Why did one of TechCrunch’s longest-serving editors leave a media giant for a bitcoin startup? For outgoing East Coast editor John Biggs , the answer is that he’s been leading one already in his spare time for the last year. Peer-to-peer payments startup Freemit has been Biggs’ passion project since December 2014, and the company has since raised more than $150,000 from angel investors, according to data from Crunchbase .
Still, Biggs is just now making the leap to Freemit full-time, leaving his job late last month at a company he’d been with for nearly 10 years. According to Biggs, it was now or never.
"I basically quit because I knew that, first off startups are either time consuming or they’re not, and if you don’t make them time-consuming, you lose focus. I figured it’s time for a bit more hustle, it’s time for more focus," he told CoinDesk.
Biggs suggested his departure was due to his confidence in the Freemit product, the team that built it and the size of the opportunity he believes the bitcoin industry has to disrupt financial incumbents.
Biggs said: "We’re in a bind, right now, because banks aren’t going to change to support the things we want them to support, especially faster cross-border payments. They already make a lot of money, and are quote-unquote good at it. My concern is they’re going to keep status quo until someone changes that status quo." In interview, Biggs went on to suggest that the move is likely to precede a period of more frequent announcements from the stealth startup, which he said could soon open to users.
Biggs said Freemit could open to an initial batch of as many as 7,000 beta users this month as part of what he called a "staged rollout".
He indicated that Freemit is watching the ongoing […]
