Don't forget "instant liquidity", eg selling your securi... er tokens before you've actually built a product, much less gotten users/customers.
The ICO craze has clarified, if it wasn't obvious before, why the incubator/seed -> Series A -> Series BCD etc is what it is. The scale of each successive stage of fundraising is indexed to the execution and progress of the product & business development, keeping the startup team motivated and the investors' risk exposure mitigated. ICO's that take in huge amounts of money frontload most of the investors' risk, leaving their only assurance as some kind of ideology-driven social contract where the ICO is now an "endowment" and must manage itself and reinvest its capital in such a way that builds it product as well as the rest of the ecosystem. But that all depends on the founders maintaining their motivation instead of heading off to a private island for the rest of their lives.
The ICO craze has clarified, if it wasn't obvious before, why the incubator/seed -> Series A -> Series BCD etc is what it is. The scale of each successive stage of fundraising is indexed to the execution and progress of the product & business development, keeping the startup team motivated and the investors' risk exposure mitigated. ICO's that take in huge amounts of money frontload most of the investors' risk, leaving their only assurance as some kind of ideology-driven social contract where the ICO is now an "endowment" and must manage itself and reinvest its capital in such a way that builds it product as well as the rest of the ecosystem. But that all depends on the founders maintaining their motivation instead of heading off to a private island for the rest of their lives.