$5M Startup Funding: The Secret Weapon Entrepreneurs Need

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Hey, welcome to another episode of Making Billions, I'm your host, Ryan Miller and today I have my dear friend Woodie Neiss. 

Woodie is the managing general partner at his venture capital fund, D3VC.ai, he's also the co-architect of the Jobs Act. 

So what does this mean? Well, it means that Woodie understands government, private markets, and how raising capital for startups can be hard, but no longer as hard as it used to be.

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[THE GUEST]: Woodie Neiss is the managing general partner at his venture capital fund, D3VC.ai.

THE HOST]:  Ryan Miller is an Angel investor, former VP of Finance, CFO of an insurance company, and the founder of Fund Raise Capital,  https://www.fundraisecapital.co where his strategies he

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• 9:06 [Ad] Everyday AI: Your daily guide to grown with Generative AI
• 9:54 (Cont.) $5M Startup Funding: The Secret Weapon Entrepreneurs Need

Transcript

Ryan Miller   

My name is Ryan Miller, and for the past 15 years, I've helped hundreds of people to raise millions of dollars for their funds and for their startups. If you're serious about raising money, launching your business or taking your life to the next level, this show will give you the answers so that you too can enjoy your pursuit of Making Billions. Let's get into it. 

Ryan Miller  

What if I told you that there were two entrepreneurs with zero legal background that could change the entire landscape of how startups get funded in America? See, in just 460 days, they rewrote the rules of capitalism, opened doors for 1000s of founders and created a $5 million funding opportunity most investors don't even know exists. This is how you turn $100 into a potential million dollar investment and nobody's talking about it. All this and more coming right now. Here we go. 

Ryan Miller    

Hey, welcome to another episode of Making Billions, I'm your host, Ryan Miller and today I have my dear friend Woodie Neiss. Woodie is the managing general partner at his venture capital fund, D3VC.ai, he's also the co-architect of the Jobs Act. Yeah, he's actually the guy that successfully persuaded the US government to radically increase their support for entrepreneurs by making crowdfunding possible in America. So all you compliance nerds out there, Reg. CF, this is the guy who made it happen. So what does this mean? Well, it means that Woodie understands government, private markets, and how raising capital for startups can be hard, but no longer as hard as it used to be, thanks to his work in helping to support what I like to call the rise of the rest. So Woodie, welcome to the show, man.

Woodie Neiss   

Thank you, Ryan. It is super exciting to be here, I have to tell you what you've built here at Making Billions is really something special. I mean, it's rare to find a platform that brings together such tactical depth and real capital insight. Like I followed a lot of investor content, but this show it like really consistently delivers on the level of strategic clarity and actionable advice and that people want. So the fact that you've got LPs and GPS and founders and operators, I mean, that really just speaks to what you've developed, so congratulations to you too. 

Ryan Miller   

Awesome. Well, thank you, you're were very kind. We've been fortunate to be in the top, I don't know, 2 or 3% in the world, it's all because of amazing guests like you. And I was telling you before we hit record, I'm like, I feel like I've talked to celebrity, right? If you're into raising capital or entrepreneurship or alternative investing, this is going to be a banger of a show. So I'm excited to get into it. Like I said earlier, you're one of the the architects of the Jobs Act. What's one of the craziest things you've seen trying to get a bill for, a financial bill to radically change capitalism in America, right? No, they hold on to capitalism with an iron fist, and I love it. So what's the craziest thing you've seen when trying to get a bill passed with and signed by the president united states. What's one of the craziest things you've seen? 

Woodie Neiss   

Well, you know, typically, it takes lobbyists and lawyers to get legislation written and through Congress. We were three entrepreneurs just walking the halls. It's a much larger story. But the craziest thing was, is the day before this was signed, the chief counsel for the Senate Banking Committee called us in said, guys, I just have a few questions for you about the bill itself. And the first question that he asked us was, so tell me the legal counsel that reviewed this. And my business partner Jason and I looked at each other, and Jason looked at me, I looked at Jason, and Jason clearly was not going to answer the question and I went, you know, we didn't have legal counsel do any of this. And he's like, Are you kidding me, this is about to be passed by the Senate, and the President's about to sign this into law, and you're telling me no law firm ever reviewed this. And I Jason, I looked at each other, and I just looked at him and said, I didn't know what a law firm was. 

Ryan Miller    

Man, well, that is, that is wild, right? A question I love to ask everybody, because that's why we listen to a show called Making Billions. And it's the first question is, how do you win when you're entering into this area of venture capital investing, investing in this startup company, we'd love to hear your opinion. So how do you win? 

