There's a great alignment I think between having the consumers themselves invest the money. I read somewhere that VC's who invest in startup's actually lose mon

There's a great alignment I think between having the consumers themselves invest the money. I read somewhere that VC's who invest in startup's actually lose money on average. The reason they're doing it in the first place is because they represent pension funds and similar who want a finger in 'that startup action' for diversity, with no one monitoring the eventual results closely enough (the consumers probably end up with +1-2% overall) If point of capitalism is the efficient distribution of resources to the places they need to go then the VC's are actually doing a pretty bad job of it (on average) At least with crowd sourcing it's a step in the right -direction- toward funding ideas that seem popular, that a bunch of consumers who invest would hopefully be doing so because they also want to use the product. I'm sure there'll still be serial swindlers and greedy investors who get scammed, but in a utopian world it'd be great if it was sort of like Kickstarter, where you put in $50 with no guarantee of actually getting what you're funding, but now there's a chance you'll not only get that product, plus your money back, plus a nice little bonus sum if the company succeeds. I guess the key is managing the expectations of the investors