On a rainy evening in March, sixteen people gathered in a tucked away conference room in Brooklyn. Before the evening was through, they would decide among themselves a key rate of interest that would affect borrowers and investors across the country. But this was no illicit cartel. There wasn’t a cigar-chomping banker in sight. The […]
Marco Vangelisti left his job as an investment fund manager in 2009, after an eye-opening discovery about the kinds of companies the fund, and its mission-driven clients, were investing in. The first thing he did was to liquidate his Wall Street portfolio and reinvest it in local and sustainable investments. The second thing was to […]
Like many Millennials, Megan Hafner and Betsy Ramaccia want their work to have meaning and impact. But what exactly does that mean? Few of their peers, they saw, had any real sense of what such work would look like. They conceived of Why We Work Here, a road-trip-cum-research-project, to explore the question: “What does it […]
Audrey Jacobs is Vice President, Americas, for OurCrowd, an equity crowdfunding platform for accredited investors that is based in Jerusalem. OurCrowd combines venture capital with investment crowdfunding. That means it vets and selects deals and invests its own capital alongside that of its investors. It also provides post-investment support to its portfolio companies through a […]
Three years ago, Catarah Coleman and Shoneji Robison—the “Dessert Divas” behind Southern Girl Desserts—were riding high. After several years of running the operation out of their homes and shared commercial kitchen and retail space, they were invited to open their own 1500-square foot shop in a Los Angeles mall, where they could sell their southern-inspired […]
Editor’s note: The momentum behind intrastate crowdfunding continues to grow, with a majority of states either passing or proposing such laws. And perhaps no one has tracked this activity more closely than Anthony Zeoli, a Chicago-based attorney and the driving force behind Illinois’ brand new intrastate crowdfunding law, which was unanimously passed by the state […]
Social entrepreneurs: You have your work cut out for you. And too many of you may be living in a social enterprise bubble. Those are some of the implications of a new study looking at consumers and socially responsible spending. For one thing, according to the study, shoppers may have good intentions–they want to buy […]
Three years after the JOBS Act was passed, making it easier for small ventures to raise capital, Congress is tackling the issue of secondary trading. The House Financial Services Committee last week floated a draft bill that would allow the creation of “venture exchanges” tailored to the needs of small companies. In many ways, the […]
Drew Little is co-founder of a startup called Producia and the creator of an evolutionary economic model called Producism. He is on a mission to help democratize innovation by offering technology that provides access to the necessary tools, resources, and communities of support for creators to manifest their ideas together. He started his entrepreneurial journey […]