AMA with Holli Bohren

I saw a fantastic management team in a very interesting space, with potential for rapid growth. I've specialized in high growth, early stage companies my whole career.

A successful exit returns all funds to all investors with plenty left over for common shareholders. In a successful exit, employees’ earnings from their equity are equal to or greater than what would be considered very large bonuses for their role, for every year of employment. In other words, materially more than the employee would make based on salary and regular bonuses alone.

I have worked with companies on successful exits from inception to exit in as little as 18 months a couple of times, and up to 4-5 years on the long end. Venture capitalists invest through funds with 10 year lives, reflecting the expectation that the company will not exit within just a few years. A successful exit as defined within less than 5-6 years is extremely unusual. It is also extremely unusual to have a successful exit in a private company without multiple rounds of funding. Additional funding does not imply lower returns. It implies continuing investor confidence and supports growth. The broader and more complex the scope of the product, the longer it is likely to take.

In Brave’s case, it is unlikely a buyer would overlook the BAT ecosystem and the UGP, and any exit involving an acquisition would (by design) bind the acquirer to Brave's brand values and to BAT's economics going to large scale. Any dismal exit would not be good for either equity investor or BAT holders. Go big or go home!

BAT is a utility token, defined to account for human attention first and foremost. Brave supports it as part of the BAT platform. We will add support for other digital assets and make them usable by average folks, for all kinds of ecommerce.

Brave has a large UGP (300M) sufficient to fund well beyond the launch of ads. The sale structure including genesis block structure was publicized on https://basicattentiontoken.org in blog posts, and then made public via smart contracts on Ethereum. The Public ledger is public.

None of the employees are paid in BAT in lieu of salary.

I'm a reading addict, and I listen to whatever music my 13 and 14 year old kids are into.

Venture investors and angels rarely get bought out. Instead, they expect future rounds to be accretive, meaning the value added makes the smaller piece of the bigger pie worth more than the bigger piece of the smaller pie. Investors in most startups including Brave would generally expect to see successive rounds of financing until an eventual sale or IPO. IPOs are quite rare. Many companies file for an IPO as a way to attract a buyer, and exit without ever going public. The odds of going public for any startup are very low, but that does not mean the odds of a successful exit are low for Brave. Most successful exits with good returns to employees are sales. (Note that Crunchbase is not always complete.)

We will be doing a combination of those three things.

The VCs did not receive tokens, just equity, as BAT is a utility token.

Yes we are looking for a G/L accountant who will take on payroll for now, and ultimately need another staff person in HR due to the demands of employees, contractors and companies in multiple countries. Please visit https://brave.com/jobs for job postings!