From a brief google, Uber's seed round is up 5000X so that beats my example. But Ethereum did pretty well; their equivalent of a seed round was in 2014, when one Bitcoin was worth $600, and as of today they're up 700X since then. That's down 85% from their peak of 4600X.
And I'm guessing the Uber seed round wasn't available to the average investor. If you just look at the public companies available to everyone, another quick google says the best in the last decade was Netflix at 40X gain.
> And I'm guessing the Uber seed round wasn't available to the average investor.
If you ask the SEC the majority of ICOs aren't available to the average investor either, and never should have been. Because the vast majority are pure, hot, unadulterated garbage like Dentacoin and IOTA - which emulates a ternary computer for literally no reason anyone can identify.
Nevertheless it was available and the SEC is fine with Ethereum today. In any case, as far as the Crypto Fund goes my second paragraph was irrelevant anyway.
I mean, look, the point is that you can't compare when bitcoin first opened up to an asset, it was a toy that surprisingly people pay for today even though it's being propped up by Tether and Bitfinex. It's akin to comparing the par value (1/10th of a cent) per share that the Uber founders received at formation - a 5,000,000% return. That makes the returns quite comparable. Starting something can be lucrative.
It is by no means the best performing asset. Anyone with shares from the formation of a startup has outperformed.
Equity is passive investment once you own it whether you remain employed or not. It's capital gains once you own the shares, not ordinary income. You can also include anyone you want in the cap table at formation, not just employees -- if you wanted, you could easily issue your advisory shares at that time.
Not to mention, at formation, you're more than welcome to pay market salaries to your founders, that's your perogative as a founder.
Not a startup. They don't just go from seed round to IPO on idle. The founders had to invest thousands of hours and immense stress to get it to IPO. Meanwhile a holder of 1000 BTC from 2012 probably continued to work their day job until 2017 when they incidentally became multi-millionaires.
This is the reason bitcoin will never be more than a way to move funds illegally and for a few gamblers to trade it online.
Society is fine with startup founders and "employee number 5" making their fortune because they put in actual effort to build a company.
The bitcoin millionaires happened to mine a few coins in 2011 before most people knew about it and then just did nothing as you said. Zero contribution to society from making that paper (or bit) fortune.
Why on earth would everyone else not on the right internet forum in the early 2010s make the few that were fabulously rich?
Investing in stocks is a similar passive income, but at least in that case the investors money is going towards some business that pays a wage to workers or provides some net benefit to society (hopefully).
A start-up is just any company that's founded, usually with aspirations, and what I'm saying is that, technically, you can throw anyone you want on your cap table at formation [note]. I'm not saying it's typical or common, just that it's fundamentally possible. Same with founder compensation.
Bitcoin as a "passive investment" is such a lame comparison because it does, literally, nothing, just like hanging onto some beanie babies. Beanie babies, but much more wasteful.
[note] Anyone who's an employee or an accredited investor.
And I'm guessing the Uber seed round wasn't available to the average investor. If you just look at the public companies available to everyone, another quick google says the best in the last decade was Netflix at 40X gain.