Most traditional startups get asked "What is your exit strategy?" meaning a Merger, Acquisition, or an IPO. Do you see these as the same for bitcoin and lightning startups? What exits are realistic for bitcoin startups?
Thank you for a great question that resonates with me personally. Investor liquidity is a pressing issue for traditional VC because this is how VC industry is measured in general. However recent changes in macro, finance and liquidity markets including crypto, have exaggerated pursuit for liquidity to enormous scale leading to significant decoupling between the amount of accrued enterprise value and the liquidity obtained by investors. Personally, I want to believe that this disproportion is temporary and will go away.
In bitcoin and lightning ecosystem, neither VCs nor founders that we have been meeting seem to be overfocused on obtaining liquidity. The ecosystem follows the low time preference ethos. It does not remove the question of liquidity from its existence. And also to have more traditional VCs invest in this space, they need to understand their liquidity options. So we encourage startups to think through how they sustainably accumulate enterprise value over time while they keep building the entire ecosystem.
If VCs and founders are aligned on how enterprise value accumulates, liquidity opportunities will follow. Usually industries go through midterm consolidation phases that provide for MnA opportunities. In the long run, we hope to see more bitcoin enterprises reach public markets too, or markets of secondary stock transfers. Maybe these types of markets will be powered by bitcoin native financial solutions. Some companies could still generate investor returns while remaining private.
Many applications in the space are aimed at novel payment solutions. Payments are one of the most natural ways to capture business value, so there is a lot of opportunity to accumulate enough enterprise value that will find liquidity.
Also bitcoin is possibly a new type of monetary system, so maybe there will be totally new ways of generating liquidity in the ecosystem.
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