[ExI] The prodigal son returns -- Pathfinder

Tue Nov 7 20:34:00 UTC 2017

Good morning boys and girls.  It's a pleasure to be back with you again.

Back in October of 1997, I got my first computer.  I signed up for free
internet with NetZero, loaded up Netscape Navigator, and through a sequence
of events now lost to the mists of memory, stumbled upon the exi list,...
and found a home in the transhumanist tribe.  I had a wonderful time with
youse guys. For 16 years I came to the clubhouse every day until, in June
of 2013, I bid you farewell and ventured out into the world to seek my
fortune.

"And what have you seen, my blue eyed boy?"

Now, I return with tales to tell of the wonders I have seen and the
adventures I have had,... and am having.

So settle in, and be amazed.

I was once a man of modest means, wont to describe myself as independently
austere.  A late-night denizen of the undergraduate library at UC Berkeley
-- it's open till 3 in the morning!  A person of no importance.  A wise ass
underachiever, lazy, opinionated, self-indulgent and self-absorbed.

But lucky.   Yes, the secret to my success is my unstinting and undeserved
good luck.   Many are those who lament their all-too-frequent encounters
with misfortune.  You never hear those who roll the dice and win, to
declare -- or even notice -- the "unfairness" of it, the unfairness of
their Good Fortune.   Yet that is the essence of my story.   The God of
Wiseasses has made a project of me. Or, as Mark Twain has noted, "Those who
are born to hang are safe in the water."

So here's the deal:

In 2014, my wife Gail is sitting at her computer... the years of hanging
out with a techno-weenie transhumanist has had its effect ... and she says
to me," This Bitcoin thing,... It looks like the wave of the future, let's
invest some of the money in that." -- We had just sold our house in Canada
and had a couple a hundred grand hanging around, looking for a home. --
Barely acknowledging her comment, online and engrossed as usual, not even
looking up, I waved my hand and said, "Go for it."

Bitcoin had just crashed, ,,, er, "corrected"... from a first peak of
speculative frenzy which had taken it to a thousand, down to 200.  We
bought 80,000 dollars worth in tranches at 300, 400, and 600.

Then, a year or so later we sold a piece of property in Half Moon Bay for
100k,... just as Ethereum was emerging.  Caught up now in the
cryptocurrency frenzy, her Jewish gene up-regulated, Gail says to me,
"Let's buy some Ethereum."  I waved my hand as before, and we put 50k into
Ethereum at $12.  Do the math.  Gail might very well be some sort of
savant.  Me, I'm just lucky.

And so, I began a new life.

I saw the ICO phenomena emerging from the Ethereum project, and I saw an
opportunity.   Gail became a voracious consumer of cryptocurrency
information: my in-house research department.  We became a team.  I had
transhumanist projects to fund and I went out into the world looking for
someone to show me how to "stage" my ICO's.

I found a fellow in Pleasanton, 30 years experience in failed software
startups, SLAC veteran, robot hobbyist, my kind of guy.  He too had
recognized the opportunity, and was looking for a funding partner.  It was
a perfect match. We put our heads together, and came up with a plan to
stage an ICO to fund a cryptocurrency Investment bank, Pathfinder Equity
Systems... I'm the eccentric rich guy who writes the checks, he's the
experienced and grounded business guy who does the work.  "A drunkard's
dream if I ever did see one."  We launch in eight days or so.

In our first stage, we'll be processing ICO's for small and medium-sized
tech firms in Venture Capital portfolios.  Currently, the value in these
companies, and the VC's investments, are "trapped", unable to take the
final  leap to enhanced value by going public with a conventional ***IPO***
process.  That's where the cryptocurrecy-based ICO process comes into play,
offering an alternative route to: public trading, liberated liquidity,
enhanced company value, and investment recovery/profit extraction for the
VCs.

Here's our website:

http://www.icopathfinder.com/

And here's a link to a sponsored article in VentureBeat, for a more
detailed idea of what we're up to.

https://venturebeat.com/2017/09/29/reverse-icos-may-be-your-best-vc-portfolio-exit/

It gets better, way better.

Tomorrow: the Pathfinder Moonshot.  This is the good stuff.  You're gonna
love it.

Best, Jeff Davis

     "Everything's hard till you know how to do it."
                                           Ray Charles
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