Startup, Scaleup, Screwup.

6The Crowded Shadows

Learn about the benefits of Equity Crowdfunding and choose between the use of a crowdfunding platform or doing it all yourself.

 

It was one of the most unnerving times of my life. The solid black line that I plotted on a piece of paper that showed how much funding the crowd had pledged to our startup was rising slowly but steadily. It was a weekly agonizing ritual to extrapolate that line to the day of the deadline and check whether it would end just above our minimum crowdfunding target, or just below it. Every week, I added the new investors. Every week, the line went up. Sometimes just a little; sometimes a little bit more. I can still see the bite marks on my coffee cup.

I’ve done many stupid things in my life but, occasionally, I pride myself on having done something smart, often unintentionally. On the stupid side of this rather unbalanced scale, we find the psychopaths who I dated and the money I invested in cryptocurrencies. On the smart side, we find the Special-Purpose Vehicle (SPV) that I set up with the notary at the time I launched our company. An SPV is a legal entity in which many investors can be pooled and, when the SPV owns shares in a business, it is represented as just one line on the capitalization table of the company. Future investors in the company will appreciate this construction because, rather than dealing with many small shareholders ...