Today on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast we have a guest who helps us bridge the gap between the past, the present, and the future.

Ethan Kurzweil, a Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, who is leading BVP’s crypto efforts and the BessemerDAO, comes onto the show to help us make sense of the evolution from the Web2 to Web2.5 to Web3 world.

Ethan and I had a fascinating discussion. We talked about: 

• The evolution of venture capital and private markets. 
• Bessemer’s thesis on Web3.
• Why Bessemer decided to start a DAO and how they are innovating on portfolio services by building out a community. 
• How Web3 gives people the primitives to fulfill on the premise of decentralization and ownership.

Bessemer is a storied venture fund that got its start back in 1975 after spinning out of Bessemer Trust. Fast forward to today, they are one of the best technology investors on the planet investing into industry defining companies like Shopify, Twilio, PagerDuty, DocuSign, LinkedIn, Twitch, Yelp, Wix, Sorare, and many more.

Ethan brings a fascinating perspective to the world of Web3 and consumerization of private markets investing given that he spent the early days of his career at early metaverse company Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life, and working for Dow Jones, where he managed the turnaround of the international editions of the Wall Street Journal.

Ethan then went on to join Bessemer, where he’s a Partner investing into developer platforms, data infrastructure, digital consumer applications, and consumer facing crypto. He’s invested in the likes of PagerDuty, Intercom, Twitch, LaunchDarkly and crypto companies like Sorare, TRM Labs, and Fold.

Thanks Ethan for coming on the Alt Goes Mainstream podcast.