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140 Locavesting<br />
there is every reason to believe that London and Berlin and Milan<br />
and S<strong>of</strong>i a should be real innovation centers,” he said, citing a new<br />
entrepreneurial- minded generation. “Platforms like ours make the<br />
possibility <strong>of</strong> greater innovation in Europe a reality.”<br />
Can You Create the Next Google in Increments <strong>of</strong> $100?<br />
Are we stifl ing innovation in fi nancial technology and social networking<br />
in the United States and, more important, impeding the<br />
development <strong>of</strong> potential solutions to our social and economic ills?<br />
I asked Kevin Lawton, a serial entrepreneur based in Silicon Valley<br />
and an expert on crowdfunding, for his perspective. Lawton, who<br />
has a degree in computer science and started his career at MIT’s<br />
Lincoln Laboratory in space- based radar and satellite communication,<br />
is a self- described trend spotter, idea creator, author <strong>of</strong> multiple<br />
patents, and news and business book junkie. “Absolutely, the<br />
answer is yes,” he says, without hesitation. Lawton, who considered<br />
starting a crowdfunding startup himself, said many entrepreneurs<br />
start <strong>of</strong>f thinking, “Wow, this awesome future thing could be huge!”<br />
But once they begin delving more deeply into various approaches<br />
and the regulatory hurdles that must be surmounted, they invariably<br />
end up with a scaled- down, less potent model.<br />
Like others who have studied the problem, Lawton believes<br />
that as long as these funding models are limited to accredited<br />
investors—a tiny portion <strong>of</strong> the population—they’ll never reach<br />
critical mass. “We’ll never really get the power out <strong>of</strong> crowdfunding<br />
until we get the entire spectrum <strong>of</strong> people to participate,”<br />
he says. For what it’s worth, he thinks he has a solution fi gured<br />
out, but he’s been busy fi nishing up a self- published book about<br />
crowdfunding.<br />
Jouko Ahvenainen, the Finnish chairman <strong>of</strong> Grow VC, observes<br />
that complexity begets complexity. “When you have very complex<br />
regulations, one outcome is that you have very complex<br />
investment instruments. It is more and more diffi cult for anybody<br />
to understand how these instruments work and what the<br />
consequences are if something happens, as we saw with Lehman<br />
Brothers.” Like most P2P companies, Grow VC’s aim, he said, is