The 2015 Fintech Finance 35: Barry Silbert, Digital Currency Group

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< The 2015 Fintech Finance 35

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Barry Silbert
Chief Executive Officer
Digital Currency Group

When it comes to investing, Barry Silbert has always been a little ahead of his time. The Gaithersburg, Maryland, native began buying and selling stocks at age 13 with his bar mitzvah money and four years later passed his Series 7 exam to become the then-youngest U.S. licensed stockbroker. After graduating from Emory University in 1998 with a bachelor’s in business administration, Silbert went to work for investment bank Houlihan Lokey in New York, focusing on restructuring. He left in 2004 “to scratch an entrepreneurial itch” and founded SecondMarket, a platform to trade shares in privately held companies and funds, now owned by Nasdaq. Silbert launched into angel investing in 2010 and a year later began reading about the history of money and Bitcoin. “It took me about six months of being a skeptic before I came to the conclusion that Bitcoin had the potential to change the world,” says Silbert, 39, who invested about $200,000 in the digital currency in 2012, when the price was below $10. As the price rose tenfold (it has since settled around $300), he used some of his gains to make angel investments in Bitcoin companies. “Being one of the few guys out there making investments in this space, I got to see most of the companies that got formed in 2012 and 2013, and put together a portfolio of really, really great companies,” he says. Today those investments related to Bitcoin and the underlying blockchain ledger are housed within Digital Currency Group, a New York–based C corporation Silbert set up last year with funding from Bain Capital Ventures and RRE Ventures. (Bain’s Matthew Harris, No. 3, and RRE’s James Robinson IV, No. 1, sit on DCG’s investment committee.) DCG’s 56 investments are in 17 countries and include Abra, Align Commerce Corp., Ascribe, BitPesa, Chain, Coinbase and Ripple. “I am absolutely convinced that the time has come for a digital currency whose money supply is not controlled by a government,” Silbert explains. “I think what people are missing is the role that a digital currency could play in the world today as a complement, or even a replacement, to something like gold.”

The 2015 Fintech Finance 35