I was involved with one of the bigger ICO right at the beginning of the ICO craze. I had pretty regular conversations with the project founder and was in talks to become the dev evangelist. The project had raised ~$5 million in ETH (this is when ETH was trading around $80). Despite the fact that this project had raised a crazy amount of money the whole project was being conceptualized and coded by a single 23 old guy who was promising features that much larger projects with teams of the best people in the field were yet to solve. Not to mention the project was blatantly lying about it's PoW algorithm.
When I tried to point out that the project should use some of that money to organize the software engineering aspect the founder got pissed off with me accusing me of trying to run the project. They had a second round and raised even more money (in addition to the insane capgains on their first round).
I check the github from time to time and it appears they've got at least 2 other devs involved and may actually bring a blockchain to market but this doesn't hide that fact that the project needed nowhere near the amount of money they raised. Hell they could've used a couple hundred grand from the first round and literally just paid a team of people to build the blockchain for them. did I get off of a gravy train? Yes. But there are more things to life than money.
When I tried to point out that the project should use some of that money to organize the software engineering aspect the founder got pissed off with me accusing me of trying to run the project. They had a second round and raised even more money (in addition to the insane capgains on their first round).
I check the github from time to time and it appears they've got at least 2 other devs involved and may actually bring a blockchain to market but this doesn't hide that fact that the project needed nowhere near the amount of money they raised. Hell they could've used a couple hundred grand from the first round and literally just paid a team of people to build the blockchain for them. did I get off of a gravy train? Yes. But there are more things to life than money.