We’re thrilled to have participated in Decent’s Series A round. Decent offers affordable insurance to small businesses and independents. In a healthcare system where large insurers are king, this is no small feat. Decent partners with the Texas Freelance Association to allow small businesses to band together to get coverage types and rates typically available only to large employers. The company officially launched in Austin, Texas, last year.

As the COVID-19 crisis swept the US , Decent’s customer signups surged and its value proposition — aligning patient, doctor and provider incentives — came into focus. …

Foundry was publicly announced as DCG’s fourth wholly-owned subsidiary business today — August 27th, 2020. Behind the scenes, CEO Mike Colyer has been quietly building this business from the ground up for close to a year. He now leads a team of 8, the company has issued tens of millions of dollars in equipment financing, and has helped to procure nearly half of the mining equipment sold in North America this year. He’ll tell you the rest in this Q&A session!

Sometime in late 2019, our newsletter subscribers stopped hearing from us. Our analytics suggested most of them probably didn’t notice. If weak engagement is the symptom of a newsletter in decline, the leading causes are tedious content, poor execution, and misunderstood audiences. Our diagnosis was that we lost touch with why we were writing in the first place.

After a cooling off period, we turned a new page, with one question to answer, “what do our subscribers want to hear from us?”

Here’s what we’ve come up with:

Real Talk…

We’re going to be open with you. Only 9% of our 122 active portfolio companies are female founded… and just 3% of our total companies are solely led by women.

Though we’re not far off from industry averages, we feel strongly that these numbers should be higher.

To provide full context, Crunchbase reported in 2019 that the total number of VC-backed companies with female founders rose to 17%*, but that only 2% of those companies did not have a male co-founder.

This week we bring you a Founder Feature interview with Roham Gharegozlou, CEO of Dapper Labs. The company behind CryptoKitties, Dapper Labs is on a quest to support the next generation of killer games, apps and the digital assets that power them.

Tell us about your background and how you got into crypto

RG: I made my first website when I was nine; it was all downhill from there. I tried my hand at a string of small startups during my time at Stanford before deciding I needed time to mature as a leader. …

Are you ready to take your skills to the next level in an industry that is evolving at rapid speed? Are you ready to make real impact at a company rather than being caught as a cog in the corporate wheel or trapped in an ever-narrowing role at a startup? Then it’s time to take a look at Digital Currency Group — the preeminent investor in the emerging bitcoin and blockchain industry.

About Digital Currency Group

DCG’s mission is to accelerate the development of a better financial system. We build and support blockchain companies by leveraging our insights, network, and access to capital. DCG provides the foundation upon which great companies are built, and to date, we have invested in more than 140 companies in 30+ countries around the world. …

This week we bring you a Founder Feature interview with Alexander Liegl, CEO and Founder of Layer1 — the first US-based, vertically-integrated Bitcoin mining company.

Tell us about your background and how you got into crypto*

AL: I was born and grew up in Munich, Germany. I came to the US to complete my undergraduate studies at Stanford University, where I double-majored in Applied Mathematics and Philosophy. I came across bitcoin in late 2012 and setup a small electricity arbitrage-play by mining it in my student dorm with some friends. Electricity is free for students and we saw an opportunity to startup a few machines and get a first feel for all-things bitcoin. During my Junior Year at Stanford, I founded Bessel Capital, an institutionally-funded hedge fund. Bessel was a quant fund with focus on volatility products. After Stanford, I worked at the Stanford Management Company (SMC), Stanford University’s $25B endowment fund, where I was their first-ever undergraduate analyst and worked on the special investments desk. After SMC I founded Apex Labs, an AI-powered fraud detection platform for the tax agencies of G20 nations. Apex built a highly scalable data unification and analysis platform for tens of billions of financial documents and hundreds of millions of taxpayers. Looking back, my career has always oscillated between the technology and finance industries prior to founding Layer1. …

This week we bring you a Founder Feature interview with Jessi Baker, CEO and Founder of Provenance. Powered by mobile, blockchain, and open data, Provenance empowers brands to increase trust, using technology for greater supply chain transparency.

Tell us about your background and how you got into crypto

JB: I come from a background in consumer brands supply chains (and manufacturing engineering), but worked for most of my career on the design and development of digital products for consumer brands. I founded Provenance whilst doing a PhD in Computer Science at UCL in London. I started looking at bitcoin in 2012 when a friend of mine explained the potential of it to me. Blockchain tech became a core component of my PhD from 2013, as I saw it’s immense potential in product supply chains and in brand building. …