Silly angel stuff

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

I see this a lot – companies either continually raising from angels or even putting together large seed size rounds made up of angels.

Angel rounds are not bad but do one and then get to the institutional round.

How Lee Fixel, Flipkart’s godfather in New York, changed India’s start-up ecosystem – Livemint

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

Interesting read – don’t know much about Lee Fixel.

He made some coin on this though.

It seems to me if that if the founders were left alone on FlipKart – none of this would have ever happened.

Still remains to be seen what a post WalMart world will look like.

How Lee Fixel, Flipkart’s godfather in New York, changed India’s start-up ecosystem – Livemint

Depending on the final details, Fixel could make more than $3.5 billion on an investment of less than $1 billion, and still retain a 4-5% stake in Flipkart. That’s a stunning return by any measure. For the exit-starved Indian market, it’s almost beyond belief.

Jeff Bezos interview with Axel Springer CEO on Amazon, Trump, Blue Origin, family, regulation – Business Insider

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

This is so good. Every founder should stop and watch this.

The focus on the consumer above everything else is such a good lesson.

It is also just great listing to his view on criticism, making mistakes and long term planning.

And the slight work/life balance speech at the end is spot on.

Jeff is pretty amazing.

Jeff Bezos interview with Axel Springer CEO on Amazon, Trump, Blue Origin, family, regulation – Business Insider

US Digital Currency – Sam Altman

~ michael_msft ~ Leave a comment

I have always held the view that a powerful digital currency is a threat to the central banking system of all governments. Which in theory means the governments could embrace it as a way of having more control over it. I think this is what Sam is suggesting since at the moment the governments are trying to squeeze it which to me is forcing crypto to figure out how to survive away from central banking control. If this happens than central banks will have a big issue on their hands and probably the only way to prevent this would be to embrace it.

Not sure it will be the USA that will pull this off but if they did would be pretty amazing. Given the Trump administration being more focused on crap like building a wall – my guess is that somewhere in Asia would be a more obvious choice.

US Digital Currency – Sam Altman:

Although I don’t think the US government can stop cryptocurrency, I do think it could create the winner–let’s call it “USDC” for US Digital Currency–and fix some challenges that governments currently face with cryptocurrency.

I think the first superpower government to do something like this will have an enviable position in the future of the world, and some power over a worldwide currency.

The US government could decide to treat USDC as a second legal currency, which would be hugely powerful.  (I think the US doing this would be significantly more impactful than the smaller governments thinking about it now.)

Ideally the initial coins would be evenly distributed to US citizens and taxpayers—something like everyone with a social security number gets two coins, one that is immediately sellable and one that you have to keep for 10 years.