Oh, you’re a real company!
“How on earth will we find our way through this jungle?” Andreas, my co-founder and I were discussing the ICO again. The times when you could just do an ICO by yourself have passed. Over the last year, ICOs lost their innocence. The requirements are so demanding that they’ve become impossible to fulfill without access to an experienced team. Aside from personalized guidance through the ICO jungle, you need legal advice, communications and marketing experts, designers, token technology, and many other things. For a company considering this avenue to acquire funding, one question stands out: Where to begin?
At Securosys, we decided to engage an ICO advisory company. After some research, which basically consisted of talking to our friends who had successfully made their ICOs, we settled on Lykke (after the spinout from Lykke now BVV — Blockchain Valley Ventures). The winning point was that they came as a package deal: they had the technology stack for the tokens and ICO (not that we had a clue as to what these were) and they had a design team at hand, people ready to dig in and support us (I’ll tell you more about that in the next blog post). In addition, they had already guided several companies through the process of creating an ICO. In fact, they already successfully completed their own ICOs to fund their company.
Enter into the picture BVV’s Michael Guzik, a German with Polish roots, who was designated as our project lead. This blond, skinny, 1.90m tall ultra-marathon running guy is the ultimate networker. Soft-spoken and attentive, he has the ability to make connections with almost anybody, and even manages to get his newly forged contacts to respond! In short, this man is precisely the person you want to have on your side when running an ICO.
Our first contact was made at our offices in Zurich. Michael brought along his two colleagues Victor Solomon, the doer (official title: Head Research), and Ivan de Casseres, the lawyer. When they arrived at Securosys, I don’t think we exactly presented the image that they were expecting. We sat our guests down at our impressive oak table, our products neatly presented nearby. Pitching Securosys, we told them about our products and where they were already being used and gave them our numbers from last year. This was our second year of profitability with 4.7m in revenue and 1.1m in EBITDA, which was probably a stark contrast to what they’d heard in other initial ICO engagement meetings. Heinrich Zetlmayer, Managing Partner of BVV, who joined our meeting somewhat later, put it nicely: “Oh, you’re a real company!”.
A real company, with real products, real customers, real revenue, and experienced management — well yes, that’s what we are! Apparently, we seem to be an exception. So far, it has been confounding to us that many ICO companies without anything on their record sheet could raise tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. They often had no products, no track record of execution, no business plan — just a whitepaper that would express an idea in an expensively designed multi-color brochure. In that sense we are completely different, since we are at a growth stage. We have working products that have already been sold and are currently in operation. We have a very experienced team that has been building and selling these products over the last few years. We know how we can grow this company and get to the next stage. No vaporware — a real company!
So Heinrich, who spent the last ten years on turnarounds of companies, jumped on the wagon. “With this success story, you should do a security token! People will be very attracted by a solid growth company, whose products will become central to the evolving crypto finance industry. We might even get conventional venture folks to invest in a Securosys ICO.” He expressed many things that had crossed our minds before. The discussion of utility tokens versus security tokens seemed like it could be endless (a separate blog post on this is coming soon).
What are all of the consequences for the investors and our company? We’ve already had venture capital investors calling us up, interested in a conventional investment. Could we get them interested in an ICO instead? Hopefully Michael, Heinrich, and the rest of the BVV gang can help us make the right decisions and get us moving in the right direction!
