You say you want a revolution? Well, you know…..
Welcome to post number one of the ‘Diary of a Crypto Entrepreneur.’ Truth be told it was Tim Draper who put me up to this. We have been challenging each other since we were 6 years old. If you are lucky enough to have anchored yourself in the same town you grew up in like we have, nothing really seems to change. This has been a tremendous gift, and Tim has been a tremendous friend.
It all started a few months back in a email chat between a small group of newly baptised crypto-heads, where I began lamenting the idea that the token business has no real valuation basis. I said something like, “This craze is so out of control, it makes it look like we were playing with Tinkertoys during the Internet Bubble.” That’s when Drape boomed in, “Perk, when are we going to see the book ‘Crypto Bubble.”
The fodder for Tim’s challenge was the fact that back in 1999, my brother Michael and I wrote what turned out to be an international best-selling book called The Internet Bubble: What You Need to Know to Avoid the Coming Shakeout (HarperBusiness 1999). For our analysis, we simply borrowed an algorithm created by the now famous VC Bill Gurley of Benchmark who, at the time, was making a name for himself as an out-of-the-box Wall Street analyst. When we applied Mr. Gurley’s equation to the trading values of all the Internet companies that had gone public you didn’t have to be a MIT statistics professor to see that it was time to run for cover. Hence the first sentence of our book; ‘If you own any of the 217 stocks listed in the back of the book — Sell Now! — because if the party is not over by the time you read this book, it will be shortly thereafter.’
It is not my style to wallow too much in the past, but in retrospect, I was living a very surreal existence in those days. On one hand, as founder and editor of Red Herring, I was minting fiat currency selling ads to Morgan Stanley, Microsoft and Stoli, and hopscotching the planet proclaiming with a straight face that ‘Silicon Valley is the Athens of the Information Age!’ On the other hand, I was doing the math, scratching my head and, well, the rest is history.
Source/More: Diary of a Crypto Entrepreneur Post #1—Living in a distorted reality by Tony Perkins – Alchemist
