Not every venture investor was bewitched by the promise of cryptocurrencies and the growth of companies like FTX, the crypto exchange that filed for bankruptcy nearly two weeks ago. Some venture capital firms actually ignored the fanfare and passed.
Consider Ramy Adeeb, founder and general partner of 1984 Ventures, who in 2017 took a very public stance against investing in crypto. He published a column on LinkedIn that argued against the sector, associating Bitcoin with a scene from the movie The Big Short in which Mark Baum and his staff realize that a local Miami mortgage broker has been conning strippers into taking out highly leveraged mortgages. Adeeb attempted to debunk several myths about Bitcoin—that there’s a limited supply of the currency; that blockchain makes Bitcoin valuable; and that Bitcoins are secure. (Adeeb is the founder and ex-CEO of sharing website Snip.it—which sold to Yahoo in 2013—and is also a former principal of Khosla Ventures.)
