Ask HN: My company plans an ICO despite my opposition as CTO, any advice?
I&#x27;m in my late 20s. It&#x27;s been almost 4 years since we founded our startup company. We pitched for a year and eventually gathered enough investment to give it a go. The initial plan was to release our app in the local market (middle east) and aim for more users. At the end of first year, with the approval of the board, we decided to delay marketing spending for more development to polish existing features as well as to add more ones. We revoked one feature (not ads) which would provide early cash flow as it turned out to be too ambitious and rash.<p>We pivoted and decided to go global with our proven to be fun features highlighted. It went smooth and retention rates grew tremendously until finally the day for series A arrived. The lead investor (the one with the most equity) already hinted that he would be willing to invest, some others followed as well. They are all angels btw.<p>Mails exchanged, meetings happened, places were visited and it turned out what we can gather is not enough to handle marketing costs for aimed growth. We contacted people from crowd equity funding companies. Apparently, none of them is currently accepting applicants from our country.<p>During our last meeting, the board discussed the idea of an initial coin offering. Some of our investors are crypto enthusiasts and many of them think it is a good idea to fund a project publicly with tokens. The thing is, our product doesn&#x27;t resemble anything like a currency, not even a commodity in my opinion. It sounds unnaturally arbitrary to have tokens inside our app, or a token with our app&#x27;s branding on top. Moreover, as someone who is the most technically proficient person in the board, I can easily deduce that all the proposals about hows and whys of the ICO resembles an obfuscated fraud. I couldn&#x27;t believe what I heard that day and it seems I am the only one who thinks that way.<p>I plan to spend my all remaining days until the next meeting to prepare the hugest report ever written, hoping it will prove that it is the worst idea we ever discussed. As my voting rights being limited, I have no idea what to do if my report doesn&#x27;t stop its happening. I still need to work for a year to permanently gain rights on my own equity. If I quit now, I&#x27;ll lose everything except the lessons learned during these 4 years.<p>My question is, what would you do?