As a kid, I was fascinated by Wall Street. When my parents took me and my siblings on a tour of the New York Stock Exchange and I got to witness the frenzy and excitement, I knew it was for me. I didn’t understand what was happening and, as a boy, I couldn’t quite comprehend the concept of trading ownership in businesses across the world, but I figured I’d work out those trivial details over time.
With my path having been set by the eight-year-old version of me, I graduated from college and headed to New York. With an entry-level position at a start-up hedge fund in hand, it was time to fast track my education. I began the three-year journey to earn the right to use the CFA designation and then I enrolled in Columbia Business School. Diploma(s) in hand, it was time to change the world, but, of course, the world had different plans.
As my career got underway, the Great Recession of ’08-‘09 essentially put the mid-size hedge fund where I worked out of business. Sensing the investment opportunity of a lifetime, I set out to start a hedge fund with two colleagues – and Tiburon Capital Management was born. Over the next four years, we raised over $50 million and outperformed our peers and industry benchmarks. It was a wonderful experience that culminated in the sale to a large pension endowment advisor. Just as I had known at eight-years-old what my career path would be when I visited the NYSE, my path post-Tiburon became abundantly clear to me the second I read the JOBS Act: I would create a platform to level the playing field for small businesses and entrepreneurs across America. And that’s when I founded GrowthFountain.
The JOBS Act took 80 years of securities law and turned it on its head. Let me explain: in the wake of the Great Depression – when a receding tide revealed all the naked swimmers – all the fraudulent corporate behavior and lack of investor protection were revealed. Congress had no choice but to intervene and create an agency to oversee corporate governance in this country and, in 1933, the SEC was born. Our omniscient congressmen and women, wise as they were, didn’t foresee the internet. Fast forward many decades and that antiquated regulation became the noose around many-an-entrepreneur’s neck. Small businesses were able to limp along, supplementing their much-needed seed and early stage capital by securing loans from banks. But in 2008 and 2009, in the wake of the Great Recession, lending seized from banks to our small business community. Congress convened again to update the rules by which small businesses could raise money, and the JOBS Act was born.
The JOBS Act enables two things. First, companies can now publicly advertise their fundraising campaign. Second, investors no longer need to meet certain wealth or income thresholds to invest. Couple these two things together, and now everybody in the world can invest in America’s small businesses and entrepreneurs through SEC-registered platforms like GrowthFountain.
It was clear to me that GrowthFountain would be my future; it was the perfect culmination of my being. I had honed a deep-seated skill in financial analysis over the past decade and had faced the direct challenges any entrepreneur would face from my days at Tiburon. My goal was to build a platform that could minimize friction and level the playing field for America’s small businesses. I thought about that quintessential local business – your favorite neighborhood restaurant. They are likely to know an awful lot about the restaurant business, but are intimidated by terms of financial valuation and legal documents. I wanted my platform to automate those processes so that the entrepreneur could focus their energy on telling their story to potential investors in the best way they could, creating an emotional connection through carefully selected imagery and media. This new opportunity presents local business with the chance to turn their customers, community and extended network into partial owners who can then organically become brand ambassadors, spreading the word and helping that business grow.
Equally important to building a quality product that could ease the process for entrepreneurs was designing and implementing a strategy that would solve the chicken-and-egg problem that all platforms have. In order to be useful, our platform needed to attract investors and issuers. But what is the best way to attract all constituents required for a successful offering? And how can we really help local businesses? That’s when it hit me – time to talk to the credit union industry.
Credit unions, after all, are cooperatives; they’re member-owned. In a sense, credit unions are the original crowdfunded entities. They’re not-for-profit, and exist solely to benefit their members, focusing on community development and growth. Those credit unions’ mantra is people-helping-people, and they seemed to have the exact same interests that GrowthFountain does. With this in mind, we approached Callahan & Associates, an innovative thought leader in the credit union space with a sterling reputation. They thought our company idea was wonderful, and helped us craft our partnership with each credit union. GrowthFountain currently reaches 750,000 credit union members as their preferred crowdfunding platform, with projected reach at 10-16 million over the next 12-24 months.
We now have a platform we’re extraordinarily proud of; GrowthFountain can help streamline the process for all you entrepreneurs out there in need of financial assistance. Now that we have massive distribution capabilities, we can get your offering in front of an awful lot of eyeballs. You should come take a look.
