IAC’s Incubator May Shift to Focus Heavily on Crypto

(Bloomberg) -- Barry Diller’s IAC/InterActive Corp. is considering shifting its incubator platform Newco to focus “heavily” on cryptocurrency, said Chief Executive Officer Joey Levin.

“Practices that have existed for decades or centuries are just going to be more efficient when done on a blockchain,” Levin said, speaking Tuesday at the online Bloomberg Deals Summit.

Levin said that IAC is aiming to start three to five businesses a year through Newco, whose current projects involve sports and gaming, health care and home renovation. While IAC prefers to build companies, Levin said “buying is going to be a more frequent and easier option.”

IAC is “definitely looking” at potential acquisitions in cryptocurrency but high valuations in the overall market will probably make such deals unlikely, he said.

“There is a significant amount of capital chasing companies right now. Price is definitely reflecting that.” Levin said. “I think it’s going to be very difficult to find anything that’s risk-adjusted and affordable.”

“People are presuming that everything goes to the moon and not everything does go to the moon,” he said.

Investors shouldn’t expect to see IAC spin off any companies anytime soon through special purpose acquisition vehicles, or SPACs, said Levin, adding that he isn’t “a SPAC fan.”

SPAC deals, in which a business goes public through a merger with the blank check companies, don’t make sense for IAC’s portfolio companies, he said.

“I don’t really see why you’d go through all that work to build a company and then hand over the keys at a critical point to somebody else,” he said.

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