Steve Powers | Wall Painter

<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" mozallowfullscreen="" src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/55971773?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0&color=d6cf00" webkitallowfullscreen="" width="853"></iframe><br /><div style="text-align: right;"><a href="http://www.firstandfifteenth.net/" target="_blank">Steve Powers</a></div><br /><script src="http://player.ooyala.com/player.js?deepLinkEmbedCode=hzOWMwMzpe5eLx7Idgn_wcrIfPjV4yMt&width=853&height=480&video_pcode=JqcWY6ikg5nwtXilzVurvI-vU6Ik&embedCode=hzOWMwMzpe5eLx7Idgn_wcrIfPjV4yMt"></script>

Steve Powers | Wall Painter

Steve Powers

Read more »

Upstart Gives You Money In Exchange for a Percentage of Your Earnings

<iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="480" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/8GyRnX1Ssxo?rel=0" width="853"></iframe><br /><br /><div id="posttext" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b><a href="https://www.upstart.com/" target="blank">Upstart</a></b></span><br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-large;">U</span><b>pstart provides you with a modest amount of capital, in exchange for a small share of your income for 10 years. It’s an investment in you, not your idea or your business. Pursue your dreams with guidance from backers who believe in your aspirations. You share some of your upside, but payments are capped regardless of your success. </b><br /><br />Use the money to build a business, pay student loans, focus on your craft or work to learn.<br /><br />Upstart is funded by Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, NEA, Google Ventures, First Round Capital, Crunchfund, and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. </div>

Upstart Gives You Money In Exchange for a Percentage of Your Earnings

Upstart U pstart provides you with a modest amount of capital, in exchange for a small share of your income for 10 years. It’s an investment...

Read more »

Mike Merrill Sells Shares in Himself to Investors

<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZnmSMrrxpGtANxPWzIoueKAANjy1dZ5lCAz7Jx6I-eOjSWq8-YhVv9hg2G1sk0b5A3_hZcc4UUecgpcrgdfpzs7VVxBw_Z08PgzdmaAwGsKopDrX-TIcTthA5Nq2LVCirIkP6lyE0gxk/s1600/1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZnmSMrrxpGtANxPWzIoueKAANjy1dZ5lCAz7Jx6I-eOjSWq8-YhVv9hg2G1sk0b5A3_hZcc4UUecgpcrgdfpzs7VVxBw_Z08PgzdmaAwGsKopDrX-TIcTthA5Nq2LVCirIkP6lyE0gxk/s640/1.jpg" width="426" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Chris Buck</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><div id="posttext" style="text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: large;"><b><a href="http://www.wired.com/business/2013/03/ipo-man/" target="blank">WIRED</a></b></span> <br />Joshua Davis <br /><br /><span style="font-size: x-large;">O</span><b>n January 26, 2008, a 30-year-old part-time entrepreneur named Mike Merrill decided to sell himself on the open market. He divided himself into 100,000 shares and set an initial public offering price of $1 a share. Each share would earn a potential return on profits he made outside of his day job as a customer service rep at a small Portland, Oregon, software company.</b><br /><br />Over the next 10 days, 12 of his friends and acquaintances bought 929 shares, and Merrill ended up with a handful of extra cash. He kept the remaining 99.1 percent of himself but promised that his shares would be nonvoting: He’d let his new stockholders decide what he should do with his life.<br /><br />Merrill had plenty of great ideas and ambitions—videogames he wanted to develop, a data backup service he wanted to launch, a whiskey-tasting society he hoped to form. He needed venture capital, but as an ordinary guy, he had limited access to capital markets. That didn’t hold him back. He simply relied on the support of the motley group of programmers, bloggers, and baristas he knew in Portland. It was Silicon Valley–style finance, writ small.<br /><br /><span style="color: black; display: inline; float: left; font-family: museo-1,museo-2,helvetica; font-size: 32px; font-weight: 300; letter-spacing: -0.04em; line-height: 1em; margin: 30px 30px 30px -125px ! important; text-align: right; width: 295px;">He found himself beholden to his shareholders in ways he had never imagined, ruining personal relationships along the way</span>But, like many entrepreneurs before him, Merrill soon learned the downside to taking on outside funding. In the ensuing months and years, 128 people bought shares of Merrill, and he fell victim to competing shareholder interests, stock price manipu­lation, and investors looking for short-term gains at the expense of his long-term well-being. He was overwhelmed by paperwork and blindsided by takeover interest. He found himself beholden to his shareholders in ways he had never imagined, ruining personal relationships along the way. Through it all, Merrill clung stubbornly to the belief that since an IPO had worked for Google and Amazon, it should work for an individual too.<br /><br />Merrill felt that more people would invest in him if they knew they were going to have a say over which projects he pursued. To enable this oversight, he paid a developer 500 shares and $500 to build a website that allowed shareholders to vote on his priorities and projects. The developer also coded a trading platform so Merrill’s stock could be bought and sold after the IPO. Anybody could now get a piece of him; you just had to click a Buy button on <a href="http://www.kmikeym.com/" target="_blank">KmikeyM.com </a>(the site is an abbreviation of Merrill’s full name: Kenneth Michael Merrill).<br /><br />The corporate oversight got more complicated in August 2008, when Merrill moved in with shareholder number seven: his girlfriend, Willow McCormick. Though they’d been dating for two and a half years and generally got along great, it wasn’t an easy decision for Merrill. McCormick taught grade school, and her idea of fun was playing Boggle at night with her friends. Merrill couldn’t stand Boggle. He was more interested in things like planning the whiskey-drinking group with his buddies. “His ideal relationship was one in which we lived harmoniously independent lives, and I think mine was a little more traditional,” McCormick says.<br /><br />Steve Schroeder, one of Merrill’s oldest friends, was upset that he hadn’t been consulted about the move-in. He may not have put much money in—just $139 for 66 shares—but that still gave him 4.8 percent of the voting stock. McCormick had only 19 shares, so technically Schroeder’s opinion should have carried approximately three times as much weight. If Merrill was now going to spend more time at home with his girlfriend, he would have less time to pursue activities that were priorities to shareholders with larger stakes. <a href="http://www.wired.com/business/2013/03/ipo-man/" target="blank">Continue reading at wired.com.</a><br /></div>

