Two years after the Federal government passed the JOBS Act, legalizing crowdfunding the sale of startup equity, the law sits idle, awaiting a final set of regulations from the SEC. Here in the State of Washington, we grew tired of waiting, passed the Washington Jobs Act, and are moving forward toward legal equity crowdfunding for Washington companies and residents. The last step in that process...
Putting aside the impact for a moment… for early-stage impact investors, how can there be a reasonable return on investment if there are little to no 10x’s to be found? A bit of analysis and a surprising answers…
Less than 0.4% of American startups are funded by venture capitalists. We know this thanks to the measurement and reporting of the venture capital industry and the Kauffman Foundation. 2,000 companies were reported to receive their first round of venture capital, out of a bit more than 500,000 new companies created annually. (Both of these are U.S. statistics). Investments by Angel investors are...
Yesterday I attended and spoke at a great investor event set up by Element8, “Investing a World With Few Exits“. The event kicked off with an amazing summary by Rob Wiltbank, which not only reprised his conclusions from his groundbreaking research on Angel investing, but included analysis on new data sets he has been collecting. The key learning continues to hold true. In the...
This weekend I broke ground on book #7 in the series, The Next Step: The Realities of Startup Funding. The key lesson is that for startups, money is time. Or more specifically, money buys your a faster time to market and a potentially faster path to profits. This is not how venture capitalists or Angel investors talk about money. For them, money is fuel. Which, from their perspective, is true...
Green Lines Series | Michael “Luni” Libes, Founder & Managing Director, of B Corp Certified Fledge Posted on 04/08/2014 by Kerrie Mullaney | Leave a comment Our team met up with Michael “Luni” Libes for a one on one interview to find out more about the successful entrepreneur and the driving force behind Fledge. Read along to find out more about what inspires Luni to support young...
Nearly two years after Washington D.C. passed the JOBS Act, which legalized crowdfunding of startup fund raising, the law goes unused, awaiting a final set of regulations from the SEC. With no end to that process in sight, we here in Washington State took matters into our own hands, and last month passed the Washington Jobs Act, an intrastate crowdfunding law. This law will allow any Washington...
Today was a typical day. Big pile of email, including two wantrapreneurs looking for feedback on their ideas, stand-up status meeting with the current “fledglings”, a few one-on-ones with those CEOs, a few asks throughout the day from those teams, and a few quick meetings with graduate fledglings and one of my other mentees. Two and a half years into this new career of providing guidance and...
By this definition we have at least 2.6 billion deep sinners – the 37% of people in the world who live on less than $2 a day. They are the future Steve Jobs’, Mohandas Gandhis, Madame Curies and Pablo Picassos who will instead eke out a living as drug dealers, child soldiers, prostitutes and destitute slum dwellers. The three trillion dollars or more we have wasted in misguided development aid...
A few years ago, Alexander Osterwalder invented a new way to talk about and visualize business models, creating the Business Model Canvas. This tool has made it far easier for entrepreneurs to understand, iterate and communicate their business models. I’ve taught the Canvas to hundreds of entrepreneurs and business owners, and found it quite useful. However, every time I did so, the...
