Crypto founders are getting very rich, very fast via secondary sales
The startup world celebrates stories of founders who scratch and claw for years and, finally, become multi-millionaires when the business they built goes public or is acquired. These tales of wealth are common in crypto too—though the path to a big payday is often much shorter.
Case in point: Bam Azizi founded crypto payments firm Mesh in 2020, and this August raised $130 million in a so-called Series B funding round. In the ordinary course of things, capital raised in a Series A or Series B round goes almost entirely to fund a startup’s growth. But in this case, the round included at least $20 million for Azizi himself.
The payout came via secondary sales, which entail investors purchasing shares held by the founder or…
