We have seen the future, and it is ours—because we’re backing it with our own capital. So far, at least 45,000 projects have been successfully crowdfunded through online donations, to the tune of more than half a billion dollars in total. But the vast majority (an estimated 80 percent) of dollars pledged has come in through Kickstarter, which so dominates crowdfunding today that the term and the company’s name have become nearly synonymous. It’s an enormous market, still in its early days, but right now you’d be forgiven for thinking that one firm will have that future all to itself. Look, Kickstarter is aces. From films to music to apps to gadgets and more, this one site has created a whole new paradigm for how creative people can thrive outside the corporate economy. But it simply doesn’t make sense for one site to own the idea the way that, say, eBay came to own online auctions in the 1990s. Buyers came to eBay’s front page to search or browse for what they wanted, leading to a huge “network effect” wherein the sale of any given item became exponentially easier as more buyers and sellers joined in.
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