A young entrepreneur who built a $10million company whilst still in college has explained what has since led him to invest in blockchain.
Miles Carroll says he sold web application FeedMagnet shortly after graduation and stumbled across blockchain after spending time in Silicon Valley.
“I had a conversation at 2am one morning with one of my friends, who’s been an investor and consultant for a long time and he was like, ‘you need to talk to me about (blockchain) .. it’s doing well,'” Mr Carroll said.
“I was like, dude this is a scam, it’s not going to work, but after talking for like 30 minutes … I was hooked.”
How did Miles Carroll invest in blockchain?
At the age of 28, Miles Carroll is now a managing partner at Australian firm Kosmos Capital, which invests in many early-stage blockchain projects.
He says he is driven by the desire to innovate and improve the world through the implementation of new technology.
“We really wanted to change the world and actually make things better,” he said.
“Going in, everyone had this hyped notion we were going to re-do the entire marketing system and equities markets. That’s not going to happen.
“(But) what you can do is use the technology to make incremental changes and true improvements.”
Changing times
Mr Carroll says his firm has recently moved away from investing in tokenised projects and is now focussing on traditional equity investments.
“We’ve actually changed things up a bit … there’s just not enough control (over) where the (tokenised projects are) going,” he said.
“You need to actually be able to help push them into directions that would actually help them.
“Most of 2017 and 2018 was about the launch of tokens without any true value. It was pure speculation. So there was nothing really to back it up, there was no users actually using it.
“So a lot of those projects, they die before they can launch their products and actually have users use it.”
However, that’s not to say that Mr Caroll thinks all tokenised projects will fail.
“Later this year, most likely the year after and the year after that you’ll see a lot more of these projects launch their products when their tokens come out,” he said.
“What need to have in the next couple of years to see any real growth in the blockchain space is moving away from that speculative value to some kind of true world value.”