Now that we’re 10 years in, where’s the biggest opportunity in crowdfunding for the next 10 years?
Great question. For me, the first ten years of RegCF were about proving the model works. And it does. Over $3.2 billion raised. More than 8,700 issuers. We built an entirely new asset class from scratch. That debate is over.
So where's the opportunity now? Three places.
First — secondary markets. We created millions of investors holding positions they can't sell. That's not a market, that's a waiting room. The moment we get credible secondary trading infrastructure, everything changes. You get price discovery. You get portfolio management. You get institutions actually paying attention. I've been pushing this at the SEC level because it's the single biggest unlock for this entire ecosystem.
Second — and this is where my research is headed — is what I call the Investomer Effect. We're finding that customers who invest in the companies they buy from behave completely differently. They spend more. They stick around longer. They recruit other customers. The next generation of winners won't be companies that stumble into this — they'll design for it. That's a massive opportunity in tooling, strategy, and frankly in how we think about what a "raise" even means.
Third — data. We now have ten years of public, structured data on early-stage capital formation and nobody is doing anything with it. We've been tracking every single RegCF offering since 2016. We can tell you survival rates, follow-on patterns, institutional crossover — 85% of these companies are still operating, by the way, not the 90% failure rate people assume. That dataset is the foundation for real analytics in private markets. Think of it as building the Bloomberg terminal for this space.
The bottom line? The first decade proved everyday people could invest in startups. The next decade is about proving those investments build wealth — through liquidity, better data, and companies that treat their investors like the customers they already are.
Great question. For me, the first ten years of RegCF were about proving the model works. And it does. Over $3.2 billion raised. More than 8,700 issuers. We built an entirely new asset class from scratch. That debate is over.
So where's the opportunity now? Three places.
First — secondary markets. We created millions of investors holding positions they can't sell. That's not a market, that's a waiting room. The moment we get credible secondary trading infrastructure, everything changes. You get price discovery. You get portfolio management. You get institutions actually paying attention. I've been pushing this at the SEC level because it's the single biggest unlock for this entire ecosystem.
Second — and this is where my research is headed — is what I call the Investomer Effect. We're finding that customers who invest in the companies they buy from behave completely differently. They spend more. They stick around longer. They recruit other customers. The next generation of winners won't be companies that stumble into this — they'll design for it. That's a massive opportunity in tooling, strategy, and frankly in how we think about what a "raise" even means.
Third — data. We now have ten years of public, structured data on early-stage capital formation and nobody is doing anything with it. We've been tracking every single RegCF offering since 2016. We can tell you survival rates, follow-on patterns, institutional crossover — 85% of these companies are still operating, by the way, not the 90% failure rate people assume. That dataset is the foundation for real analytics in private markets. Think of it as building the Bloomberg terminal for this space.
The bottom line? The first decade proved everyday people could invest in startups. The next decade is about proving those investments build wealth — through liquidity, better data, and companies that treat their investors like the customers they already are.