

21 - mwilcox
http://a16z.com/2015/03/11/21/

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Mithaldu
> We just took the wraps off 21

Yet when going to that website it has literally no description of itself and
demands your email address.

I can see this going two ways:

1\. He's honest and 21 is just another way of harvesting email addresses.

2\. He's dishonest and hasn't taken the wraps off anything.

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thesausageking
His dual roles brings up up an interesting question:

If you're founder of a Bitcoin startup that's doing well and has its pick of
investors, do you pitch a16z, knowing that the founder of what could be your
largest competitor is a partner there ?

~~~
nostrademons
I thought that a16z doesn't invest in multiple companies that are competitors.
The reason they gave for not investing in companies that were likely to pivot
was the Burbn => Instagram pivot, which put one of their investments
(Instagram) into competition with another (PicPlz) [1].

This makes me _really_ wonder what's up with 21, though, because a16z has
already funded a major Bitcoin startup (Coinbase [2]), and did so after Balaji
claims to have founded Instagram. Does that mean that 21 has no intention to
become a Bitcoin payment processor or exchange?

[1] [http://www.bhorowitz.com/instagram](http://www.bhorowitz.com/instagram)

[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinbase](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coinbase)

------
woah
What does 21 do?

~~~
pault
It's been speculated that they are developing a consumer-oriented hardware
bitcoin wallet/node.

~~~
woah
This would indeed be very lucrative, as it is the missing component for
adoption, IMO. I wonder why it's taken them 3 years though.

~~~
Mahn
There's been Trezor for some time now:
[https://www.bitcointrezor.com/](https://www.bitcointrezor.com/)

Projects like these are great, but they won't drive adoption per se.

