Monday, December 31, 2018
Reflections on 2018: Alon Goren, 805 Startups and Crypto Invest Summit
Editor's note: As we head into the new year, we've been featuring reflections on 2018 from notable investors, entrepreneurs, and others from Southern California's technology community. You'll be able to browse all of those contributions here. Here's Alon Goren, founder of 805 Startups and the Crypto Invest Summit.
What was the biggest lesson you learned this year?
Stick to what you love and what you know and do best. That's not to say to never get out of your comfort zone or to never try new things. We'd never grow as people and as a community if we never try new things, get dirty, screw up and be uncomfortable every now and then. But my thing has always been supporting startups and entrepreneurs at an early stage. It's what drove me to crowdfunding and what's sucked me into crypto. In crypto over the last year, there where MANY deals that were too good to be true, too urgent, too exciting and too exclusive for me to be totally comfortable with. Many of my friends made a killing (in the short-term) investing in these deals and because of the network that I have built with Crypto Invest Summit, I had access to most of them. But as an admittedly tiny investor myself, I never made those deals. The few deals I was a part of are deals where I loved the founders, loved their working products and was excited to be a customer as well as an investor. I believe they can become billion dollar companies, but they did not try to take advantage of the hype and raise an unnecessarily large sum of money for a product that had yet to be built or proven like many others had. There are a lot of gems out there that were able to ride that wave, make it through and are better for it, but I think that history will be kind to my decision of sitting out on most of those deals.
What was the biggest news for your company in 2018?
Josef Holm (my business partner) and I officially created Goren Holm Ventures. We invested in and advised a few incredible startups and are incubating a company we've been working on behind the scenes for a long time. You'll hear about it soon. Our conference, Crypto Invest Summit, has become the world's largest investment focused blockchain event and has taken a life of its own. We're proud to hold it twice a year in Los Angeles. #longla!
Are there any technology innovations, gadgets, devices, software, that you found most interesting in 2018?
Not surprisingly, as I am all in on crypto and blockchain and that's where I've spent all my time this year, that's what I found most interesting. There were a ton of really interesting products, but the way decentralized exchanges work and how they will evolve really excites me. The anonymity and self-custody is really interesting, but what excites me most is the ability to transact without any central authority or middlemen. The way most of these decentralized exchanges currently work is complicated, clunky, slow and for lack of a better term, crappy. But products like TOTLE are changing that and every day these products improve and become more intuitive. These types of products will lead us to a future where everyone has to play fair because everyone will truly be in control of all of their assets and the service providers they choose will have to prove their value while competing transparently.
Finally, what's your prediction on what will be most important thing for the technology industry in the coming year?
Not sure about the coming year, but I think that what we've created with technology is killing us both figuratively and literally. Human intimacy, or the lack of it, is the biggest problem we will face in our lifetime. No amount of my magic internet money will fix it.
Alon Goren is a financial technology marketing expert and entrepreneur turned investor and advisor. Him and his partner, Josef Holm, founded Crypto Invest Summit, the world's largest investment focused blockchain event. He was born and raised in Southern California and also founded one of Southern California's largest startup and investor networking groups, 805 Startups (2,500 members).