Interview with Featured Pledgecamp Advisor: Keith Teare, Founding Shareholder at TechCrunch
Pledgecamp has a number of notable advisors who have helped scale organizations across the media, software, and blockchain markets. Here is our introduction and testimonial video of the Pledgecamp advisor, Keith Teare, Founding Shareholder of TechCrunch, Executive Chairman of Accelerated Development Ventures, and serial tech entrepreneur.
For me, as a venture capitalist, there are really three things I care about ever in any company. The team is the first one and it isn’t really to do with the narrow version of what I care about might be honesty, integrity, vision, passion, but there’s a there’s a broader requirement of the team when you’re investing. And that is, is it possible these people can describe and bring to life a vision of something that doesn’t currently exist? With this team I’m seeing first we have a track record in execution, as they’ve done it before. It’s a very young team by the way, so that’s saying something. Secondly, their vision is a huge vision to build a global crowdfunding platform that is bigger than any that has so far existed. By the way, this team was not born in the United States but is thinking global. That itself is quite rare. I work a lot in the UK and it’s rare to meet UK entrepreneurs who think global because they’re trained to think local, to be limited, to be realistic if you like.
So, what I look for in a team is ‘please don’t be realistic’, but ‘please be able to execute a big idea’ and that’s what I see here. Any ICO better be symbolically representing a body of work. If an ICO says, ‘we have this token, this token doesn’t actually represent a body of work’, the token is probably valueless. So a token number one, a token must be put in place to capture the value from some human effort. Crowdfunding and these products being made through crowdfunding is a massive body of work and has value. What you choose to store that value in is a variable. It could be a dollar or it could be a token. If it’s a token and everybody trusts it, it’s gonna be very stable, solid and represent the underlying value. When people do that, they are, if you like, owning a part of human effort. Blockchain and crypto it feels to me are part of a new global infrastructure. The internet was the first part of it. Smartphones were the second part of it. It feels that blockchain and crypto is the final part of it, which create a new human race that is not encumbered by national borders. Like a lot of technologies, crowdfunding isn’t globalized is highly centralized at the country level. So, Kickstarter is effectively a U.S. company looking for U.S. customers who have U.S. credit cards and compared Indiegogo is pretty similar. Cryptocurrency by definition is borderless. You can own a token anywhere in the world and deploy it anywhere in the world without requiring the person deploying it to have a credit card that you recognize. So yeah, by cutting out the highly national-centric financial system and putting on top of it a layer of tokens that are the same everywhere in the world, you open it up to inclusion instead of exclusion. That’s a fairly fundamental thing and I think that’s one of the reasons why cryptocurrency is the future a lot of businesses.
Learn more about Pledgecamp’s other advisors by watching our YouTube video interviews and/or reading this blog post introducing them.
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