Jonathan Nelson wants to understand your pain. Having worked as a nurse for 20 years before starting his blockchain-based global venture fund with his wife Laura, he aims to discover which problems ail entrepreneurs the most, drawing from a worldwide community of Hackers/Founders that the couple built while he still labored in emergency rooms.
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Where in Honduras were you born? It was a little town called Minas de Oro, or mines of gold. It’s literally in the middle of the country, end of the world, and my mom and dad ran a school there. In 1967, they got into a Chevy pickup truck with their three kids under 5 and they drove south 5,000 miles from Minnesota to Honduras. They knew “sombrero” and “amigo.” That's all the Spanish they knew.
Were their parents, your grandparents, freaking out? Yes. They’re in northern Minnesota, and they’re like, “We need sturdy boxes so, hey! Glen’s Army Navy Surplus has some great boxes.” So they went and got a bunch of boxes that say “U.S. Army Munitions.” They end up packing all of their belongings into U.S. Army Munitions boxes, driving through Central America in the 1960s. The border crossings did not go well for them. They had to unload everything, go through everything piece by piece and pack it back up. We then moved to Costa Rica.
How did you study programming? I was working nights and weekends as a nurse. And so I tried in fits and starts to go to a normal college. I ended up applying to the best computer science program I could find at the time, the University of Maryland, and it was online. Most of the people that I was taking classes online with were military, and a lot of them were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. They were information and security professionals. So literally on the discussion forums, someone would say, “Hey teach, we're moving forward to the front lines this weekend: Can I hand in my paper three days late?” And he'd be like, “Yeah, not a problem.”
And it was bizarre, and it was Maryland, so there was kind of this whole government thing. I ended up getting this random email from the NSA saying, “Hey, your grades are great and you're working at a center of excellence for information and security: How would you like a full-ride scholarship to go to school, study computer science, and then you can work for the NSA?” And I was like, “Yeah, that's not me, really.”
I never finished the degree.
Why do you not like the term “ICO”? They're not currencies. I think a lot of people have just gotten really, really uptight. “Well, it's a cryptocurrency!” “No, it's not a currency, Bitcoin's not a currency, it doesn't this and that and the other thing. It doesn't have these features that I was taught in an economics class about currency.” It's currency-ish. But let's just call these things digital stock certificates because that's really kind of the application that I want. And all of a sudden people went “Oh, it's a stock certificate, it's a piece of a company. Oh, OK. I understand. But crypto, that's kind of scary, that's black evil hacker stuff.”
And there's been a lot of fraud and there has been a lot of crap in the industry, but in the last 12 months, you've had companies around the world raise $12 billion for new technology projects. And seed-stage venture capital last year was $6 billion. So you already have twice as much being raised in this market and it's only been going on two-and-a-half years … How do we build the white-hat approach to raising crowdfunding online from around the world using a digital stock certificate? That idea, I think, is going to change entire economies.
Revenue growth 2015-17
| Rank | Prior Rank | Name |
|---|---|---|
1 | 1 | Livongo Health Inc. |
2 | 2 | GridGain Systems |
3 | 1 | GameChangerSF |