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Well, a few months ago, Jon Medved was in
town talking about his crowd funding site, OurCrowd, which, seeks to use the power of
the Internet to raise money from a very wide range of investors for innovative and start-up
companies. He started this site in Israel, which is of course, the single most innovative
country in the world, and certainly in terms of technology. And now he's back in Australia,
so Jon what brings you back here. Well, it's time to get started here in Australia.
We're announcing our plans to launch later on this year, OurCrowd in Australia. What
we're doing is we're actually recruiting now, investors who will be interested in crowd
funding both Australian start-ups as well as world-wide start-ups. More importantly,
we're looking for Australian entrepreneurs who want to list their companies on OurCrowd.
We're managed to successfully recruit about four thousand accredited investors worldwide.
We have fifty-three countries represented in OurCrowd. We're probably the leading global
platform. There're other platforms who are working in different geographies, but our
whole positioning has been to build a global platform so that an Australian investor who
actually has truly global ambitions: He wants to run a company that's going to go for global
dominance in a given sector, not just to be from Perth to Adelaide to Melbourne to Sydney,
but to get over the ocean, than we would like them to come and list on OurCrowd, and we
hope to build together with them exciting companies.
Jon it's very interesting, the whole idea of crowd funding in terms of start-up companies,
because the critique or the complaint of Australian entrepreneurs and innovative companies has
been, yes you can get a bit of seed funding from angel investors, but after that it gets
really hard and you've basically got to leave Australia and go to the west coast. One of
the challenges has always been that middle market for venture capital. Now, do you see
crowd funding around the world changing that and making capital more accessible across
borders? Absolutely, we want to bring the west coast,
we want to bring Israel to Australia rather than force Australian entrepreneurs to leave
their homeland. We have this problem in Israel all the time. Recently, one of our companies,
Waze, not my company but Israel's companies, Waze was bought by Google for a billion dollars.
And there was initial talk about taking that company into Silicon Valley to integrate with
Google Maps, made a lot of sense. And the guys at Waze said we're not going and so that
company stays in Israel. Facebook just bought a company in Israel called Onavo, and there
is talk also about bringing that company into Silicon Valley and they said, 'No, we want
to stay.' And I think that there's no reason why Australian entrepreneurs can't build global
companies from here, and we simply need to bring capital from abroad. So look, there's
a lot of money here in Australia in the Superannuation funds and what not, but there hasn't been
the vibrant sort of active early stage investment ecosystem.
We think that crowd funding can join together with angel investors and venture capital as
a third leg of this ecosystem. And we think that doing it as a global entity, where investors
from around the world are essentially helping each other or helping the best of breed entrepreneurs
here in Australia both get the funding they need, but more importantly, the connections
they need to cross the ocean. Because it's not just about the funding part, it's about
the crowd building. In other words, you need connections so that you can find distributors
and partners and additional rounds of funding so that you get introduced to these people.
You don't have to physically go and move your shop to Silicon Valley to do that, but you
have to be engaged with the world. Well Jon, thank you very much. Actually, I
can't endorse any of your investments. That's a matter for you to do that, but it's a...
Check with your investment advisor Yes, that's right, check with your investment
advisor but it's very interesting and great to see you again.
Thank you, it's great seeing you.