Sirin Labs is an open source technology company and the creator of the ERC20 coin, SIRIN LABS Token (SRN). Sirin Labs has developed Finney, a mobile phone based on the blockchain technology, which is planned to be available to consumers in 2018. In December 2017, Sirin Labs successfully raised $157 million via their ICO, which is by far the third best ICO of all time, behind the ICOs of Tezos and Filecoin.
On this webinar, Moshe Hogeg, the founder of Sirin Labs, offered advice to those looking to run a successful ICO. Throughout this article, we will present some of the most important points discussed by Moshe during the webinar.
- Sirin Labs has a team of 50 employees, which includes 40 engineers. The company's team developed their whitepaper after analyzing the whitepapers of other successful ICOs. After writing their ICO whitepaper, they shared it with their advisers, including Ethereum's co-creator, Steven Nerayoff.
- Sirin Labs pitched two kind of investors: investors from the cryptocurrency ecosystem itself and investors with non-crypto (fiat) money. They managed to raise around $20 million from non-crypto investors. A considerable percentage of the money raised came from Japanese investors.
- Even though people may tell you to pay for moderators to help you with your Telegram group, Sirin Labs moderated theirs by themselves throughout the ICO. They set up shifts to cover the whole three month ICO and used the company's engineers as the moderators of the Telegram group. The reason they did this is that as members of the crypto community are very smart, they were receiving questions that required real professionals to answer them. Their engineers managed to offer excellent answers to every single question they received. Today, the company's Telegram community has over 8,500 people.
- Sirin Labs was also open to American token buyers. The company's board thought that if they blocked America from participating, it would be like saying that they are doing something wrong. They already have stores offering their product for sale and they already sold 25,000 Finney phones through the pre-order phase. Therefore, they opened the door to American token buyers with the help of some American law firms. Sirin Labs didn't talk to the SEC directly, but their lawyers talked to them on weekly basis on the industry in general.
- Sirin Labs only sold a small percentage of the raised cryptocurrency (bitcoin and ether) to use to keep their project going. They are storing the remainder in the form of ether, bitcoin, and EOS.
These were some of the most important points discussed by Moshe during the webinar. You can listen to the whole webinar in the video below:
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSkjurLM_SI[/embed]