Taking a time out from his duties at crowdfunding platform, Tilt, co-founder and CEO James Beshara shares his thoughts about the funding method and its future with Fortune magazine.
While discussing funding method’s growing popularity over the past few years, Beshara explained,”The amount of attention it gets far outweighs that number of people using it. Crowdfunding is a loaded term in people’s minds. The irony is it’s not really about a crowd at all. It’s small groups with intimate connections. It is very rarely total strangers.
“It sounds so trite for a young tech founder to talk about the world as a global village, but that’s where I think it’s going. Crowdfunding will move away from flashy products and return to the core needs. If you want to really get philosophical, this could relegate charities useless.”
Revealing his prediction of what the funding method will be like 10 years from now, James noted, “It’ll be mobile, it’ll be in micro-bites. And they won’t be using the options that exist now.” He then added, that many people don’t necessarily want the “big ornate Kickstarter campaign.”
Noting some of the smaller crowdfunding platforms, Beshara commented on Venmo’s approach. “Venmo works for one to one, but when you really want a social product, it’s like the difference between e-mail and Facebook.”
Also sharing details about Tilt, James said, “We’re okay with building a platform that has these trivial use cases, like for a tailgate, because by the seventh use case, they will use it for a more noble cause. Think of Tilt as ‘our money.’ Like,’What can we do with our money?'”