Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs) are all the rage these days. But what are they exactly? On this podcast, listen to Samson Williams, the President of the Crowdfunding Professional Association, as he explains in simple terms everything you need to know about NFTs and Distributed Autonomous Organization (DAOs). Whatever your background knowledge is of crowdfunding, tokenization, blockchain, or technology, you’ll get all the info you’ll need to understand why there’s so much hype around it all, and learn some pointers on how to protect yourself from possible fraud as well. Be warned: you may be floored by the truth bombs being presented on this podcast!

LISTEN ON SPREAKER HERE >>>

NFT marketplaces such as Open Sea allow you to create and sell non-fungible tokens of just about anything you can imagine. But when you buy an NFT, what are you actually paying for? What do you really own? Where is the value in your “investment”? What does proof of authenticity exactly mean? How is the NFT cre...more

Web3 ...

there’s so much hype around a term that has a hazy definition -- it calls to mind the parable of the blind men and the elephant.

Man 1: Web3 is about blockchain and decentralization, you know, a DAO (decentralized autonomous organization).

Man 2: No, it’s DeFI and getting away from BigTech or around regulation by CentralGov.  

Man 3: I think it’s all about cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

Man 4: It’s definitely about self-sovereign identities and getting people paid in a creator economy.  

Man 5: It’s beyond the creator economy, it’s the new OWNERSHIP economy.

Me: It’s about giving VCs and casino capitalists some new concepts to feed into the hype & hope machine which will allow them to raise ever larger amounts of LP money tied to their age old “2 + 20” business model.  

Yes, I’m the cynic among the blind men and sorry, there are no women in the blind men and elephant parable.

The massive amounts of investment flowing into this grand new era...more

This is for Natasha Taylor as she, like most professionals, have been inundated with so much misinformation about NFTs that it makes a sane rational person feel crazy. You’re not crazy. Your rational brain is just warning you not to drink the kool aid. Because regardless of the flavor (Non-Fungible Token) the kool aid is still laced with bullshit. 

Non-Fungible 

The easiest way to understand the term “non-fungible” is to remember that your friends are non-fungible. Meaning, you can’t replace your BFFE with someone else. Why? They’re unique and irreplaceable. Hence why if you treat your “friends” like they’re replaceable (fungible) you’ll find yourself all by yourself. A non-fungible token is like your best friend, you can’t just replace it with something else. Thats it. Got it? 

NFTs and Digital Scarcity 

Digital scarcity does not exist. There is no such thing as digital scarcity in art. Find any image on the internet, right click on it and save it to your desktop o...more

Kathleen Minogue leads Crowdfund Better, a social enterprise designed from its founding to help entrepreneurs access capital through crowdfunding. Much of her effort has focused on underserved communities, including women and BIPOC entrepreneurs.

“Our goal is to provide education to help empower people to understand that this opportunity exists to use crowdfunding as a capital-raising tool,” she explains. “While I believe it is magic and it is transformational for so many people, there’s a mystique around it, and you know, we want to pull the curtain back, and you can see the man or the woman moving the levers.”

Kathleen didn’t start in the business community. “I taught middle and high school, and so when I came to this space, I wanted to find a way to reach anyone, no matter what level they were at and help them to crowdfund better, which is how I named the company.”

She believes she can help anyone learn the skills to crowdfund successfully if they invest the time to learn. She appl...more

The following article was written as part of a keynote I gave for a Banking and Payments Conference in Africa, to introduce Bankers to the art of the possible in the banking and payments industry. 

“General Partners (GPs) crowdfund from Limited Partners (LPs).” - Samson Williams 

As a financial anthropologist, I find Humans in Venture Capital fascinating. The humans in Venture Capital (VC) are different from the culture of Venture Capital. Yes, humans do come together to build and create the culture of VC. But individually they are unique, and able to operate and make independent decisions without regard to so-called cultural norms. I bring this up because one of the odd relics of VC culture is that nearly universally, these otherwise independent and autonomous humans engaged in Venture Capital, fall victim to a cancerous myth of VC culture. What is that myth of VC lore? The strongly held misconception that crowdfunding is a resource only for businesses who can’t secur...more

Hello Beautiful People! 

A quick note to point out the obvious thing in RegCF...the Broker Dealers are joining The Crowd. Some bullet points for you to mull over: 

1. Last week $17.3M was committed to RegCF deals. This is probably up 100% from 2020 but you'll have to go to KingsCrowd.com to confirm. 
2. Note the #5 Funding Platform isn't actually a "Funding Portal" but a Broker Dealer. 
3. Who is Dalmore Group? And why should you care that BDs are swimming with The Crowd? 

While there are only 65 FINRA registered Funding Portals, there are over 3200 Broker Dealers in the USA. BDs have far more access to capital than even Sharks do. To put it in terms more easily understood, if VCs are Sharks, Broker Dealers are Orcas. DYK that Orcas are the only seafaring creature that actively hunts Great White sharks? 

SO! This is a big deal because BDs have access to institutional capital the likes of which VCs could never fathom accessing. What happens when institutional mone...more

DAOs + Crowdfunding = The Future of Finance

We're going to skip the part where DAOs are engaging in unregulated crowdfunding for the moment. And instead, focus on what happens when hundreds or THOUSANDs of people use technology to do a thing.

1. Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAO)s are where humans form an organization (some would call it a business but lets not get stuck in details) for the purpose of doing a thing.

2. #ConstitutionDAO formed so that its members could buy an original copy of the Constitution.

3. Calling it a DAO vs an LLC/Corp just means that members have some sort of #blockchain based ID that identifies them as members of the DAO.

4. DAOs are actually businesses because the members there in have a financial interest (represented by smart contracts /staking / shares etc....) in the thing the DAO was organized to do.

5. So its great that Humans are forming digital LLCs using blockchain ID (aka DOAs) as a form of identify and then together as The Crowd, engaging ...more