For me, the CFGE Crowdfund Banking and Lending Summit in San Francisco was both eye-opening and provocative.
Andrea Downs and her team assembled a terrific group of speakers, including:
- Richard Swart of Berkeley, who described the past, present, and future of equity Crowdfunding around the world with his normal clarity and depth of data.
- Ron Suber of Prosper, who demonstrated in 45 minutes how he’s brought Prosper back from a near-death experience to create a $1+ billion business.
- Nikul Patel of Lending Tree, who described the business model behind P2P lending better than I’ve ever heard it described.
- John Berlau of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, who put modern Crowdfunding into a historical framework reaching back to Henry Ford and beyond, asking “Why doesn’t government just get the hell out of the way?”
To say I was honored to be among that group of speakers is an understatement.
I spend a lot of time thinking where equity Crowdfunding is headed. You couldn’t sit through this conference without wondering where equity Crowdfunding and P2P lending are going to intersect. We’ll explore that further in future posts, maybe even get some experts to chime in, but if you’re a Title II portal it sure does seem there are lessons in the P2P model.
I was thinking about that in a bar on Thursday evening when Travis Ishikawa crushed a three run shot to send the Giants to the World Series, and again on Saturday, while I pedaled a bicycle in blazing sunlight across the Golden Gate bridge and through Sausalito, Mill Valley, and Tiburon. There are worse places to think.
Thanks to Andrea Downs and her CFGE team for a great event.
Questions? Let me know.