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Crowd funding, as most people know it, is a donation based way to raise money where individual people support a cause, an effort, an idea, a company, a product, or a person in whatever dream or vision they have. I saw the first formation of this with Kickstarter about two years ago and thought it was a brilliant idea. So I started looking at campaigns and offering my own funding support to select campaigns.
How Crowd Funding Has Expanded
As the industry of crowd funding has evolved and developed, it has expanded beyond “donations” to equity based investing, enabling companies to bring their products onto a crowd funding platform and raise equity with investors.
There are now a large variety of equity based crowd funding platforms that allow accredited investors to invest smaller amounts of money in individual companies as if it was a traditional venture capital fund.
It’s critical to recognize that today the SEC only allows crowd funding for equity investment to occur with accredited investors, which means you have to have income of at least $200,000 a year and/or net worth of $1 million, exclusive of your home or residence. So it’s for more experienced investors who have the financial capacity and risk tolerance to invest in early stage companies.
A key benefit of Crowd funding is how it democratizes the investment opportunity and moves it beyond the inner, small circle of top tier Venture Capital firms. Crowd funding allows an investor to make a smaller investment, sometimes as small as $1,000, into a company that they feel passionate about. This enables them to own shares in a company, having equity, and have an opportunity to participate in the economic gain and reward while feeling connected to the product or services.
The Development of Mindfull Crowd
As I saw this industry in its infancy developing, I recognized that this was the future for early stage funding. Over the last year we developed our own proprietary Crowd funding platform called Mindfull Crowd. We’re very excited about expanding our investments from our Venture fund, Mindfull Investors, to allow new accredited investors to participate investing alongside our Venture fund.
For many investments on Mindfull Crowd we often have our own investment in the company,where our money is “at risk” and we have “skin in the game”. With Mindfull Crowd we’re broadly sharing our investment process, acumen, and success which we’ve built up over the last 30 years with investors seeking to join us in funding the most innovative companies for our future. We’re allowing individual investors to invest a smaller amount of money and to choose companies they feel attracted to and really excited about.
They can choose to invest on Mindfull Crowd and benefit from our expertise in doing all the due diligence and being their steward and fiduciary for their investment, yet not requiring them to have an enormous amount of money committed to any one company.
What Mindfull Crowd Does
Through Mindfull Crowd, we create a special purpose vehicle where we create a limited partnership where the company has one investor, Mindfull Crowd. We represent all the investors that invest in the crowd to the company and reduce the cost, time and effort in dealing with a multitude of investors.
So the company has us as their contact and point person, instead of having dozens or hundreds of investors. We share updates with investors on the progress the company is making. We’re actively involved with each company on Mindfull Crowd, just like we are through our venture fund. We are extremely supportive and add great value to these companies well beyond just the capital investment we’re making. This is because of our investment experience, our industry know-how and relationships, and the active role we take with companies adding significant value to them and increasing their likelihood of success.
And, most importantly, we work with the companies over the long-term to enable them to achieve that success and create a liquidity event for investors. Mindfull Crowd is committed to working with the companies over two to seven years to create a successful outcome for the company and all the shareholders.
Why We Started Mindfull Crowd
We started Mindful Crowd believing that this is an investment platform enabling accredited to have access to VC quality investments, yet not have to invest millions of dollars in a fund. We believe investors will be best served and increase their chance of making a great investment return by investing with the Mindfull platform and our team that has great investment experience.
Our team and our platform, the Mindfull Crowd, has extraordinarily deep experience in the investment industry, along with a track record of success. We understand early stage investing and venture stage investing, the risks and the rewards and the way to create successful returns to investors. We realize that the key to the success of a company is first and foremost the team, the founders, and their ability to scale the business.
Having experience and learning from previous mistakes is vital and greatly increases the likelihood for success of our investments, the Mindfull Crowd, and the return to investors.
As crowd funding matures, I believe there will be more equity based crowd funding platforms that are vertical platforms, that will be specifically focused in target and niche areas. We at Mindfull are doing that from the start, where we believe our focus is in the area of leading edge, innovative technologies that have positive impact in our lives in the areas of health, environment, and lifestyle.
We’re focused on this specific segment of life impact technologies and believe that this is an area that’s got great promise, that’s greatly needed, and that will provide extremely compelling investment returns to investors—and most importantly, it’s the area where we have expertise, knowledge, and prior success.
How Do I Get Involved with Mindfull Crowd?
…As an investor
Very soon, you’ll be able to go on our website, MindfullCrowd.com and become a member by registering yourself. If you’re an accredited investor, you will be accepted. Membership is free, and once you become a member, you’ll get access to see the companies we’re working with. From there, you can decide for yourself if you’d like to be an investor, to join us, and if so, whatever dollar amount you want to invest.
…As an entrepreneur
As an entrepreneur, you can come to our website and you can post on our site an offering of your company for us to review. There is a template for you to fill in as an entrepreneur. The first criteria that needs to be met for us to consider a new company is that it must be in the area of health, the environment, and healthy lifestyle.
Then we’ll look at your team. We’ll look at the stage of your company. We’ll consider the amount of capital you’re seeking to raise. We’ll look at your current investor base. We’ll look at how far along you are in the process of growing your business and future needs of capital required to achieve success. And we’ll look at how it not only fits our themes and strategies, most importantly, we will look at how we can be engaged with your company and its founders to create a close relationship where we can add significant value to your business.