My hope for crowdfunding would be that it would be exactly like you describe: spend the time, connections, and pal around with people doing projects, but the on

My hope for crowdfunding would be that it would be exactly like you describe: spend the time, connections, and pal around with people doing projects, but the only difference would be the dollar amounts. $1,000 here, $10,000 there, on things like performances, food carts, etc. Stuff a VC would never touch because the max payout is like $50k. But for a small investor to make 10 ~$5k investments, and get back principal plus $50k over the course of a few years that's pretty good. And they can do it in their own community on projects that don't make sense for someone in New York or SV to even know about.