Tapping into The Power of Crowdfunding with Woodie Neiss of GUARDD

The Modern CFO

In 2012, Woodie Neiss was a CFO and entrepreneur who was seeking to change the rules of the investment game. When President Obama signed his crowdfunding bill later that year, it opened a whole new world for individuals to participate in the private capital markets. Today, the crowdfunding industry has surpassed $1 billion in funding and takes place almost entirely online.

Woodie continues to empower entrepreneurs through his latest venture, GUARDD, where he automates the process of ensuring audited financials with the goal of creating a more liquid environment for private company founders and shareholders. He is a vanguard of empowering founders throughout the lifecycle of their businesses from fundraising to exit.

On this episode of The Modern CFO, Woodie shares how he architected the roadmap of Regulation Crowdfunding (Reg CF), what is so powerful about crowdfunding, and why one-size regulation does not fit all.

Show Links

• Check out GUARDD
• Connect with Sherwood (Woodie) Neiss on LinkedIn or Twitter
• Check out Nth Round
• Connect with Andrew Seski on LinkedIn

Key Takeaways

2:30 - Tackle outdated investing laws

In his early days as an entrepreneur, Woodie was frustrated by the inability to tap into individuals as investors, like his large customer base.

“I had started a company with my brother-in-law called Flavor RX. We flavored medicine for children so they’re more compliant. The coolest thing about our company was a mother got her kid to take her medicine by going into the pharmacy and asking pharmacists to flavor it. The kid took the medicine and she's like, ‘Oh my God, you just saved me countless hours of struggling.’ I would get a phone call the next day: ‘How do I invest in your business?’ I thought, well, you can't because we can only raise money from accredited investors. When my lawyers told me this, I knew this was a complete missed opportunity. I have hundreds of mothers calling me saying, ‘How can I become an investor in your business?’ They can be a marketing agent for my company. Why can't I take money from them? These laws were written 80 years ago to protect retail investors, and you have to live by them. I thought was stupid.”

3:53 - How the crowdfunding bill was signed

Woodie and two friends from business school ultimately drafted a new framework for Reg CF. President Obama signed it into the Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act in 2012.

“We wrote this eight bullet-point framework for investment crowdfunding. We went to the SEC, they said it was cute. Then they said, You should head over to that building with the white dome on it.’ I kid you not. Naively enough, we just walked over there, because we had a few days in Washington. We started knocking on the doors of both Republicans and Democrats. People were shocked that entrepreneurs were there, so they listened.”

6:04 - Connecting retail investors to the private capital markets

Today, crowdfunding doesn’t just live on websites—it’s been used on social media as well. Woodie never anticipated the breadth and reach of his bill, which he sees as bringing positive transparency to the investment space.

“The industry launched in May 2016. Just this past month it surpassed $1 billion in funding. When we put this together, I was thinking, ‘Wouldn't it be great to use a website to be able to allow people that have a customer list, or their own friends and family, to invest in their business the same way that a campaign on Kickstarter or Indiegogo can?’ To see people using Twitter, Instagram, YouTube Live as the outreach, the public solicitation, I think is awesome. It really connects the people to the entrepreneur in a way that a website just doesn't do by itself. I think the advances in technology are really benefiting the industry because it ties you closer to the people that are raising capital. I think that's all good, too, because I think it brings this level of transparency that you otherwise don't have in the private capital markets.”

8:43 - Deciding which constraints would minimize retail investor risk

One major fear was that crowdfunding would end up like gambling, leading some investors to lose everything. That’s why Woodie and his team wrote in limits based on annual income.

“Any accredited investor can risk everything that they have in one company. Do they? No. They're smart enough to diversify their assets. Now, when we built this framework we were concerned that people might be risking more than they can afford to lose. This is the only segment in the private capital markets where investors are capped on how much exposure they can have. We built into the framework, based on net income, or annual salary I should say, as an individual investor, how much you make or how much you have saved thresholds as to how much you can invest. That doesn't exist anywhere else. People will tell us that’s pedantic, but quite frankly that was an investor protection mechanism we put in there. So, the investors that are saying, ‘I think it's too risky for certain investors to put in there,’ my response to that is well, there are caps and limits on how much people can risk.”

11:11 - Tap into the power of the crowd

Some assumed crowdfunding would operate only within the San Francisco and New York venture communities. That hasn’t been the case.

“The deals are the same deals that are being seen in the Bay Area and New York City, with the same investors. What we've seen is the evolution of this industry, where instead of those people saying, ‘You know what? You shouldn't go to crowdfunding.’ They're saying, ‘Well, we should use crowdfunding and we should syndicate our deals to the crowd because the crowd brings something that we don't bring.’ We can bring deep pockets, but they can bring marketing power because they've got a vested interest in the outcome of the business. They can bring connections. They can bring their own brainpower to how we can help scale this business. VCs are great for that Rolodex of people that they might be able to connect you to, but the reality is you can get so much more out of a crowd.”

12:44 - Make transformative moves at the right time

Woodie credits the success of the crowdfunding initiative to timing. His team pitched the idea to Capitol Hill on the back of the recession when political leaders were hungry for job creation.

“We were in the right place at the right time. In 2008, we had a recession. Washington was looking for solutions. We went and showed up in 2010 with this [pitch]. People were looking for an answer to the question, ‘How do we create jobs in local communities?’ The whole point of investment-based crowdfunding is you are, essentially, helping people that have great ideas all over the country create businesses that hire people. The government can't do that on a macro level and so they need to look at innovative solutions like this that can actually solve what they need to solve at the most basic zip code level. That's what we delivered to them. That's why we were able to build support for this.”

16:34 - One size regulation does not fit all...