Woodie Neiss    

I mean, we'll probably get into a lot of this later. Of this later on, but today, there have been over 8300 companies that have used this. They have run 10,000 offerings, which tells you they're doing multiple rounds. There are 1000s of data points. We actually built a database that collects up to 150 data points on each company. There's 150 platforms that have registered with the SEC. So it's just confusing, where do you go for these deal flow? We all know that investing in the earliest stages of a company's evolution is going to be the lowest valuation, and that's where you're going to make your alpha not with all of them, because not every company succeeds, you know, many of them fail. A lot of them fail because they don't have cash. Hopefully, we solve that with investment crowdfunding, but there are going to be ones that do succeed, and it's how do you find them? And so we built, we built this database, and from the database, one of the things that we did is we built an algorithm to actually try and identify promising companies from the dataset. 

Woodie Neiss    

And the way we did that is we looked at who graduated out of the dataset. So we look at this early stage, seed pre seed companies that start their funding journey there, and then, most of them are either go on for VC financing or acquired. There's been 18 that have had public exits and so there's opportunity there. But with that algorithm, we created a ranking of the companies each week, and it takes into account the company the signals of companies that have graduated, and we look for those signals in the new companies coming in and that's the report that we get, it's called capital pulse. And so if you want to win, you want to identify the companies that are going to be the most promising. Now, there's 400 active ones right now. How are you even going to go to all these platforms? How are you going to find the deals, you don't have to anymore? You can go to people like us that have the data. You know, it's helpful when you built the data set of the entire industry that started on the first day of the industry, because it gives you this unique advantage to do this type of stuff. But, you know, each week, we send out the capital pulse report, and it gives you the 15 top reports. I mean, I know you can't see that, but this is what it, you know, it looks like, and it just tells you, know who's on the list, what industry they're in, how many rounds that they've done. We break them up into different categories, from a rapid riser, those are the ones that have a lot of the crowd behind them. And that's, you know, one of the secret sauces of this whole industry is follow the signal of these people that are investing in these deals, because that's a signal that doesn't exist in really, the private capital markets. You learn about deals when they close. So we let you know who are those rapid risers in here, we tell you about their valuation changes. We have a little chart that shows you the industry that they're in and how well that industry is doing. And then, you know, people can do their diligence right off of that. 

Ryan Miller    

Awesome I love that, so you're spot on if I can distill a lot of because it's just jam packed with so much. And I'll just want to make sure that what make sure that we're, I'm properly capturing everything your your a wealth of wisdom, brother. So really, it's just kind of like, don't waste time and really make sure you get a grasp of the data and information. For those finance nerds like me, we understand something called the efficient market hypothesis, which basically says all available information if, if you believe that the market's efficient, this is public markets. All available information for particular public information, this particular stock, it's already priced into the deal, great. But how do you generate alpha? How do you get surprised when everything's known? And so there's some debate on that, but I want to take a little bit different approach, which is to say, the essence of that is to say, if you want to properly price, you need information. You if you want to know what to pay or to sell something for, you need good information. Now, the cool thing about alternative assets, like venture capital, private equity and so on, is it's not an efficient market, I believe. There is asymmetric goal, not risk, but asymmetrical information. And so what one guy's intrinsic value of a startup might be is different than yours. And the difference in the my belief, is the ability to generate alpha, especially in alternative investments or alternative assets, is whoever has the edge, that edge is access to information. And so you brother, through the work that you have and the data that you put forward, it's giving you an edge at D3VC.ai. If everyone's going but at D3VC your VC fund is you've created something that you understand those markets. You've created an asymmetrical information which gives you a competitive edge in this environment, and it's legal. So in alternative assets, you're allowed to have information that the other counterparty may not. I'm not saying it's fair. I'm not saying it's not fair. I'm just saying, how cool is that that's something that's a little bit frowned upon in private markets. Is exactly what you should do, and it's not underhanded. It's it's competitive business to say, if we can get an edge in this, and we'll talk more about competitive edges and sharpening those edges, but if we have access to certain kind of information, or we have something that we can differentiate ourselves, maybe we can really do some good in the market. So my question then is, so, so you have it, I think you call it the capital pulse report. What's the easiest way? Because I'm curious myself, what's the easiest way to get that? Like, if people want to do investing and they want to, you know, obviously, check with your lawyers and your accountants and everyone, but if that feel, if people feel that that's right for them and they want to get that edge like you have. Can they access that? How do they get that? I mean, where do we get this competitive edge that we call information?

