Crowd Sourced Venture Capitalism

victusspiritus.com

4 points·messel··4 comments

I'm a little puzzled by this piece. From the title I was expecting to read a proposal for a crowdsourced venture firm - a firm that made collective investment decisions and was funded my a large pool of people. There are big legal and practical hurdles, of course, to such an arrangement.

Upon a second read it sounds like the author is actually suggesting a large pool of people getting together and being some sort of LP at a VC. That's even more far fetched.

Anyone think of a way something along these lines could work?

If you're not familiar with covestor I can see the confusion (in addition I'm never quite good enough at communicating my ideas).

The idea is to pool resources from a large body, and to have several existing, experienced and effective venture firms do the actual investing. The results of the venture firms are public and trackable, and the crowd can vote up or down, or comment on the firms while tracking all the startups that are invested in.

I realize that the legal and practical hurdles exist, but I'd be willing to pool 5-10k and invest in a solid VC with a few hundred thousand other folks. Right now all I can do is look to mutual funds (blech!) or stocks (long term not a bad way to go).

I believe there's some measurable boost to having a few hundred thousand folks pulling for your startup.

There ought to be a word for when a proposed solution has suggestions on how to fix everything but the actual hard part. And then handwaves the actual hard part away.

delusion (I prefer the term rose colored glasses).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com