zooko & ian, I hope as astute marketers you will understand for every person who makes the effort to complain there may be 100 others who agree with vlad and Trashman but don’t make the effort to give you feedback. And I hope you understand that (despite ostensibly English not being vlad’s native language) he is communicating to you that the ideology in the market of Bitcoin is that it is a community investment in bettering our world and that there shall not exist centralized parasites, not the Federal Reserve central bank nor investors. Again Zooko, I advise you give your investors a % of the corporation and you can raise funding for the corporation and service corporate needs for your technology. Simultaneously you could launch a general use Zcash that is targeted to the Bitcoin market and that community’s ideological sentiments, which can be orthogonal to your efforts to apply your technologies to corporate markets (or even somewhat integrated but not integrated from the funding perspective), and such could also serve to demonstrate that your company is the expert on this technology which can drive the funding of the corporation by venture capital investment (probably coming from the corporations that want you to invest in applying your technology to OpenLedger or other projects applicable to corporate needs).
I think Ethereum has shown that the Bitcoin community stands ready to buy into an ICO to the tune of $millions if you can demonstrate a superstar team of developers and clearly communicate your strategy for the Zcash ecosystem, so that speculators are enthused about the potential ROI. And then these speculators become cheerleaders for Zcash doing your PR for you at a viral scale that you can’t do otherwise.
For as long as the speculators can see the lion’s share of the ICO money is going to fund the develpoers, then the community that supported Ethereum will not likely complain (even though there will be some others who will complain if the launch isn’t a “fair” launch of debasement, but I’ve explained that it is silly to give that $ away to the electric and hardware companies who have no vested interested in Zcash’s development).
Also it seems to me that if you can show ICO funds have been stored in specific BTC addresses which are then maintained for the duration that the funds have not yet been spent on development, then you can effectively show that the funds were not used to purchase Zcash coins and thus the community will know your group is not controlling a large share of the coins.
An ICO presents some legal issues w.r.t. to the SEC regulations if you allow US investors to purchase. For this, you really need to consult an attorney. IANAL.
Edit: and if you are going to do an ICO, I urge you to do asap, because one theory is we are going into another liquidity contagion downturn worse than 2008 which may start as soon as May or maybe as late as 2017. It is quite possible that the altcoin market will go comatose. You would thus be advised to get funding now asap and not take coins from mining over an extended period of time. To be stable developers, you should not also be speculators. Remember that! I learned that the hard way in the past.