Can there really be 452 crowd funding platforms?

May 8, 2012 By 1 Comment

Hard not to be struck by this statistic in this morning’s in-box. According to the report below from crowd sourcing.org, there are now 452 crowd funding platforms, and collectively they were used to raise $1.5Billion in 2011, in over a million successful fund-raising campaigns.

I thought I was on top of this space, but if this report is correct there are far more of these platforms than I know about, and far more successful crowd fund-raisings than I had imagined. Does this match anyone else’s experience?

Filed Under: Capital raising, M&A, Strategic partners, Crowdfunding Tagged With:

Changing healthcare: Tricorder X Prize

April 10, 2012 By Leave a Comment

It’s hard not to get excited about the Tricorder X prize if (like me) you are interested in new things in general, and in ways innovation can be applied to reengineering the US healthcare system in particular. I spent some time recently reading carefully through the draft guidelines which describe just what this “Tricorder” needs to do in order to win the $7M first prize. What strikes me most, apart from the sheer ambitiousness of the goals, is the extent to which success is going to require us health industry types to approach the world differently than we have done in the past. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Healthcare opportunities Tagged With: ,

Crowdfunding: more work needed

March 22, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Challenges

Nice post yesterday by “Startup Iceland” on the challenges of creating a robust Crowdfunding platform. This concept is certainly resonating way beyond the normal Silicon Valley world!

The author acknowledges some of the issues that are scaring various pundits in the blogosphere, and might make crowdfunding “risky”. He mentions:

  • Information asymmetry;
  • Valuation issues;
  • High cost of transparency and accountability.

His conclusion: more work needed. But soluble.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Capital raising, M&A, Strategic partners, Crowdfunding Tagged With: , , ,

Crowdfunding and the Nanny State

March 21, 2012 By 3 Comments

Lots of activity in the blogosphere this week on Crowdfunding, coinciding with debate in the Senate of the so-called JOBS bill (HR3606), which contains various provisions relating to Crowdfunding. I wanted to comment on some of the different perspectives, and in particular, on a series of recent posts in one of my favorite blogs, Baseline Scenario. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Capital raising, M&A, Strategic partners, Crowdfunding Tagged With: , ,

Top healthcare cost categories

March 19, 2012 By 1 Comment

This post examines the size of the different components that make up the total $2.6 Trillion National Healthcare Expenditures (NHE) of the USA. It also looks at the different growth rates of the components.

This is the third installment in our series on US healthcare costs. For background to this project, which is all about identifying fertile opportunity spaces resulting from runaway healthcare costs, see the introduction; the first installment; and second installment of the series.

Components of $2.6 Trillion US National Healthcare Expenditure (2010)

NHE components as percentage of NHE

The chart above depicts the $2.6 Trillion of US National Healthcare Expenditures in 2010 by category (1). These top 5 categories comprise the majority of this expenditure (74% of the total):

  • Hospital expenditures (31%);
  • Physician and Clinical expenditures (20%);
  • Prescription Drug expenditures (10%);
  • Administration & total Net Cost of Health Insurance expenditures (7%); and
  • Nursing Care Facilities and Continuing Care Retirement Communities (5%).

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Healthcare costs, Healthcare opportunities Tagged With: , , ,

Eating the seed-corn of healthcare

March 15, 2012 By 2 Comments

In the prior post in this series, I concluded that controlling healthcare cost growth was about reducing the differential growth rate of NHEPC (compared to GDP per capita) by a couple of percent per year. This made me want to dig deeper into the question of what exactly is NHEPC (National Healthcare Expenditures Per Capita)? I learned some intriguing things.

The topic of this post is the inexorable decline over time in the fraction of our healthcare costs allocated to the bucket called “Investment”. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Healthcare costs, Healthcare opportunities Tagged With: ,

Healthcare cost growth analysis (1)

March 13, 2012 By 2 Comments

As explained in this prior post, I am working on a project to identify fertile opportunity spaces resulting from runaway healthcare costs. Here is the first installment of my investigation, my first steps to understanding the healthcare cost curves. (For details of data sources see the references at the bottom.)

Typical media depiction of healthcare costs

Here is the typical “scary graph” we have all seen in the media. The basic data comes from the US government (1). It shows “runaway cost growth” and more significantly, it shows healthcare costs approaching 20% of GDP. Yikes! [Read more...]

Filed Under: Healthcare costs, Healthcare opportunities Tagged With: ,

Runaway healthcare costs create opportunities

March 8, 2012 By 3 Comments

We all know US healthcare costs are growing at a rate most consider unsustainable. If you accept the premise that a lot of time and attention will be focused over the next decade on ways to improve healthcare quality and reduce costs (or perhaps reduce costs without reducing quality?), then there are likely to be some big changes in a very large industry, and that is likely to open up some opportunities for energetic entrepreneurs who can think a little ahead of the curve.

Well, at any rate that is the thesis of a project I am working on. I am going to be spending some time digging into this topic. The end goal is to see if we can figure out some promising areas for entrepreneurial focus. But first, we need to explore the facts a bit deeper. I am going to be capturing some of the initial results in a series of posts here, as I think they may be useful to a broader audience. The first question I am going to explore is “Just where is all that money going, and why are costs growing so fast?”.

If you are interested in getting involved with this project, helping, sharing ideas, or getting access to later portions of the work, please let me know by signing up here.

The healthcare cost series

  1. Healthcare cost growth analysis (1)
  2. Eating the seed-corn of healthcare?
  3. Top healthcare cost categories
  4. ……..
Filed Under: Healthcare costs, Healthcare opportunities Tagged With: , , , ,

Fewer IPO’s: the reasons

March 2, 2012 By 1 Comment

Relating to my last post on Crowdfunding and the 99%, yesterday’s Wall St Journal had an excellent summary of the state of the US IPO (Initial Public Offering) market, written by Jack Markell, Governor of Delaware.

In my earlier Crowdfunding post, I made the point that the small, early-stage companies that a public investor could invest in 20 years ago no longer do IPO’s on exchanges like NASDAQ, and I felt that was part of the compelling argument in favor of new initiatives like Crowd Funding. Mr Markell adds a lot of color to this, explaining how the “US has experienced a stunning decline in IPOs …. while capital markets in Asia, Europe and South America have thrived“. He cites both a decline in annual IPOs over the last decade, and a decline in total listings on US exchanges (from 8,800 15 years ago to 5,000 today).

This is a different point than the one I was making, but I suspect there are common causes for these two phenomena. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Capital raising, M&A, Strategic partners, Crowdfunding Tagged With: ,

Crowdfunding and the ninety nine percent

February 22, 2012 By 7 Comments

I have been following the idea of “crowd-funding” for several years and am a great fan. A couple of weeks ago I was having lunch with a colleague who is starting a new crowd-funding site. As we discussed it, I realized that crowd-funding represents an antidote to one of the many ways in which today the “ninety nine percent” are disadvantaged compared to the “one percent”. I have not seen this particular line of thought articulated before, so here it is.

In case that introduction sounds too rabid, let me qualify this post by saying I am not really a fan of Occupy Wall St (OWS), I have no problem with the 1% earning lots of money (so long as the taxpayer is not acting as bailer-out of last resort), and I am myself an accredited investor, long-time startup entrepreneur, and occasional angel investor. I dont believe in equality of outcomes, but I believe very strongly in equality of opportunity. And that is where I see an intersection of crowd-funding, and the concerns of movements like OWS. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Capital raising, M&A, Strategic partners, Crowdfunding Tagged With: , , ,
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