Interviewed by Forbes, Republic‘s COO, Caroline Hoffmann, a former McKinsey Associate Principal and Harvard MBA, told Alana Matos about their “goal of creating a level.”
Through their platform,
they are democratizing access to angel investing by allowing entrepreneurs to crowdfund investments, the journalist pointed out.
In particular,
The team at Republic has recently stood out with the launch of their Crypto platform, where users can participate in token presales by investing as little as $10.
Commenting on the new initiative, Caroline Hoffmann said 5 things:
1. EQUITY CROWDFUNDING IS THE REAL MERITOCRACY
A lot of founders from top business schools will not have too much trouble finding seed funding. But there are so many more ideas out there, from a much more diverse set of founders. So I saw this as a compelling way to give people the opportunity to raise capital if they have great ideas. It’s a real meritocracy.
2. INDUSTRY GROWTH IS A FINE LINE TO WALK
We want to create long-term value for investors, which means we can’t accept every company. On the other hand, we see it as an imperative to grow the industry. We can’t make this industry known to the everyone if we don’t choose an accelerated growth trajectory. Building a company in a new industry presents a lot of opportunities to shape it, but the trade-off between quality and volume is a fine line to walk.
3. TO INNOVATE LEGAL EXPERTISE IS NEEDED
Our ability to innovate has been driven by a few factors. First, we have a lot of legal expertise on our team: our CEO is a securities lawyer and we have additional deep legal expertise on the team. This has allowed us to develop an open source a new legal product: the Token DPA (Debt Payable by Assets). It’s designed specifically to compliantly let unaccredited investors get tokens through a token presale.
4. 1 IN 2 CROWDFUNDERS IS A WOMAN
Almost half of founders who have raised on our platform are women. I would love for more women to vote for their wallet and invest in these projects. I think it will happen as more women become the heads of households or equal breadwinners. Right now, in investing, we’re still lagging behind.
5. STARTUP INVESTING: AN EXCITING CHANGE IS COMING
I would love for Republic and for startup investing to be as mainstream as a 401k. There is no reason for people not to be able to invest a small portion of their net worth in higher risk but exciting projects through our platform. We’re hoping that this will become as mainstream and desirable as traditional capital sources and institutional VC funding, or even more. There is an exciting change coming.
Find out more here.
Oliver* 
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