Do’s And Don’ts Of Crowdfunding
Event Info
Description
Do’s And Don’ts Of Crowdfunding
Panel Discussion
Crowdfunding has recieved a lot of attention in recent years as a way to support start-ups, charities, and other ventures. Especially early on, start-ups often struggle to get funding, and crowdfunding offers an exciting alternative to traditional funding sources. The crowdfunded market is growing fast, with around $3 billion pledged by individual donors in 2013. With it, also the number of crowdfunding platforms and crowdfunding models is growing.
This session will give you an overview of the crowdfunding world, and we have organized an exciting panel of start-ups who were successfully crowdfunded, and crowdfunders. They will each share their experience and their top "do's and don'ts" of crowdfunding, and as always, there'll be lots of time for Q&A!
Crowdfunders:
Alysia Wanczyk is the marketing director for Seedrs - one of the leading equity crowdfunding platforms in the world. Along with building the Seedrs brand and driving awareness of crowdfunding, Alysia helps entrepreneurs develop their fundraising campaign marketing strategies and helps identify various tactics startups can use to engage with their tribes
Chris Hancock is Chief Executive Officer at Crowd2Fund. He has a background in digital communications and finance – working for companies such as HSBC, Barclays and the BBC – Chris founded Crowd2Fund two years ago and has just launched a new full service crowdfunding proposition www.crowd2fund.com, which offers businesses a lot more flexibility and support when crowdfunding and growing their business.
Crowdfundees:
James Dawson is a serial entrepreneur and is both Head of OpenFin Europe a successful financial tech firm and CEO of Humble Grape. Humble Grape has recently completed a successful fundraising on Seedrs for £500k to launch a tech driven wine bar in central London.
Prior to this James was Managing Director at ICAP where he ran e-trading for credit and equity derivatives. He attended UNP in South Africa where he earned a degree in Economics and a post graduate degree in Psychology. Later, he attended City University in London where he earned an MBA in strategy and finance.
Frank Milani is doing a Masters in Innovation, Creativity and Leadership and one of the founders of Popcord (Powergoat Ltd), the sleek key-ring that can be used as a charging cable for smartphones (www.popcord.co). He launched Popcord on Kickstarters in January 2014 and raised over 200% of the funding goal.
Matt Johnson is one of the founders of Bare Conductive, a technology and design studio developing electrically conductive materials and hardware. In 2013 the studio launched the Touch Board on Kickstarter and raised over 800% of the funding goal. At Bare, Matt likes to split his time between talking to people about the products and sitting at the bench playing with a pot of Electric Paint and a Touch Board.
Tom Eilon launched one of the first Kickstarter projects, following Kickstarter’s launch in the UK and successfully raised funding for the Manuka Belt in 2013. Following his campaign,Tom reached out to Kickstarter experts to understand how they raised significant funds through Kickstarter. With these learnings Tom created the course “Hack Kickstarter: 6 Experts Reveal How They Raised $1m”. The course launched on Udemy in April 2014 and have been taken by over 2,800 students. (If you are interested in the course, the coupon code: UNRULYVERSITY will get you a discount).Tom is now running Growth Street and is on a mission to open up overdraft lending to small businesses. Growth Street is hiring!
Moderator:
Costas Andriopoulos is a Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Cass Business School. His main research interests focus on how organizational paradoxes enable innovation in the face of changing technological environments. In particular, he studies how entrepreneurial firms in high-velocity markets can excel at both incremental (exploiting current capabilities) and discontinuous innovation (exploring into new space). Costas' articles have appeared in leading journals, such as California Management Review, Organization Science, Human Relations, Long Range Planning, International Small Business Journal, among others. He has also authored Managing Change, Creativity and Innovation (2014, Sage Publications), which is now in its second edition.
