Crowdfunding: an interview with Eve Dmochowska

Eve Dmochowska is the founder of Crowdfund, an innovative South African funding initiative for start-ups. The basic idea is to get 1000 people to contribute R1000 and distribute the pool among high-potential early stage onine start-up businesses.

Due to the high levels of interest in funding for new businesses in Silicon Cape, we asked Eve a couple of questions:

1. What is “crowdfunding”?

Crowdfunding is the concept of raising large amounts of money by pooling together small contributions from a large crowd.

2. Specifically, how will your initiative work?

The "crowd" raises R1 million (or more). This gets put into a fund, which is then used to fund the very initial stages of an
online startup. The fund takes a stake in the startup, and this results in ROI

when a further round of finance is raised.

3. What are the key attributes that you bring
to this initiative that will help it be successful?

An excellent board, to screen the applicants for the money and a powerful and committed network of people who will mentor and help the startups.

4. Have you managed to recruit people to help you?

Definitely. The board has been chosen and *many* investors have pledged their time as well as their money to help mentor the start ups. Also, companies are coming on board to sponsor equipment, bandwidth, space

etc.

5. A novel idea, where did the idea come
through?

Necessity is the mother of invention. I was tired of seeing excellent ideas go to waste because there is no culture of startup investment in this country.

6. How will you define its success and when
do you expect to see these milestones achieved?

There are various stages. The first one is getting to the R million mark, which is pretty much there. Then it is managing to put together a great co-working space that utilises economies of scale to maximum benefit. And then of course identifying the startups with great potential, and funding/mentoring them to a stage where they receive further funding.

For more information, go have a look at the Crowdfunding.co.za website.

Tags: crowdfunding, crowdsourcing, funding, investment, vc