#plugintodevin - Your Mark on the World with Devin Thorpe

Igor Belagorudsky, president of FastCTO, joined me to explain his company’s new tool for rating crowdfunding issues to make them more appealing to large investors. Increasingly, investors of all stripes are looking at deals on investment crowdfunding websites like Wefunder, Republic and Crowdfund Mainstreet. The score is intended to help both novice and expert institutional investors better understand the investment opportunity.

Issuers, that is the companies selling shares on a crowdfunding site, can hire FastCTO to provide the review and rating.

Preliminary Interview with Igor Belagorudsky, the President

Of FastCTO.

Expert tips for crowdfunding or fundraising:

Tip 1: Make your listing attractive to not just the individual that might be willing to invest $100 (or $88 as that's the average donation) but to the one that might be writing a $20,000 check (there aren't that many of those yet but we're looking to change that). The bigger the check sizes, the less investors you need to convince and the less time you need to spend to nurture your raise.

Tip 2: Assume, even though it's not always the case, that people writing bigger checks have more experience investing overall and use different metrics to decide whether to invest or not. As a trivial example, an investor contributing $100 might be thinking, "this is something I'd like to have/own/put my name behind" and never once opening the SEC filing you had to submit as part of your listing. On the other hand, an investor contributing $10,000 will definitely open the SEC filing, have their advisor(s) look at it, confirm your predictions, validate your business plan, etc. Now imagine the rigor with which someone considering a $100,000 investment might be looking at your listing with. Make sure you provide the resources that have the best chance of satisfying someone like that.

Tip 3: The goal of what we're doing is that more sophisticated investors will be attracted to the crowdfunding space and be willing to make big investments in companies that pass their sniff test. For "traditional" private security investments (angel rounds, VC, PE, etc), investors use a due diligence process to validate their decision to invest or not. Depending on your industry and the type of company you have, the due diligence might have several sections - finance, legal and IP, technical, organizational, etc. For crowdfunding companies, your SEC filing is meant to satisfy the finance section of a due diligence and your various warranties you make when listing are meant to satisfy the legal, but there's nothing besides your listing that satisfies the rest - especially the technical part of a due diligence which, for companies with any technology, is an essential part of the process.

The FastCTO Score aims to fix that - we want crowdfunding companies to have access to a technical due diligence they can share with sophisticated (and all) investors so they can check the tech checkbox and confidently invest. Not every company going the crowdfunding round might need that - you might not have any technology or software or systems that set your company apart, but for those that do, it's now an option.

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin.

Beginning with English language training, Utah-based FluentWorlds is delivering its immersive 3D experience to your phone. Available for both Android phones and iPhones, the technology is winning fans.

CEO, David Bradford, 68, leads the company with his wife, Dr. Linda Bradford, who has a PhD in instructional psychology and technology. She serves as the chief product officer. Their son, also David, is the VP of finance and business development.

This isn’t your typical family business. The senior Bradford has a proven tech background. He served as the CEO of both Fusion IO and HireVue, companies that achieved significant scale. Bradford recruited Steve Wozniak to Fusion IO as the chief scientist. Fusion-io went public and was later acquired by SanDisk. Bradford started his career at Novell, where he worked with Eric Schmidt. In November of 2017, David was honored with the “LifeTime Achievement Award” by Utah Business Magazine.

Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2lUM2Eq.

In 2012, Congress passed and President Obama signed the JOBS Act, a law that authorized investment crowdfunding. A wide variety of for-profit businesses, many of them having a social mission, have taken advantage of the law to raise money from small investors under either Title III, implemented as Regulation Crowdfunding or Title VI, implemented as Regulation A+.

TechSoup is an international nonprofit that helps deliver technology to other nonprofits around the world. This innovative organization is using Regulation A+ to offer securities in the form of low-interest loans to the public.

CEO Rebecca Masisak joined me for this conversation to explain important details around the $11.5 million offering. Institutional investors are participating with investments in the millions of dollars. Small investors are participating in increments of just $50.

This is an innovative application of the JOBS Act and a rare opportunity for ordinary investors to participate in an impact investment opportunity.

CaringCrowd.org, by Johnson & Johnson Global Public Health, is a sponsor of the Your Mark on the World Center and GoodCrowd.info.

Rehema Home is an orphanage in Kenya that cares for children, about half of whom are HIV positive. These wonderful children are often in need of medical care. Rehema Home raised over $10,000 on CaringCrowd, Johnson & Johnson’s global health crowdfunding platform.

J&J generously matches individual donations up to $250. Of the $10,647 raised on CaringCrowd, $3,576 came from J&J in the form of matching funds.

