#70 - CoinList Cofounder Andy Bromberg and Ramon Recuero

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Andy Bromberg and Ramon Recuero. Andy is the co-founder and CEO of CoinList, and CoinList provides financial infrastructure for token creators and investors. And Ramon is an engineer here at YC.
All right, here we go. Let's just start, Andy, with a quick intro of who you are and what you're working on.

**Andy Bromberg** (0:24)
So my name is Andy Bromberg, I run CoinList.
CoinList is a platform where the best digital asset companies manage their token sales. And we're also where investors find high quality deals in the space. So we're working on helping with things like compliance, helping with things like transaction processing for deals in the space, and then helping investors, who are also our clients, find these high quality deals and invest in them. So broadly, we provide full services for sales like Filecoin and Blockstack and Props, and manage their sale on the platform, and then our investors see the deals. And then separately, we just run compliance for a lot of sales as well. So helping them with Know Your Customer, Anti-Money Laundering, Investor Accreditation, which we could get into, but the nitty gritty technical stuff you got to do if you're selling to us.

**Craig Cannon** (1:06)
And Ramon, for people who don't know you, what are you working on?

**Ramon Recuero** (1:09)
Yeah, I work for YC, and before I had my own company, and I worked in video games for Zynga for a while.

**Craig Cannon** (1:15)
All right, you want to start it off?

**Ramon Recuero** (1:16)
Yeah. So let's assume that we're starting a project. So how should we think about this new mode of fundraising?
What kind of project could be perfect for a token sale versus going through an angel or through an incubator?

**Andy Bromberg** (1:30)
Right. So really interesting. Most projects, not a good fit for this funding model. And we see a lot.
CoinList has done three publicly on the platform so far. We've gotten over 900 inbound. So most projects, not really high quality and not doing an ICO for the right reasons. So when we think about the right reasons, for me, it really comes down to one of a couple use cases.
One is raising money for protocols that need to be distributed. So Filecoin is a great example of that from Protocol Labs, which is a YC company.
And there, I think the insight is that, historically, protocols have only been funded by governments, academic coalitions, sometimes really huge companies, because they're just expensive to develop. When you're developing something that foundational, it's too costly for a startup to develop, typically. And so the ICO model, giving stakeholders a stake in that protocol on that network, is actually the first time that we've had a way for new protocols to emerge and be funded for small teams with great ideas. And what that's enabling is this world of competitive protocols, where instead of one just being the king by default, because it's the only one that's capitalized well enough, now we can have competitive protocols going back and forth. So protocols is one example.
The second is projects that have a disproportionate advantage by having early users be stakeholders on the network. So I'll break that down a little bit.
The idea there is that if you can give the earliest users of a platform some upside if the project's successful, that's in theory good for every project, right? If any company gave their early users some equity, if that was easier, then maybe that'd be good. But we really think ICOs are good for ones where there's a disproportionate impact there. So one example might be if you had some sort of tokenized or distributed tour, right? Anonymous routing system, where if there aren't enough users on the platform, it just doesn't work. It actually, it's just not anonymous or pseudonymous. It fails its mission. So the idea there is if you could give those users an early incentive, then perhaps that would be incentivized to grow the network faster, get to that critical point where it tips over and becomes useful much faster and then be able to grow from there. And then the last category I'll mention is, we're early on this one, but separate from those two, securities tokens, so asset-backed tokens that are taking an existing asset and tokenizing them, that's appealing, but almost a totally different category from the first one. We could talk more about the difference between those. And then the last thing I'll say there is, I imagine we're gonna find a ton more use cases for ICOs. We're basically a year into the market right now. It's really young. And so those first two categories for the more technical ones than the asset-backed ones are the ones that we find appealing so far, but there's gonna be way more beyond that as this market evolves.