Everyone says Bitcoin is "unreliable", so why does he still want to invest in it?

John Biggs founded the peer-to-peer payments startup Freemit in December 2014 with $150,000 in funding from angel investors.

Biggs is actually a senior editor of TechCrunch, a well-known American technology blog. In the past year, Biggs was busy starting a business while doing his own job. It can be said that Biggs was building Freemit in his spare time. This year, Biggs will devote himself to Bitcoin entrepreneurship. At the end of last month, he left TechCrunch, where he had worked for 10 years. Biggs said: "This is an opportunity that can't be missed. It will never come back.

“Startups take time to run, and if you don’t spend time focusing on it, you lose focus. I think it’s time to spend more time on Freemit and focus more on it.”

In addition to this reason, Biggs is more importantly confident in Freemit's products, Freemit's team, and the future development of this field. He believes that the Bitcoin industry has the potential to subvert the existing financial system.

Biggs said:

"We are in a dilemma now. The banks will not change as we would like them to and will not support what we want. Especially faster cross-border payments. They are making a lot of money and are satisfied. That's where I worry. They may be content with the status quo. So someone has to change this situation."

Biggs has also seen the turmoil of Bitcoin expansion. He said that when making decisions, he would also consider the uncertainty of Bitcoin's transaction capacity. New technologies will always face various doubts. He said that the debates that are currently holding back the Bitcoin community are like the debates among early Internet innovators, but they will eventually be overcome.

Freemit’s development strategy

What about Freemit? Biggs said Freemit will be available to users soon. The beta version will be open to the first 7,000 users this month, which Biggs said is part of its "phased deployment." In order to reach a larger target market, Freemit will not only focus on Bitcoin, but also target ordinary users who are more familiar with traditional banking products and online payments such as PayPal.

“What’s different about us is that we have a hybrid model, and most of our team members have worked in banks, so they understand how these systems work. We take a circuitous approach, not playing the Bitcoin card first, but connecting multiple paths, and eventually the use of Bitcoin will flow naturally.”

Biggs contrasted his approach with that of Abra, the industry’s best-funded cross-border payments bitcoin startup with $14 million in funding to date, pointing out that the two are polar opposites.

Abra has created a network of “tellers” that replace traditional brick-and-mortar branch locations, a model that Biggs praised as “Uber for cash,” but Freemit won’t be taking a similar approach.

Biggs said Freemit intends to target international students and younger users of payment products, and he likened the approach to Align Commerce, a blockchain startup that uses blockchain for international remittances, primarily targeting small businesses that need to send money abroad.

Role Transformation

Biggs is excited about his current role change and said his past experience working at TechCrunch is an asset to his current startup.

“I believe that my past experience managing distributed teams and my extensive experience in media will be very useful.”

Of course, raising money for the business wasn’t easy, and “not fun,” as Biggs puts it, but his family and friends were very supportive.

"They don't say if I'm stupid for doing this, and my wife supports me," Biggs said.

Biggs is a long-term supporter of the Bitcoin industry. When he worked at TechCrunch, he also wrote about Bitcoin. Now, although he has left, he will share what he wrote at TechCrunch with everyone. But now he has fallen in love with his role as an entrepreneur.

“I’m beginning to understand why people are addicted to it.”

Original article: http://www.coindesk.com/techcrunch-editor-leaving-job-bitcoin-startup/
By Pete Rizzo
Translator: printemps
Editor: printemps
Source (translation): Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/leave-for-bitcoin-startup)