Bill Drayton, founder and CEO of Ashoka, literally coined the term “social entrepreneur” when he founded the nonprofit back in 1980, almost 40 years ago. He also decided that changemaker was one word and not two, something the Oxford dictionary now recognizes (though Webster’s does not, to the Drayton’s consternation). Drayton says, “We all sense that society is at a profound, indeed historic turning point.”

Before we explore the turning point, he’s talking about, let’s briefly review some of the history of Ashoka and social entrepreneurship.

The kernel of the idea for Ashoka came to Drayton, he says, when he was visiting India at age 18. On this journey, he began to appreciate that an entrepreneur could make systemic changes that could have profound implications in the lives of large numbers of people. He also began to appreciate how difficult it is to make that leap at almost any point in one’s life.

Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/34G2L03.

Personally impacted by wildfires in her Northern California community, Julia Jackson saw the impact of climate change and recognized that the time for talk was long past and went to work.

Julia created the nonprofit Grounded to accelerate the work of climate change reversing technologies. An admirer of Paul Hawken and his work at Project Drawdown, she has sought to accelerate some of the very technologies Paul and his team identified.

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin.

LifeNet International is working to save lives in sub-Saharan Africa by building capacity within the existing health care infrastructure. By equipping the facilities and training the people there, the organization hopes to transform them, allowing them to save more lives.

Maggie Ehrenfried, managing director of development for LifeNet, joined me to talk about the organization’s impactful work and its success raising over $25,000 via CaringCrowd by Johnson & Johnson. She notes that nearly half of the funds raised came from the J&J match.

Never miss another interview! Join Devin here: http://bit.ly/joindevin.

"I am on a mission to provide clean and affordable energy to women and girls in African rural communities through the use of modern technologies like AI,” says Monique Ntumngia, 29, founder of the Green Girls Organisation working in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The organization uses a unique scoring algorithm called MNKB92 to optimize energy strategies for villages where they train women and girls to assemble and sell solar lamps and to deploy biodigesters to create methane for cooking and organic fertilizer for crops.

The organization provides the materials for free but receives a 40% cut of the revenue from the sale of fertilizer and solar lamps. The organization helps women find markets for the fertilizer.

Read the full Forbes article and watch the interview here: http://bit.ly/2jXKWqE.

Having created a technology for nonprofits that has the potential to accelerate their fundraising and their impact using artificial intelligence and machine learning, Art Komarov has learned a few things about the adoption of new technology. He shares some powerful insights to help nonprofit leaders implement the latest and greatest tech for good.

Interview with Artiom (Art) Komarov, the Co-Founder and CEO of Wisely.

The following is the pre-interview with Artiom (Art) Komarov. Be sure to watch the recorded interview above.

Expert Tips: Adopting new technology? Here are some thoughts on how to get everyone in your organization on board:

Tip 1: Everyone has an “accidental technologist” in their organization: someone that ends up being a technical resource for their colleagues, without an official IT title. When you’re incorporating new technology into your organization, work closely with your ''accidental technologist'' to get buy-in and show the product's value. The rest of the team will follow.

Tip 2: Reinforce why you made the decision to implement new technology: Always come back to how the technology enables your mission and goals for the year. Employees need to see the technology as a tool that helps them achieve their daily, weekly and monthly goals, and hit their targets.

Tip 3: Embrace change! But acknowledge and recognize that fears about technology, old and new, are usually (secret) fears about change. Talk openly about it with your team and encourage their feedback along the way. Successful change management is the core of successful technology adoption and will help your organization achieve its goals more successfully and efficiently.

#final50

Wendy Burton has been planting Empress Splendor trees for about two decades. With help from crowdfunded investors from Wefunder, along with accredited investors participating in a Regulation D 506(c) offering, her company, World Tree, will plant thousands of these carbon sucking trees across the western hemisphere.

She says the tree is the fastest-growing hardwood tree on the planet. While it grows in a range of climates, its method of reproduction limits its threat as an invasive species. Because the tree grows so quickly, it sequesters more carbon than other trees.

Investors typically buy an acre’s worth of trees—110 trees—but rather than receive the revenue from a particular acre of trees, investors get a pro-rata share of all the trees planted in the current year’s crop when harvested in ten years. Farmers who plant and care for the trees receive half the revenue; investors and World Tree split the other half of the revenue.

The first harvest, she says, could produce a financial return of nine to ten times the initial investment. The Wefunder campaign raised almost $1 million; the investment proceeds from the Reg D offering are larger.

#final50