Woodie Neiss    

I love the fact that you are focused on data, because I agree with you. 100% the people with the best data are the ones that win. And we have amazing data like we launched that data set when the industry started. We collect transactions on every single offering each day. So the number of checks that are written, the total amount of those checks each day, you can do an amazing analysis on what's happening in terms of which companies are hot, which industries are hot, which geographies are hot. And we publish all this information through our sister company called cclear.ai it's cclear, so the letter cclear.ai, and on that, we've got, you can you know you've got the reports itself, so the capital pulse reports, but even people can license the data set like we realize, there's plenty of people that just want to have the data themselves. And with 5 million data points, is a lot you can do today, and so we work with a lot. Of asset managers and venture capital that is looking at, they're looking at building their own algorithms. This is, we're entering this world of algorithms, and AI will drive all future outcomes and people are looking for data and to be able to have this unique data set and a complete one, you know, with D3VC we worked with three data science PhDs to build the algorithm for that venture fund. The thing that I told them, that they were sold me on is Woodie, nobody has 100% complete data set like your data set starts when the industry started. It goes through pre COVID, COVID, post COVID. You know what's just happened with supply chain, inflation, so we can see everything that's happening in terms of early stage Capital Finance within this and it allows us to make better decisions ad so, you know, all that information is available on cclear.ai.

Ryan Miller    

All right, so C is the letter, and then C, L, and then followed by C, L, E, A, R.ai, I love that. So getting information is data information, especially as the Rise of the Machines. I don't know that's a little dramatic, but the rise of AI is coming out. It's only as good as the data you pump into it. And these are very data hungry things, but the more you get, the better it can perform. So I think even the large investment bank, I think, was it Goldman or someone came out and said, Yeah, AI can pretty much do the job of creating subscription docs, doing the job of an analyst and so here we go. And so if you have that, typically investment banking analysts, or whoever that might be, venture capital, they're gonna analyze a lot of data, and they're gonna tell you what they think you're gonna present it. Well, we can do that instantly if you have access to the right data. So I could see why this is a competitive edge for you, man. Now putting early points on the board is great, do that, we like that! We like to win, we like some points on the board. But you can also get your clock cleaned in any industry, particularly alternative assets, specifically in venture capital, right? Most people see it as a relatively high risk, high return, but access to data, it might help to sway that in a favorable direction. But what I'm really saying is there's ways to lose, especially if you're starting out. Maybe you don't have the experience. You have some, but maybe not enough to really see the full battlefield as a VC commander that you want. And so there's some downside risks that may come just because you didn't see it, not because you're a bad person or the proverbial you. And so what would you say if people are looking at investing in these early stage crowdfunding type of investments, or whatever that might be, based on your experience, what would you say is an effective way to cover your downside risk and not lose when doing VC deals?

Woodie Neiss   

So one of the things that makes investment crowdfunding unique, that doesn't exist really in venture financing or other parts of the capital markets, is we literally wrote into the legislation that any communication that is happening between prospective investors and the entrepreneur needs to happen on the offering page, which is the website of the company. At the bottom, it's this discussion board and what's really important about that is, if you're going to be investing in any of these businesses, you know you might be, you could be a scientist, but many people probably aren't. You're probably, you know, just, you know, running your own business, or, you know, you're an investor in something else, and you're interested in expanding your investments, but you are not an expert in healthcare. You're not an expert in AI, you're not an expert in, you know, beverages. But plenty of people are, and this is the key. So if you don't want to fail, and you're looking at these, this broad array of companies to invest in, go down to that discussion page, that discussion section, because there you're going to be finding people, engineers, doctors, operators, that are going to be able to asking the hard questions that you won't know to ask. And you want to listen to what there's the questions are and how the entrepreneur is answering them. And you want to read that answer to see, did they answer it completely, and do you actually understand the answer, like, did they sell you on the answer?

Woodie Neiss    

They, take Olympian Motors, for example. They, you know, they have this, no whole car concept that they're coming out with. There was an engineer that was asking about airbag systems skeptics, you know, he was skeptical and calling it out, also the pricing model. But the CEO jumped back in, explained everything went defended the pricing model, and it was a great way for the crowd that was reading this to buy into the fact that, okay, they really spent some time working on the deployment of, you know, this airbag, they really thought through the pricing model. And you know what, you know, people are clearly investing in it, so they're buying into the fact that they can do that. But it's the quality of the responses. You want to pay attention to, the quality. Do they go into in depth, are they really forthcoming? You know, there's signals in what's happening on these discussion boards. If people are asking questions and the entrepreneurs aren't answering, that's a negative signal. You don't want to be investing in a company, because why are they even going to respond to you later on, after they have your money like and by the way, if you're sitting there doing one of these offerings, pay attention. You need to respond to every single question that comes in. Raising money through investment crowdfunding is a full time job, so. So the signals itself. It's like, this engagement is the new diligence. I, that's like, the best way for me to put it is, you know, you are going to put this offering up there. If you're an investor, you need to do the diligence, not just on the documents. We all know about that, but look at what other people are saying. You know, at D3VC, we look at these deals. We look at the names of the people that asked, you know we're not AI ex, well, three of them are, but you know, we're not engineers, per se, or you know we're in clean tech or health healthcare. We look at the names, we'll pick up the phone and find out who they are and call them and ask them questions like, what? Why did you ask that question? What do you know that I don't know? Are you sold on investing in this, you know, follow the other people, and that way you don't fail. 

