TechCrunch's Samantha Stein: 'Blockchain Has Created a New Model For Crowdfunding'

We're here at Block show, and I just would like if you could introduce yourself a little bit and then tell us why you're here.

Wonderful. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. My name is Samantha Stein. I'm the Director of Special Projects and the Startup battlefield editor at TechCrunch.

Great. So maybe you could just begin by telling us a little bit about the Startup Battlefield. And I know you mentioned it has an interesting slogan, which is Slightly too soon. And if you could explain what exactly that means to our viewers.

Yeah. So Startup Battlefield is TechCrunch's early stage startup competition. So we recruit early stage companies, primarily pre series A, who we launch on TechCrunch through video, editorially, and then at our events, which are both standalone Startup Battlefields and as part of our Disrupt conferences. And not only is this a tremendous way for us to build relationships with the entrepreneurial community, but of course, our readers who are investors, are very excited to see which startups are predicting will be most likely to produce an exit or ipo, which is the judging criteria of the competition itself. I curate these companies along with my colleagues with the thesis Slightly Too Soon. So we're looking for emerging tech that's just before the time where we'd want to see it really hit the market. So we're really the first ones to launch these companies and feature them.

And so what were you doing before this? Do you have a background in tech?

That's a great question. I do. So initially I thought I was going to do a PhD in anthropology, and then my professor asked if instead I would move to the Middle east before pursuing my PhD, which I then no longer ended up doing, and if I'd be interested in helping to design information architecture protocols for digital archival purposes. So how do we find ways to capture information from physical artifacts and then preserve those in a digital format so that we can share the history of different parts of the world, even when we don't have the perhaps support or means to actually physically preserve those artifacts.

So that brings up something that maybe could be used on a blockchain, the idea of preserving things in a sort of digital ledger. So could you talk about how your work has dealt with using blockchain or digital distributed ledger technologies?

Yeah, so at the time we weren't using DLT or blockchain at any capacity, but there is a lot of overlap there. Right. If we look at blockchain as a way of structuring and preserving information, when you're creating. Creating a database of information, you have degrees of centralization and one ways in which for information verification for the case of artifacts we were designing was to make sure that we had an intranet where people who were qualified to say what actual artifacts were in their historical context, such as academics or perhaps family members or people who had lineage that was relevant to the artifact, were able to comment on it and verify it prior to it becoming available, like publicly available information. So there's definitely crossover there. After doing interesting work in the Middle East, I also ended up in Silicon Valley where I worked on a number of early stage startups, including startups in the consumer encryption space.

You know, blockchain was on the agenda at the World Economic Forum. And I know that you participate in that working with Game Changers, Global Shapers. Global Shapers with Global Shapers. So I'm wondering if you could tell me a little bit about your role there and what it was like having blockchain on the agenda for the first time this year and what you think the World Economic Forum can do with that moving forward.

Yeah, so the Global Shapers are initiative of the World Economic Forum, which are the 30 under 30, so to speak of the forum. So they're self organized chapters of individuals who are looking to do social good projects in their own backyard. And the thesis is that if you create these chapter globally focusing on their own backyard, that will maximize social impact across the board. You know, I'm currently the curator of the San Francisco chapter of the World Economic Forum Global Shapers. And so I oversee the projects that we're implementing in San Francisco. And what we're seeing there is that there's a lot of really tremendous ways that you can create social impact through technology. And it's not that technology will solve everything, but there are tremendous ways that it can help. So one of the main projects we've been working on is doing data sharing amongst homeless resource centers or support centers in the Bay Area called Shelter Tech. And I think you know the forum's overall agenda at their last annual meeting, including blockchain were saying there's both tremendous use cases for social impact that could be realized through blockchain as a technology. And there's also tremendous fiscal impact that can be created as we're thinking of new economies that we can create or ways that we can bridge the traditional economy with emerging crypto economies.

So the next question is it's kind of two in one. But the first one is do you think that blockchain and cryptocurrencies are naturally joined or do you think that they can ever be separated and going off of that with these new early startups that are raising money through forms like initial coin offerings, as opposed to the traditional seed offerings. Just how do you see those two combining and working together in the future?

Yeah, so I think there's two points here. One is the general public is conflating the idea of cryptocurrencies or crypto assets with blockchain technology. And the second question is the fundraising model being disrupted through things like ICOs or new funding mechanisms that are being made possible through blockchain technology? So answer the first question first. I think that the general public is certainly conflating cryptocurrency currencies or crypto assets with blockchain technology, when really blockchain at its core is a way of aggregating and sharing information that can be made either transparent or not. There's different attributes in the way you design it. It doesn't actually even need to have a financial instrument. I think the reason these things are conflated is because the first use case that became popularized was the bitcoin blockchain. And of course, this is a financial use case, but we can also see tremendous in which the technology could be realized and used and applied where there isn't a financial application, there isn't a token affiliated. One great example would be land titles that people like to refer to. And that's also definitely a social impact case. So there's places in the world, you know, not where I grew up, I grew up in Minnesota, but there's places in the world where it's really hard to verify that you actually own your own land. And, and you'll see people put signs outside their houses in places like Nairobi, Kenya, that say not for sale to make sure that no one comes and tries to show their home to someone else and then sell it to that person or bribe someone to change a land title.

Interesting.

And blockchain gives us, in that use case, the potential to verify that someone does, in fact, own their house and create an immutable ledger where they can't actually transfer this on paper to someone who it doesn't belong to. And, and this historically has been devastating for many people around the world where their homes have been sold and they live in them, and then they're forced to evacuate. So I think we can do better justice to this technology and what it can do by actually removing the discussion of cryptocurrencies and the financial applications from those of the technology itself. In response to your second question about, you know, is blockchain technology going to disrupt the fundraising model. I think we're seeing early signals that it already has. So my role at TechCrunch is to, in part, look at this thesis slightly too soon and figure out which technologies fit there. When we look at things like blockchain, you see a lot of companies now that are able to raise money on an idea. And it's not unfeasible that in the past you'd have entrepreneurs who raised money on an idea and they walked out of a VC with a term sheet just based on an idea alone and maybe some social signaling. I think that was more the exception than the rule. Now you're seeing more. The rule in this space is that a lot of people produce a white paper, they talk about their project and their idea, and they're able to raise money on that without a physical prototype. And that could be a trend that continues, or it could change and it could shift back to people having to raise on a prototype. What this means in the landscape overall is that if you're looking for early stage entrepreneurs, they're no longer doing gradient fundraising of a seed round and then a series, A, B, C, D and so on, with maybe some different financial instruments in between, but instead they're raising with maybe a pre sale or an ico. Oftentimes not all. There's still traditional equity investments in the space as well, or a combination. But this means that with a white paper, you could essentially raise your A and B round in one is how entrepreneurs are defining it. To me, they're saying, when we think of this, and if we're trying to draw a parallel with traditional venture, it would be doing my seed, my A and my B round in one go. So that's a huge departure from what we've seen in other spaces. And I think one way to just think of that is that blockchain technology in the case of fundraising, has created a new model for crowdfunding and we'll see where it goes.

I'm looking forward to that. That's all the time we have for today. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak to us. Cointelegraph here at Block Show Europe 2018.

Wonderful, thanks for having me.

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