Will Schroter

So right now we've got startups.com, but within that we've got bizplan.com, which is a business planning tool, as you might imagine.

We've got fundable.com, which allows people to raise capital.

We've got launchrock.com, which allows people to kind of acquire their early customers.

We've got Clarity.fm, which is a community of over 20,000 mentors that we use to connect people and kind of help them through the process and coach them.

And we've got Zirtual.com, which allows people to get an extra pair of hands on their team for a few hundred dollars to get all the stuff done that they can't possibly get done.

So, something happened.

In the early days of startups.com, when we only had a couple properties, fundable being kind of like the preeminent one that we're really pushing on, because circa 2012, crowdfunding was a really big deal.

We saw something that a lot of other people didn't see, which was we didn't think crowdfunding was going to pan out the way everybody thought it would.

At the time, Kickstarter had just done their first million-dollar raise.

I mean, crowdfunding was like everything.

But we started to have this kind of anti-view where we were saying, you know what?

This sounds awesome and I love the hype and you're reading about it every other articles about crowdfunding, but I don't see more people coming up with more good ideas to get funded.

And I don't see more people getting created as investors.

I don't think that's going to be enough just to do that as a sole business.

One of the tricky things about running the course in the life that I've had is I've had to simultaneously be the world's biggest optimist and the biggest cynic at the same time.

Part of me is like, yes, anything can happen.

The other part of me is like, yeah, but it won't.

I've got to always look at those two sides.

I was so excited about the promise of crowdfunding, but I was also very closely looking at the actual outcomes.

And I said, look, Pebble Watch is cool, but I don't see enough Pebble Watches.