Why "Big Money ICO's" may not be worth it.

With the increased amount of Initial Coin Offerings popping up, we’ve seen a seismic shift in the way that startups are funding their ventures. However the questions are the same now as they were back in the not-so-distant past when venture capitalists and angel investors put their funds into startups. How necessary is the project? How good is it’s team?

So I began looking at ICO’s, large scale projects, some that were looking to raise close to 100 million dollars (insert Dr. Evil’s pinky here). At the point where I felt like “what do all these people need that much money for?”. It finally dawned on me that they didn’t. The fallout over at Tezos was a clear indicator that people that are new in this ICO world are simply trying to bite off more than they can chew.

My next thought was, maybe there are some companies that are doing this on a much smaller scale, ones that are looking to raise an amount of money that’s in direct correlation with how much it actually costs to run a business. Ones that had a good team, were successful in previous endeavors, and had successful raises in the past, but weren’t looking at a nine-figure pay day.

While scouring the web, I stumbled across Licensing Coin. Found their Bitcoin Talk post, and was instantly intrigued by the idea of a SkinnyICO. Their goal? 500k raise, with only bare-bones marketing that’s necessary to the success of the project. Their idea made complete sense, in a space that wasn’t crowded by innumerable other startups looking to compete for the same thing (I see you, MobileGO). They want to create a one-stop-shop for media licensing. There’s clearly two sides here (buyers & sellers) and all while lacking a true middleman, the industry isn’t as streamlined as it could be.

Not only was their solution strong; but their idea to consist of a consortium, not a team looking to capitalize off of a raise and then bail, struck me as something that needs to occur more in this space. They had already extended invites to companies like Disney, Barstool Sports, and others to be apart of their consortium.

That cleared two of those ‘questions’ that I would typically ask as a venture capitalist. It passed my metaphorical sniff test. From there; the questions pertained to their founders backgrounds and their timeline of release. I found those answers to be just as pleasing. Their founder had already founded an e-commerce ad company, benja. They had also released an ICO, BenjaCoin, which had a successful raise earlier this year.

Going forward, it looks like there’s a quick and clear timeline for Licensing Coin to begin preparing their marketplace for end user consumption, with their beta released by the end of this year. Another point that piqued my interest was that Licensing Coin is following guidelines set forth by the ICO Governance Foundation.

With the increasing amount of scams in the ICO world, it’s refreshing to see a company using good faith and good judgement when raising capital, and not being greedy while providing a useful product.