Going public in the age of crowdfunding

What a day! Facebook went public with a valuation of over $100 Billion US. But to me the most interesting and unexpected story is the closing of the over $10 M US raised by Eric Migicovsky for his Pebble watch on crowfunding site Kickstarter. The watch that connects to iPhone and Android smartphones using Bluetooth allows users to be notified by and interact with their smartphone. I’ve known Vancouver born and Waterloo educated Eric for a long time and he, like so many others, was trying hard to raise some money for his pet project. His goal was $100,000 which would have got him nicely started. He surpassed this goal in hours and in fact raised his first million in less than 28 hours.  Those that pledged money were generally pre-purchasing watches. Now he has a lot of money, but also a lot of watches to delivery.

The US is moving towards allowing individuals to not only make donations and pre-purchased things from companies, but also allowing individuals to invest in companies through crowdfunding sites. It is hard to say where this will go and Canada is certainly conservatively behind the States, but maybe one day “going public” like Facebook did today may be simply putting up a video and some text on a crowdfunding site and allowing the public to invest.