The Crowdfunding Revolution: How to Raise Venture Capital Using Social Media

by Kevin Lawton, Dan Marom

Overview

THE GROUNDBREAKING NEW METHOD FOR RAISING VENTURE CAPITAL THROUGH SOCIAL NETWORKS

“The declaration of independence for our industry!”
—MAT DELLORSO, WealthForge Inc.

“The Crowdfunding Revolution should be on the mandatory reading list for everybody active in the industry or for everyone who’s planning to be.”
—CROWDFUND NEWS

“Kevin Lawton and Dan Marom have done a great job. . . . A must-read for everybody entering the field of crowdfunding!”—GIJSBERT KOREN, Smarter Money

“We recommend this book highly to anyone who is fascinated by this new methodology for funding projects and endeavors. . . . A wonderful read.”
—BRIAN MEECE, RocketHub

“Read this book if you want to catch the next wave!”
—FRED BRYANT, WealthForge Inc.

“A must-read for anyone interested in the early stage funding process.”
—MANDAR KULKARNI, pluggd.in

“The Crowdfunding Revolution offers fundraising inspiration for small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs.”
—BUSINESS2COMMUNITY

“The Crowdfunding Revolution offers fundraising inspiration for small business owners and aspiring entrepreneurs.”
—SMALL BUSINESS TRENDS

YOUR POOL OF INVESTORS JUST INCREASED BY 2 BILLION . . .

Since the day the first human being approached a prospective investor, the province of capital allocation has been controlled by a small and entrenched minority.

All this has changed. Now, the power of the Internet—particularly social media—enables anyone to connect with more investors in less time than it used to take to connect with one. The investing pool is open, everyone is in—and The Crowdfunding Revolution shows how to get to the forefront of the new world of venture financing.

This groundbreaking guide explains how the explosive growth of connectivity is obviating human-to-human networks and centralized planning of capital allocation—and describes how crowdfunding can be used to tap into a “collective intelligence” for far superior results.

Providing a wealth of information that will make your crowdfunding efforts more efficient and productive, the book is organized into three thematic sections:

THE ROAD HERE: A thorough overview of what crowdfunding is—and how and why this radical new approach is replacing traditional means of venture financing
THE CROWDFUNDING CAMPAIGN: Proven methods for marketing to the crowd, setting clear objectives, building a crowdfunding team, and communicating in a way that inspires action
THE ROAD AHEAD: The crowdfunding ecosystem, intellectual property issues, mining collective IQ, new investment models, and regulations

More than 2 billion people globally are now active online—and that number is guaranteed to grow at an extraordinary rate. The Crowdfunding Revolution explains all the ins and outs of raising investment capital by using social media and new technologies to draw small sums of money from an almost countless number of sources.

Organic. Transparent. Decentralized. This is crowdfunding. This is the future. Read The Crowdfunding Revolution and become the first expert in your crowd on this radical new approach poised to supplant age-old venture financing methods.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780071790468
Publisher:	McGraw Hill LLC
Publication date:	12/07/2012
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	224
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

KEVIN LAWTON is a progenitor of PC virtualization, many-time start-up entrepreneur, trend-caster, and business/technical blogger. He contributes to VentureBeat, SeekingAlpha, and Huffington Post.
DAN MAROM is a PhD candidate in finance at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a strategic consultant to leading institutions and companies.

Read an Excerpt

THE CROWD-FUNDING REVOLUTION

HOW TO RAISE VENTURE CAPITAL USING SOCIAL MEDIA

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By KEVIN LAWTON, DAN MAROM

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2013Kevin Lawton and Dan Marom
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-07-179045-1

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Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

THE RISE OF THE CROWD

If Facebook were a country, it would be the 3rd most populated. —TechXav

The Group of Seven (G-7), an international organization established to facilitate economic cooperation, dates back to the member nations' summit meetings circa 1975, but it was officially established in 1985, not that long before the commercialized Internet was born. In the ensuing decades after its establishment, a lot has happened on the global economic scene, including the expansion of the group to become the G-20, representing 20 of the world's major economies. But another important trend, at least as profound, has been growing: the number of Internet users in the world has grown to over 2 billion, out of a total population of 7 billion. If we utilize the number of Internet users as a proxy for sizing the available Earthly "crowd," then we have already in essence implicitly formed the Group of 2 Billion (G-2 Billion). And given the current rate of Internet penetration and population growth, in just a few years or so, we may have in just three decades transitioned from the G-7 to the G-7 Billion.

