This is Part 3 of "The New Face of Venture Capital". It talks about the imminent "big bang" of crowd-funding in startups and content creation due to startups becoming a public asset class. When Wall Street gets involved, things move. This could easily be a 1000x force-multiplier for crowd-funding.

1. The Big Bang of Crowd Funding: Startups as a Public Asset Class Kevin Lawton July 1, 2010 http://www.trendcaller.com/ Part 3 of “The New Face of Venture Capital”

2. Crowd-funding's future is way bigger than Kiva! As of the time of writing, Kiva has facilitated $145M in loans. The 1000th entry on the 2010 Fortune-1000 list (by revenue) had a yearly revenue of $1.5B, or ~10x Kiva's total lending! Crowd-funding today is a tiny & nascent funding model, but it's about to experience a “big bang” that will change the face of startup and content creation -- when it becomes Wall Street's playground . But 1st, let's look at the why the crowd is such a catalytic force...

7. Prediction markets exemplify this From a Predictify talk , the general (1 st graphic) vs the performance-weighted crowd (2 nd graphic) on the outcome of the Republican presidential primaries:

13. The ultimate: a public asset class!

16. Evolution of crowd-funding Current crowd-funding solutions are serving early phase (concept/seed stage) startup/product creation. But the crowd can do a better job at valuations at any stage, can provide matching of service providers, etc., and ... As crowd-investing becomes heterogeneous (all the sizes of players participate), then... Seed --> Series A --> Series B --> ... Why are there any limits to how far it can grow?

17. The battle is not VC vs the Crowd VC will be forced to integrate with the crowd. Anyways, VC is only satisfying a tiny % of startup capital demands. Within the crowd, the battle is human vs. the machine. Will people or machines pick the best crowd startup investments? And which crowd vehicles & services will win? The crowd provides a fertile new ecosystem; a lot of change is occurring and a lot more is coming. Get ready... “ To build a new system you don't compete with the old one, you build a new system that makes the old one obsolete” -Buckminster Fuller

18. Now about the SEC… The USA is currently ill positioned to take advantage of the immense growth and innovation machine that the crowd unlocks. One effort to change this recently produced an SEC Petition , now open to comments ( instructions for submitting comments ). The petition was drafted by the Sustainable Economies Law Center and was crowd-funded using IndieGoGo. You can follow that effort on the Change Crowdfunding Law blog (or better yet the mailing list). They’re petitioning for an exemption of securities offerings up to $100,000 with $100 maximum per investor. Now is a great time for the crowd to speak…

19. TrendCaller.com Kevin Lawton Author of the book: “ The CrowdFunding Revolution | Social Networking Meets Venture Financing ”