Financing a brewery, either in part or whole, through crowd funding campaigns like Kickstarter is a fascinating phenomenon. Old-fashioned lengthy business plans with amortization charts, projections and risk assessments are buried at the bottom of the recycling bin, or better yet, under a box of hipster-cut, 100-percent organic cotton T-shirts that have been ordered for the top 25 investors. Swag has so much more appeal than Excel spreadsheets.
Scott Metzger is the founder of Freetail and also moonlights as an economics professor at UT-San Antonio. And, yes, he was making a mockery of Kickstarter. And, no, Kickstarter doesn’t like it when they are the butt of a joke, so they denied his request to raise $267,840 for what would have been the most amazing delivery car ever.
… But there’s an aspect to these campaigns that is a little unsettling, he says. “It takes away from one very important part of entrepreneurship, which is risk. Risk filters out a lot of ideas. Without risk we could have a flood of bad ideas. Business owners virtually have no skin in the game.”
Read more at The Dallas Observer