Mike Merrill Sells Shares in Himself to Investors

Photo: Chris Buck WIRED Joshua Davis O n January 26, 2008, a 30-year-old part-time entrepreneur named Mike Merrill decided to sell himself ...

Read more »

iON | March 2013

<div id="posttext"><b><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://achieveradio.com/payday/" target="blank">Payday</a></span></b><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">28 March</span><br /><a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-28--1900---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 1</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-28--2000---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 2</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-28--2100---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 3</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-28--2200---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 4</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-28--2300---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank"> Part 5</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-29--0000---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank"> Part 6</a><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">26 March</span><br /><a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-26--1900---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 1</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-26--2000---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 2</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-26--2100---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 3</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-26--2200---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 4</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-26--2300---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank"> Part 5</a><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">21 March</span><br /><a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-21--1900---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 1</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-21--2000---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 2</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-21--2100---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 3</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-21--2200---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 4</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-21--2300---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank"> Part 5</a><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">19 March</span><br /><a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-19--1900---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 1</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-19--2000---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 2</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-19--2100---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 3</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-19--2200---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 4</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-19--2300---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank"> Part 5</a><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">14 March</span><br /><a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-14--1900---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 1</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-14--2000---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 2</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-14--2100---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 3</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-14--2200---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 4</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-14--2300---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank"> Part 5</a><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">12 March</span><br /><a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-12--1900---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 1</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-12--2000---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 2</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-12--2100---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 3</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-12--2200---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 4</a><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">7 March</span><br /><a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-07--1900---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 1</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-07--2000---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 2</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-07--2100---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 3</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-07--2200---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 4</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-07--2300---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank"> Part 5</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-08--0000---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank"> Part 6</a><br /><br /><span style="font-size: large;">5 March</span><br /><a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-05--1900---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 1</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-05--2000---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 2</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-05--2100---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 3</a>, <a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-05--2200---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank">Part 4</a>,<a href="http://audio.achieveradio.com/media2/PAYDAY/2013-03-05--2300---PAYDAY.mp3" target="blank"> Part 5</a></div></div>

iON | March 2013

Payday 28 March Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4 , Part 5 , Part 6 26 March Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 , Part 4 , Part 5 21 March Part 1 ,...

Read more »