Howard Marks
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
But Bitcoin came out in January 2009.
Before that, it turns out all the virtual currencies were in games.
So for example, you would go in a game and you get a sword.
It's worth $50,000.
What a sword.
And then you would sell it to someone else for in-game currency or actually cash on PayPal.
And so the game industry, in a way, from where I come from,
For us, virtual currency, cryptocurrency, that was already in existence.
Well, it's a great story.
What happened was
We were in the software business.
At that point, I don't know if you remember, CD-ROM software, personal computers.
That was a world totally different than today.
You had the computers at home and the computers at work.
They were not the same.
And we were looking for a business to grow.
And we saw Activision as a publicly traded company on the NASDAQ going bankrupt, having a huge problem with their cash flow.
They had over close to $20 million in debt.
They had no cash.
They were bleeding.