This is exactly what I'm debating tomorrow at Money20/20 — retail vs VC. Even @brian_armstrong the Coinbase CEO says it: retail has been missing out on private markets for too long.

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Flying cars are real. Retail has been funding this movement on DealMaker for years. But the future isn't just the car. It's a world where everyday people don't just buy what's next — they own the companies building it. Own the car. Own the company. Own the future.

Everyday people can invest in the brands they love. But some founders are having to turn them away. 11 DealMaker raises came so close to the $5M limit that they had to refund investors. We support @woodien’s petition to raise it to $20M. Community is capital.

54% of Americans would invest in private companies if given the chance. 71% wouldn't know where to start. 64% didn't know it was legal. @CathieDWood built ARK Venture to democratize exactly this access. The access already exists. Nobody told anyone it does.

The median company going public in 2024 was 14 years old. In 2000 it was 6. Most of the compounding now happens before there is a ticker to buy. I spoke to @Forbes about whether protection and access have to be a trade-off. forbes.com/sites/melissahous…

You can bet on a prediction market today. You can't invest early in the next OpenAI. The rules deciding that were written in 1982. @profgalloway, curious whether that matches what you're hearing from younger investors. My piece in @Fin_Revolution: thefr.com/news/the-ai-wealth…

Most of the industry still treats retail investors as a risk to be managed rather than a resource to be included. Founders on our platform have raised $2.8B from their own retail base. @woodien, curious whether that tracks with what you're seeing this year. My conversation with @thefintechtimes : thefintechtimes.com/in-profi…

93 tools built across 11 departments at DealMaker Labs, up from 66 in eight weeks. Almost none of the builders are engineers. AI here hasn't replaced people. It's replaced software. Agents are impressive, apps are dramatically cheaper. That changes the math on raising. Add thoughts in thread! #Buildinpublic

Very excited to announce an expansion of our leadership team. Darrell Heaps joins our Board of Directors, Joy Watson Seon as CCO and Christopher Osborn as CTO. DealMaker has incredible momentum, with capital raised through our platform up 40% year over year. businesswire.com/news/home/2…

I don't have to predict it. I watch it happen every day. Retail is already 38% of the market. 200K own the @packers. 17,500+ own @PacasoHomes. @timeplast emailed the retail investors who backed their raise and sold 10K units in 6 hours. Owners become your loudest advocates. What's your retail strategy?

I was just on @etnshow with @Ronanchamberss and @lukeknight. @SpaceX reserved 30% of its IPO for retail, versus the usual 5-10%. @AnthropicAI and @OpenAI are next. Match a fifth of that allocation and retail is looking at $1.1T into AI IPOs in 12 months. Thanks for having me on.

Really excited to speak at @money2020, Oct 18-21! Join me in Las Vegas & save $250 on your pass with code JOINME250: us.money2020.com/ #Money2020USA

I started @Dealmakertech eight years ago on a simple bet: regular people deserve a seat on the cap table of private companies. For most of those years, that was the contrarian view. But in the past six months, the ground has shifted toward retail. @SpaceX IPO with massive allocation for retail investors. @profgalloway saying he predicts that in the next few years an influencer will buy a brand with the backing of their followers. @vladtenev, Robinhood's CEO, saying the end goal of what they're building is capital formation at a company's earliest stages. And more and more people, like @Jason, saying everyday investors have been locked out of the value creation in the private markets. Feelin’ like: 🧥

Timeplast recently raised $5M from 9,733 retail investors on DealMaker. Then they emailed that list at the launch of their sustainable straws and sold 10,000 units in six hours. The cap table bought what it funded. That's the power of retail capital. @timeplast dealmaker.tech/case-studies/…

"To take the fiction out of science fiction."  That is how @elonmusk described @SpaceX's mission today, ahead of the company's IPO. Retail investors invested $15 billion of the round.  Larger than most single IPOs. US retail by our count is a $67 trillion TAM so it can absorb it. Just the retail market flexing what it can do. SpaceX is now one of the top ten biggest companies in the world. Given the size, to me, of course it’s going to be in index funds. But now index funds are changed in their makeup, because they include what is effectively a venture investment.  It will be interesting to see how the market fluctuates as people reposition over the next few weeks. There’s also going to be a lot more capital freed up for other sectors of the market. Interesting times we live in!

Allbirds recently sold for $39 million. At its peak it was worth $4 billion. Dan Frommer wrote a sharp piece in @newconsumer on what that says about this early DTC era. Many of the brands of this era raised "tremendous" and "unnecessary, and for some, ultimately harmful" amounts of capital. "This is where the 'DTC era' looks the most foolish in retrospect." This lines up with comments I've seen Michael Preysman and @mrethansong make recently about Everlane’s sale to Shein. Preysman is launching a new brand and in that initial message he says that this time "no venture capital, no private equity." “Venture capital was never suited for apparel or fashion brands" was Ethan Song’s observation in a LinkedIn post. We seem to be at a turning point in how high-craft consumer brands build their businesses and grow. As someone who has built a platform for companies to raise capital from their fans, this shift has caught my attention. @Dealmakertech has seen real success with consumer brands raising community capital and bringing their fans onto the cap table. @fromedome, I would love to talk through this and record it. Just a casual conversation. I think a lot of founders would find it useful.

"trillion dollar IPOs are a failure of public market capitalism, and if you want a real revolution, retail should have access to deals at early stages- not just rich VCs and their LPs" 🫡