This isn't creative hyperbole. Use of the crowds has disrupted or has begun to disrupt an extraordinary number of business and social activities. Until the more recent crowdfunding trend emerged, many uses of the connected crowd were referred to under the more encompassing rubric of "crowdsourcing," a term coined by Jeff Howe in his 2006 Wired magazine article "The Rise of Crowdsourcing." Conceptually, crowdsourcing using the connected crowd has been in use for much longer than the term crowdsourcing has existed. Perhaps one of the earliest and most high-impact examples is the free software and open source movements that now power many of the world's websites. In fact, free and open source software development has been ongoing since long before the Commercial Internet Age, back when, as your author can attest to, e-mail had to be addressed through an ugly predetermined routing path (the "bang path" for you cadre).

It's hardly surprising that the earliest adopters of what we now think of as crowdsourcing were technology enthusiasts: technology was much harder to use, and enthusiasts were close enough to the technology to be aware of its potentials. Equally as unsurprising were the motivations of the early adopters, which are perhaps better expressed by asking the contrary "Why wouldn't they?" Human nature has always driven people to seek others with common interests and to commune in those areas of interest, as embodied in the proverbial "Birds of a feather, flock together," the essence of which dates back at least to the Greek philosopher Democritus (circa 460 BC). The latent urge has always been there, and the Internet (even prior to its commercialization) has served to merely open up the playing field to a much larger group. Opening up the playing field it did, as the Internet-enabled open source movement built an ever-increasing momentum and entered the mainstream in the late 1990s and early 2000s, coincidental with the general technology initial public offering (IPO) bubble. It received the most flattering of endorsements any newcomer could hope for by the incumbents, being called a "cancer," "communism," "hype," and all kinds of other terms of validation, especially when emanating from big players who would otherwise not waste their breath. Remember the Ghandi-esque "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win"? Open source was already in the third phase by then.

Today, Microsoft has a web page dedicated to open source, but at the time it was launched, Microsoft took a very different tone: "We recognize the value of working with others ...," which the company wrote out in a familiar and personalized handwriting style, as if on a chalkboard. Well, we now live in a world in which the power and value in collaboration are much more widely respected.

What's been interesting about the name-calling, across the social networking spectrum from open source to crowdfunding, is that they all got it wrong. A more apropos term might better have been "community-ism" because that's what it is—decentralized, self-determined community clusters woven into the tapestry of the greater whole. Communism, by contrast, is when community is centralized, intermediated, and dictated to by a hierarchical bureaucracy. Or in other words, it uses a power structure that often resembles, at least in spirit, the place where an overwhelming percentage of the name-callers come from.

As the web revolutionized the general population's access to information and to each other, and as it made doing so increasingly easier, opportunity costs dropped. What happened to open source happened similarly to a broader class of crowdsourcing and other forms of accessing the general crowd. Mobile phone penetration exploded, and the phones got smarter including offering access to the web. Innovations in personal computers and their portability continued to accumulate, and personal computers morphed into netbooks, tablets, and other form factors. Mobile data plans, WiFi, Internet terminals at libraries, coffee shops, and airports—and more recently Internet-enabled TVs that have applications much the same as personal computers—all are part of the wave of increasing connectivity that has fueled the crowd. And there is absolutely no mystery in any of this—the power of the crowd is essentially a mathematical inverse function of opportunity costs (including lack of access). Technology and Internet access have changed everything.

Wikipedia is one of the most publicly visible "crown jewel" achievements of crowdsourcing, involving massive and organic orchestration. But behind the scenes, search engines such as Google feed on even more massive and yet implicitly crowdsourced information—the web of intersite references (links) on the Internet. Kiva popularized crowdsourced microlending to entrepreneurs across the globe for the purpose of alleviating poverty. CrowdSPRING and 99designs offer crowdsourced graphic design. Springwise crowdsources business idea spotting. The Google Translator Kit mixes artificial intelligence (AI) and crowdsourced language translation. kaChing and Covestor crowdsource finding investment managers. The pilot Peer To Patent project opens the patent examination process to public participation, and it has been trialed with some successes in the United States, Japan, and Australia. Even in the quant hedge fund industry, there is Algodeal, which allows people to build their own quant strategies on their platform—Algodeal allocates money to the best strategies and lets the algorithm authors share in the profits!6

