Below is an article by Crowdfund Insider entitled “EquityNet Founder Judd Hollas Talks Crowdfunding Innovation”
EquityNet Founder Judd Hollas Talks Crowdfunding Innovation
By: Erin Hobey, Crowdfund Insider
Jul 22, 2014
Since its inception in 2005, EquityNet has operated its business crowdfunding platform; nearly a decade later, the thriving platform has been utilized by over 42,000 individual entrepreneurs and investors, incubators, government entities, and other members of the entrepreneurial community to plan, analyze, and capitalize privately-held businesses. Multi-patented company has helped entrepreneurs across North America raise over $240 million in equity, debt, and royalty-based capital. EquityNet has positioned itself as a leading business crowdfunding Stack of Coins Moneyplatform with platform populations, activity, and revenues growing at rates of 200% to 500% per year.
Targeting the gamut of privately-held businesses and investors, the platform is “designed to accommodate very large populations of entrepreneurs, investors, and business supporters and to maximize the user ‘network effects’ within its marketplace.” The markets EquityNet support include Business Crowdfunding, Integrated Business Planning, Business Monitoring, Patent Licensing, Business Data Licensing and Business Assistance. EquityNet also offers its integrated Enterprise Analyzer technology to not only help entrepreneurs optimize their funding preparation but also enable investors to screen and analyze a large volume of deal flow.
I recently had the pleasure to catch up with Judd Hollas, the maverick Founder and CEO of EquityNet, on the phone and via email.
Erin: How and why did you make the career leap from chemical engineering to equity, debt and royalty-based crowdfunding? Was there an Eureka! moment?
Judd Hollas: Well, the dot com boom of the late nineties drew my attention into finance and investing, particularly in high and emerging-tech areas where an engineer can have an analytical advantage. Then, I got involved with a startup insurance company that was going to offer insurance on VC investments much like insurance on muni bonds. It was a crazy idea and never got off the ground, but it did lead to the eureka moment for me in which I realized that if you combine the standardize, analytical system I had developed (for the insurance company) with an e-marketplace model, you could create a large, effective, and high scalable crowdfunding platform. Of course, the word “crowdfunding” had not yet been popularized, so all the patents for crowdfunding that we filed (and later were granted) do not include the word “crowdfunding.”