Wefunder - We help everyone invest as little as $100 in their favorite startups

Software

We give everyone the opportunity to invest as little as $100 in top startups. We helped pass the JOBS Act in 2012. We built a beautiful product during our time at Y Combinator. We've funded 50+ startups with over $6 million from accredited investors. And now we're waiting for the SEC to implement the JOBS Act, so anyone - no matter how wealthy - can invest

We've funded over 50 startups currently valued at over $700 million. Here are some of our favorites!

We built Wefunder for ourselves. The three of us — Nick, Mike, and Greg — always wanted to invest in our favorite startups. But until 2012, laws written in the 1930's prevented us from doing so. You don't feel a sense of meaning when you buy a share of IBM — it's purely a financial transaction. But startups? For us, the opportunity to support entrepreneurs trying to change the world, and still have a chance of earning a return...well, that's value beyond money. We could give back

2012: Lobbying Congress In January of 2012, we built a prototype of Wefunder. The only problem: it was illegal. The legislation that would legalize crowdfunding was stalled in the Senate, and needed some serious changes for it to work in practice

So Mike and Nick launched a petition to Congress that, within 2 days, earned $5M in pledges and was mentioned on the Senate floor. That got us some attention. A week later, the entire team was invited to Washington DC to meet with the staffs of two Senators, a Congressman, and the President's Office. Amazingly, with no inside connections, we had become the public voice in DC for democratizing startup investing

For the next few months, we embraced our role as lobbyists. We helped with the speeches of one Senator and wrote part of the official legislative "letter of intent" provided to the SEC to guide their rulemaking

On April 5th, President Obama signed the JOBS Act into law, legalizing equity crowdfunding. Mike was invited to attend the signing ceremony at the White House, while the rest of the team celebrated while working in Thailand

2013-2014: "Wealthy Crowdfunding" Once the legislation passed, we got back to work. We built out the product, became registered investment advisors, and worked through a host of legal issues to make crowd investing practical for the highest quality startups

In January 2013, we joined the Winter batch of Y Combinator, the most prestigious startup accelerator program in the world. At the end of the program, on 'Demo Day,'' we opened up our platform’s 15,000-member investor community to fund our classmates’ startups

Since then, we've raised over $6 million dollars for 50+ startups from accredited investors. But that's just the start: soon, we'll be able to accept investments from everyone, no matter how wealthy

2015: Waiting for the SECD espite the JOBS Act being passed in April of 2012, the SEC still has not done the necessary rulemaking to enact it. The SEC won't implement Title III of the JOBS Act - allowing anyone to invest, regardless of income - until the summer of 2015

We can't wait for the day! That's why we started Wefunder in the first place. To allow anyone, regardless of how wealthy, to invest small amounts in the startups they believe in

We currently earn 10% carried interest in the startups listed on Wefunder. This avoids adverse selection and aligns our incentives with those who invest on our platform

We also also charge $25-$75 per investor transaction for use of our self-service fundraising utility, which includes legal templates, electronic signatures, and escrow services

We allow everyone – regardless of wealth – to invest in startups, and belong to a community of investors driven to help that startup succeed

Startups can now crowdfund from their customers on Kickstarter. Kickstarter is awesome. But pre-buying a product creates a vastly different emotion than investing. Wefunder is driven by crowd investors who feel a sense of ownership… and therefore will go that extra mile to see ‘their’ startups succeed

Startups can use AngelList or Funder’s Club to fundraise from professional investors. But the crowd is just as valuable. Once startups have raised from dozens or hundreds of investors, they us to turn them into evangelists that they can activate to help with marketing, sales, or recruiting. No one else has built a product to do this

They don't have too. Small dollar investors invest in the startups through a WeFund LLC managed by Wefunder. The WeFund then makes one inevstment in the startup. So there is only one shareholder on the company’s cap table: us

Our success will be determined based on the quality of startups featured on our platform

We have conviction, experience, and passion. We are creating Wefunder because we desperately want it for ourselves. This desire gives us the vision and a set of core principles that give us an edge

We have the design, engineering, and bizdev chops to run circles around our competition. We're not finance guys. We're startup founders who build great products. Products with a laser-focused attention to detail, nailing the entire customer experience

Also, Mike was a national kickboxing champion. The rest of us think that's cool

We will be highly regulated by the SEC. While Congress recently legalized crowdfunding, the SEC is just starting the rule making progress

There is a risk the SEC might not follow the spirit of the legislation. Over-regulation could lead to the best startups with multiple funding options to avoid crowd investing, leading to a subpar market of companies that can't raise funding anywhere else

To help guard against this risk, we're heavily involved with the SEC, FINRA, and the Crowdfund Intermediary Regulatory organization

Pretty big. We’re talking about making venture capital obsolete

Currently, 5% of accredited investors put around $21 billion/year into startups which is primarily constrained by a lack of good deal flow for investors that aren’t super connected. Once The JOBS Act allows startups to advertise their rounds, everyone will have access to great startups, and that amount invested by accredited investors could easily double. Add to that the billions of dollars that are likely to be invested by 300 million unaccredited investors that have to invest through an intermediary like Wefunder, and we are easily talking about a $50 billion market. 5% of that market at 5% fee amounts to $125 million in revenue/year, not including the upside from equity granted to us by each company raising through Wefunder

Relationships are as important as capital. The investment is a hack. Its purpose is to give people a feeling of ownership in an exclusive club of other investors that have proven – with their funding - that they are serious. Ownership and belonging are the emotions that drive the product

Wefunder is designed for the investor experience. Our kind of people want to help, but don’t know how. We allow founders to tell them. Our goal is to deliver – to anyone – that same emotion professional investors get when they know they’ve made a difference.These people are not investing in gold mines. They are buying lottery tickets in people or ideas they care about... which incentivizes them to help

AngelList (partnered with SecondMarket) and Funder’s Club are the two most credible competitors. Funders Club is more like a VC that crowdfunds its LP’s. Angel List is built for the Silicon Valley insiders club. We’re different in that we’re designed to enable all Americans to invest in startups

Also, for us, the investment is just the beginning. More important is delivering an awesome experience to both the startup and the investor afterwards. The finance guys starting the dozens of other investing sites just don’t get that... at all. For them, it’s all about the transaction

We’ve been doing startups our entire adult lives. We’re not accredited, but we’ve always wanted to invest in founders we believed in. Not primarily for the financial returns, but to be a stronger part of the community that startup is building, to give back, and to live vicariously through their experience. It made no sense to us that only the wealthy had the privilege to act on these emotions prior to the passage of the JOBS act. People are people; the dollar amounts are just smaller. On the flip side, as a founder, we just don’t get funding, but an army of evangelists who want to see us succeed. That’s pretty cool

Invest in a that holds a in Wefunder with these terms: WeFund LLC convertible note

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