A relatively exhaustive list of crowdsourcing efforts would be an enormous undertaking; a shorter list might be one that itemizes the industries which have not been subject to crowdsourcing. On the long list of the industries that have used crowdsourcing are drug discovery, oil and gas research, search for extraterrestrial life, Mars crater analysis, map and traffic information construction, restaurant and movie ratings, T-shirt design, problem solving, executive recruiting, web usability testing, fashion design, news, and photography. And it was only a matter of time: there is now a crowd conference, billed as "the world's first conference on the future of distributed work," and a crowd consortium. Many people and organizations now recognize the value of working with others.

The Dynamic Duo: Social and Physical Technologies

Conceptually, the collective wisdom and power of the crowd dates back to at least the days of Plato in ancient Greece, where dialogue was the es
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from THE CROWD-FUNDING REVOLUTION by KEVIN LAWTON, DAN MAROM. Copyright © 2013 by Kevin Lawton and Dan Marom. Excerpted by permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc..
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Part | I The Road Here
Chapter | 1 The Rise of the Crowd
The Dynamic Duo: Social and Physical Technologies
Affinity Groups
Participation and the New Pro-sumer Class
The Response to the Loss of Social Capital
The New Crowd-ployment Paradigm
The Crowd-poration
Chapter | 2 The Decline of Established Financing
The Rate of Change
The Durability of Expertise
A Multidisciplinary World
Market Time Compression
Capital Efficiency and the Rolling Close
Macroeconomic Sensitivity
The Start-Ups’ Response
The Venture Capital Industry’s Response
The Market Sizing Fallacy
The Base of the Funding Pyramid
Chapter | 3 The Decline of Outlier Identification
Curation: The New Leadership
Chapter | 4 The Emergence of Early Financing
Chapter | 5 The Rise of Crowdfunding
At the Edge of Chaos
Do It With Others (DIWO)
Critical Mass
The New Ritual, the New Status
Rivers Without Cascades
Valuations
Long Tails and Shrinking Heads
Gender Equalization
Part | II The Crowdfunding Campaign
Chapter | 6 Benefits
Money
Marketing
Participation and Emotional Attachment
Currying Serendipity
Returns, Rewards, and Perks
Chapter | 7 The Artful Ask
Authenticity: Keeping It Real
Impact and Appeal
The Team
Clear Goals
Starting Fires with Influencers and Core Fans
Rewards and Perks
Chapter | 8 The Journey
Follow Inspiration with Massive Action
Drive Traffic with Social Networking
Motivate Your Network: Keep Them Involved
Part | III The Road Ahead
Chapter | 9 Infrastructure and Ecosystems
The Power of Virtual Infrastructure
The Ecosystem
The Power of Tags
Integration and Evolution in the Ecosystem
When Dartboards Are Better Than Groupthink
Funding the Way the Market Wants It
Solving the Hoarding Dilemma
Kicking It Downstream
Intellectual Property Entanglements
Chapter | 10 Prediction Markets and Mining the Collective IQ
Diversity Matters
The Performance-tocracy
What’s an Expert?
Trendspotting
The Market Is the New Seniority
Prediction Markets Commoditized
Chapter | 11 The Intersection with Crowdsourcing
No Network, No Funding
Crowdfunding Crowdsourced Ideas
The Crowdfunding and Crowdsourcing Nexus
Chapter | 12 The New Investment Models
Venture Capital Meets Crowd Capital
Incubators and the Crowd
Crowd Capital Meets Crowd Capital
Donations First, Investments Later
Here Comes Wall Street
A New Capital Allocation Mechanism
At the Community Level
Grants and the Arts
Reinvigorating the Community
The Virtual Tech Hub
Chapter | 13 Regulation and Policy Status
The Current State of Affairs
United States
The Crowdfund Intermediary Regulatory Advocates (CFIRA)
Crowdfunding Professional Association (CfPA)
National Crowdfunding Association (NLCFA)
Europe
International
Chapter | 14 Regulation and Policy Directions
Pray for Much Failure
Taxes, Taxes, Taxes
Patents and Crowdfunding Platforms
The IP Landscape
The Velocity of Innovation and the Effects of the IP System
A Perpetual Motion Machine of Innovation
Epilogue
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Authors
Index