Invest in High-Growth Startups for As Little As $100 Through Equity Crowdfunding
Announcing my first angel investment into Vestigo! (And how you can co-invest with me and other top entrepreneurs, VCs, etc)
I’m excited to announce my first angel investment EVER into a company called Vestigo 🚀🚀🚀.
About 5 years ago, my friend Marshall Mosher started Vestigo, bringing groups of corporate executives or teams from small businesses into nature for adventures such as kayaking, hiking, and rappelling off mountains.
They have worked with AT&T, Mercedes-Benz, Microsoft, Home Depot, EY, and Chick-fil-A among dozens of other major brands, associations, and groups (including Meeting of the Minds). Marshall is also a Global Impact Challenge winner with Singularity University, has a combined social media following of over 300,000 people, and flies jetpacks for fun (seriously!).
Now, Vestigo is building cutting-edge VR experiences so their Fortune 1000 clients (and eventually, society-at-large ) can participate in trust-building, soul-searching adventures without the danger of climbing a mountain, or travel costs associated.
You can invest alongside me for as little as $100 at wefunder.com/vestigo.
I’m making this investment entirely because I believe in, and want to back, Marshall.
Angel investing, for those who aren’t familiar, is early stage support of entrepreneurs typically running new tech startups.
At the pre-seed and seed stages (or “early stages”), most entrepreneurs will raise no more than a couple million dollars for their companies, allowing individual investors to buy shares (or agreements to purchase shares in the future, which is another post entirely if we were to talk about all the complexities of angel investing) while also offering helpful connections, subject matter expertise, advocacy, and more.
We call this “value add”, and smart companies look for the best value-add angel investors, as well as diverse advisors to support the entrepreneur(s) and founder(s) in bringing their vision to life.
You can participate in this investment alongside me for as little as $100 because Vestigo is leveraging equity crowdfunding.
This allows non-accredited investors (i.e. people with less than $1M net worths, and/or $200K incomes over multiple years) to participate in riskier, but higher-potential, investments. Platforms like WeFunder and Republic are most popular for equity crowdfunding deals, but there are others you can explore as well.
I’ve also recently made another investment (my SECOND angel investment ever) into a company through a “syndicate” whereby another investor organized a legal entity known as a special purpose vehicle and then gathered smaller contributions from people like myself to add up into one larger total investment into the startup.
If you’d like to learn more about these types of syndicates, and you are an accredited investor, I’m happy to introduce you to the founder of a Slack Channel where I received this deal flow and education about how to make these types of private investments.
Finally, I am fundraising for my new startup as well, so if you are interested in becoming an angel investor and want to back an entrepreneur such as myself whom you’ve come to know, like, and trust, reply and let me know. 😎
I’ll be sharing our work publicly in a couple months, but if you have angel investing interest, I’ll send you a link to our pitch deck privately.
Given my desire to do more angel investing in the future, and my goal to empower less experienced individuals to “get in the game” without getting burned, we are welcoming friends like yourself who are value-add investors to write “tiny checks” of $10K+ (currently, all our investments have been $10k-$50k).
We are also exploring our own syndicate for people who want to invest $1k-$10k.
Anyways, enough startup talk for today. Check out the Vestigo WeFunder campaign and get in touch with me if any (or all) of this is interesting to you!
-Jared
Jared Kleinert is the founder of Meeting of the Minds (motm.co), as well as a TED speaker, 2x award-winning author, and USA Today's "Most Connected Millennial".
Meeting of the Minds curates "super-connectors" and subject matter experts as invite-only attendees to 3 day summits in places like Napa Valley, Bermuda, and elsewhere, as well as “deep dives” such as this Marketing and Biz Dev strategy & implementation workshop. Members of the MOTM network include CEOs of 7, 8, and 9-figure businesses, creators of globally-recognized brands and social movements, New York Times bestselling authors, founders of pre-IPO tech unicorns, c-suite execs from Fortune 500 companies, and others.
Jared's career began at 15 years old when he started his first company, and took off at 16 while working as the first intern, and then one of the first 10 employees, for an enterprise SaaS company called 15Five, which today has raised over $40M and has almost 2000 forward-thinking companies as monthly recurring clients.
Later, Jared would become a delegate to President Obama's 2013 Global Entrepreneurship Summit in Malaysia, write multiple books including the "#1 Entrepreneurship Book of 2015", and speak at TED@IBM the day before he turned 20.
As a highly-sought after keynote speaker and consultant, Jared’s clients range from organizations like Facebook, Samsung, Bacardi, Estee Lauder, IBM, Cornell, Berkeley, AdAge, and the National Speakers Association. His insights on entrepreneurship, networking, marketing, and business development have been featured in Forbes, TIME, Harvard Business Review, Fortune, NPR, Entrepreneur, Mashable, Fox Business and more.
Don’t forget to share! :)