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