We have a problem and we need YOUR HELP. Everyone we met with last week after the rally said the same thing: “If you don’t get this bill passed in the Senate by the end of the year, you will have no chance of passing it at all because 2012 is an election year.â€Â If you read no further, please click this link to identify your Senators, call them and tell them “I support HR2930, the Crowdfunding Bill as a solution to getting capital flowing to community entrepreneurs so that we can create jobs!†It may sound crazy but grass roots calls are powerful.
12 months ago, everyone said allowing an entrepreneur to go to his friends, family and community to raise small amounts of capital to fund their startup or small business would never be made legal. After the last 9 months of work, we have proven there IS a market for Crowdfund Investing (CFI) and that President Obama, the US House of Representatives, the Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council and the US Chamber of Commerce all agree. Crowdfund investing is a part of the solution to the jobs crisis.
Now the problem, the SEC, State regulators and special interests with DEEP pockets and tons of influence are throwing a full-frontal assault at the Senate to stop our progress and they are using fear mongering by spreading nonspecific threats of fraud!
They are marketing “fraud†because, like sex, it sells newspapers. They want you to focus on some seemly scary generic issue from the past rather than focusing on how today’s technology, Internet and social media can identify winning ideas and fund them. They don’t want you to focus on how crowdfunding by nature will expose fraud and they are avoiding the basic way all investors are taught to protect themselves against loss, DIVERSIFICATION. WHY? To protect their turf and dollars.
How can they claim their number one concern is ‘investor protection’ when they haven’t brought anyone to justice for the financial meltdown?  According to their argument, the financial markets should have ceased to exist with the 2008 financial meltdown because of fraud and loss of investor confidence. However, the markets DIDN’T stop functioning because people understand the risks and rewards of investing, especially over the long-term.  Why then, do special interests treat CFI any different?  CFI will do a much better job at backing winning ideas with money, experience, knowledge, marketing power and investor protection than any one investment an individual makes in a Fortune 500 company or someone they don’t know who comes to them with a Reg D offering.
Fraud historically has been one-to-one.  The principals of crowdfunding are based on many-to-many communication in an OPEN DIALOG where NO investor will partake if an entrepreneur hasn’t won over the confidence of the crowd. We’d love to think that crowdfunding has the ability to finance 100% of the ideas, but history shows that only 40% of the ideas will be successful in raising money via CFI. Not every idea is great and the crowd is able to determine this. That’s what we call investor protection at work.
They tell us to our faces they are willing to work with us but their quotes in the media reveal the opposite. They need to join the Internet Age.  The way we did things in the past is NOT the way we will do them in the future.  They need to look at how we mitigate fraud through crowd-vetting.  Understand that social media is based on connectivity and trust.  And using the principles of crowdfunding we can get a limited amount of capital from our friends, family and community to innovate, create jobs and not be left behind China!
We need more of your support to stop the nonsense.  We need your financial support to help offset the costs (travel, marketing, additional rallying, etc) of getting the message to the Senate (Jason, Zak and I as well as Karen Kerrigan of the SBE Council have been incurring all the costs on our own). We also need you to call your Senators and tell them you are in favor of the Crowdfunding bill that went thru the house, HR 2930.  We aren’t looking for long-term financing. This bill either passes by the end of the year or dies for good as everyone in Washington told us. Remember January 1st is the beginning of an election year. The special interests are banking on the fact that we don’t have the interest, support or money of those that this would most benefit. We need to prove them wrong!
Please donate here:
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