pointed out the most important criteria for ICO evaluation. We will use this as a foundation to define the evaluation standards and set the foundations for building the best ICO practices possible to benefit our investors, ICO projects and the crowdfunded ecosystem as a whole.
Besides the launch of the ICONOMI.performance fund there are three big pieces of news:
- We are happy to announce that Daniel Zakrisson (Linkedin) is joining as head of investment evaluation for the ICONOMI.performance. He is known to a wider audience as “The Crowdsale Analyst” and will be transitioning into this position over the next couple of months.
- We are also creating a mentoring programme led by Jan Isakovic (LinkedIn / Twitter), to help ICO projects reach their full potential. His role will be to define best practices, lead projects through the funding process and offer full support at all levels of business decision-making.
- With the ICONOMI.PERFORMANCE fund now started, we expect additional 3 or 4 investments before the end of the year. The specific projects the fund invests in will be transparent but will be announced after the conclusion of each ICO to avoid any market speculations.
We believe that the approach we have taken with the ICONOMI.performance fund will not only help the projects and investors, but will also bring benefits to the blockchain ecosystem as a whole.
