Crowdfunding will achieve mass market adoption through simpler second-generation tools
James Beshara · 20 VC FF 031: James Beshara @ Tilt on Crowdfunding For A Mobile World, Finding The Perfect Co-Founder & Beer Pong! · Jan 22, 2016 · at 6:09
James Beshara, co-founder and CEO of Tilt, compares the adoption curve of crowdfunding to how second-generation blogging platforms like Twitter drove mainstream usage.
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“And our hypothesis is, is that crowdfunding will have a very similar narrative arc to blogging to where, you know, 1213 years ago, blogging was this thing that had a lot of hand waving, had a lot of it was on the tips of you know, journalist tongues of the, you know, what is what's going to happen in the world when everyone has, you know, ink by the barrel and blogging just ruins journalistic integrity and takes up. And obviously none of that has really come to, It hasn't been that alarming. And by and large, it's been a really democratizing shift in the way information is published with blogging, but it took a few years. It actually, in our view, it took really the second generation of blogging platforms that really took it to the mainstream. Things like Twitter that had a more bite-size, simpler version, a more accessible version for you to publish information online. And something like WordPress That was much more, you know, powerful and robust. Very different than LiveJournal and Blogger, and those platforms were and are awesome, but, you know, Blogger getting to one to two million, you know, active users, and in the first few years, and Twitter really getting into three hundred million active users, it kind of shows, in our view, it kind of shows if you can make crowdfunding a little more accessible, a little more bite-sized, a little bit, you know, built for the every man and woman than you might be able to introduce it into people's daily lives a little bit easier. So we think that that might be the case with kind of the second generation of crowdfunding tools and crowdfunding arc.”
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