Worldcoin
Thoughts on Worldcoin, and lessons learned from passing on the investment
Worldcoin token went live last week at a market cap of ~$250M, and a fully diluted market cap of $23B! I am sad to say that while I had a personal allocation two years ago, I ultimately decided not to invest. Here are my thoughts.
Some background -
In June 2021, I received an allocation to invest in the private round of Worldcoin. I thought about putting in an angel investment of $10K, at $0.10 per coin. It was a two year lockup, so the tokens would be liquid today. The $10K investment would be worth $200K - $300K, liquid, based on the past week’s price.
I wanted to invest from the firm I was with at the time, especially because we believed in universal basic income, which is what Worldcoin is tackling. But it wasn’t the best fit at the time. A lot of the implementation details weren’t quite flushed out, so it was hard to justify the investment at what was a $1B fully diluted valuation.
Instead, I received a personal allocation. I was very close to doing it, but decided to pass.
Reasons:
While not necessarily a conflict of interest, it was not the best look to LPs to invest personally, but not from the fund.
Like I said above, the valuation was quite rich, at least from a fully diluted perspective.
The utility of the tokens weren’t quite clear at the time (June 2021).
While Sam Altman had cofounded the project, it wasn’t clear how involved he was. It seems to me he got more hands on in the last year or so.
Result:
Missed gain of 20-30x in 2 years’ time.
Lessons learned:
Sometimes, it’s ok to just bet on the founder, even if a lot of data points seem questionable.
Sam Altman is an extraordinary founder. This year, he’s gotten very well known thanks to OpenAI, but even back then, he was a forceful figure, and had been speaking about universal basic income. It was clearly a problem he thought deeply about.
Oh well, you live and you learn!
I’m very excited to see how they build out the vision of universal basic income. It will be fascinating, and I trust they will figure out some very interesting use cases for the token.
Make Orwell fiction again! #Bitcoin