US House Votes in Favor of Crowdfund Investing!

One word …. AMAZING!  The debate was amazing and the vote was AWESOME – 407 to 17!  I can’t believe in only 9 short months we went from “hey we’ve got a framework and a solution” to a bill that just passed the US House of Representatives!

We owe a HUGE debt of gratitude to the AMAZING group of people who made this a reality thus far:

1) Karen Kerrigan at the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council, for listening to me and putting up with my nonsense!

2) Whoopi Goldberg and Tom Leonardis who first publicly spoke out in favor of our idea and got slammed for it. … Guess 96% of Congress agrees with you/us! 😉

3) Angus Loten at the Wall Street Journal for deciding the subject was newsworthy enough in our early days to write about it in the WSJ?!?!

4) Kevin Lawton who wrote The Crowdfunding Revolution and provided major contributions to my testimonies and the Startup Exemption framework.

5) Paul  Spinrad, Jenny Kassan & Danae Ringelmann (of IndieGoGo) who wrote the first petition to the SEC to make equity-based crowdfunding legal.  Paul also provided incredible input in the testimonies and framework.

6) Chairman Darrell Issa who so graciously took 20 minutes after the May hearing to talk one-on-one with me about crowdfunding as a solution.   Peter Haller & Hudson Hollister for pushing the idea forward.

7) Doug Rand from the White House who reached out to us and included our proposal as part of the President’s Jobs Act.  That’s bipartisan support!

8) And the AMAZING Chairman Patrick McHenry for calling the Crowdfunding hearing, writing the legislation, entering it into record, deliberating over TWO committee hearings, bringing together ideas from both sides, passionately debating it on the floor today and pulling off a 96% bipartisan win in the US House of Representatives!!!  Also a shout out to Dana Mauriello for her awesome testimony at the September Crowdfunding hearing!

And most importantly to my cohorts JASON BEST and ZAK CASSADY-DORION without whom NONE OF THIS WOULD HAVE happened!  As Jason said, “we were naive enough to think we could challenge the status quo and make a difference.  Look at what happened?”

WE AREN’T DONE! … Off to the SENATE … Stay tuned because we have our own big news on this front coming out in the next 24 hours!!

THANK YOU EVERYONE!

Sherwood