Ryan Miller   

And that ties right into, I love that phrase, what we call due diligence, instead of due diligence. So this is the new diligence is to say on these crowdfunding platforms, you can see the comments, you can see how responsive people are or not, and it goes back to the old saying, read between the lines. And so this allows you to really pull out to say how responsive are they? Because if they're not responsive and raising money, likely not going to be very responsive once they get it, if they get it. And then also, it gives you an insight to be like, I could tell this guy knows what he's talking about, or this girl knows what she's talking about. Maybe I should reach out to them and see, like, hey, you're obviously looking at placing you're into this world. I'm into this world, but you really seem to know what you're talking about, this is great. So we call that new diligence, or at least a or at least a sliver of the new diligence. I absolutely love that, man, so thank you for bringing that forward. So how to not lose is really just read the comments and go as deep as you can on that, and then winning is just getting some data. 

Ryan Miller    

So I'd love to just round second base here. We wouldn't have a show called Making Billions if we didn't cover the market. So I'm just curious, right, you're, you're in venture capital, I mean, alternative investments. One thing we all have in common is we pay attention to the market. I know there's many markets, there's not a market, but what are you seeing out there? What's what's getting you excited? What's terrifying? Let's, let's open that up a little bit. So where's the market at today from your vantage point? 

Woodie Neiss   

Oh, wow, things have changed dramatically. I think investment crowdfunding is at like, the end of the second inning of a very long venture capital gain. The VCs. We saw what happened in 2022 you know, the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, and then the whole geopolitical, macroeconomic struggle, supply chain issue. Interest rates went up. VCs are pulling back, sitting on the sidelines, sitting on, you know, trillions of dollars, probably, but they're also recalibrating and thinking, do we want to be focused on early stage and what we're seeing is a lot of them moving upstream to light later stage deals. And if you just look at the data from pitch book in 2016, 41% of the deals that they invested in were later stage in 2025 it's 61% so it's moved and I think that's just going to move up even further. But when you looked at the amount of capital, it was never the highest percent of capital into early stage, because that's the riskiest. It was 89% in 2016 that's 96% in 2025, 96% later stage deals. So what does this mean? There's a complete void that has opened up pure early stage opportunity. Now, you might think of it as, you know, no one's going to go into the space. Well, we clearly are buying into the fact that innovation is always happening, startups are always being started, you know, they're coming out of universities. They're coming out of Google, people are just branching out and doing their own thing, they need capital. These are really smart people that are putting these ideas out there, and I truly believe that the all the future unicorns that are born will be funded through investment crowdfunding. It's just the natural evolution of what's happening, so VCs can move upstream. I think what we're going to see are early stage VCs, like the three VCs coming into the marketplace and say, this is going to be the domain that we want to focus on, and we're going to follow these new signals. We're going to look at the, you know, the comment section and go in there. But this is just going to, you know that the markets aren't going to go back. You know, if, if everything were to revert to normal, and interest, you know, interest rates have come down, but you know, you know people would calm down. Think about everything, VCs aren't automatically to go, okay, let's go back to investing the way we did before. No, that's not going to happen. History doesn't happen that way. So this is this new opportunity, and we are here to take advantage of it.

Ryan Miller   

Brilliant. So it almost creates a vacuum. I mean, it was in the 90s of later stage. It's kind of wondering if there's any money to be raised in the early stage, and the answer is yes, but not like it used to be, is what I'm hearing. And this vacuum is creating a larger opening for REG CF offerings or crowdfunding, then it leaves the question for me to wonder, is, so what advantages have you seen? So now we got this void, what advantages have you seen since your bill was put into law and crowdfunding is now a viable option to raise capital.

Woodie Neiss  

I mean, right off the bat, the two biggest things are, you don't need to be in Silicon Valley or New York City to raise money. This is happening in our data set, there's over 2300 cities across the United States where people have raised capital for their companies. I mean, that speaks volumes to the democratization of capital that we were talking about when we were going to walk in the halls of Congress. That so, you know, I'm in Denver like this is a great opportunity. And even in the data set, you know, we started this crowdfunding genome project where we look at the ecosystems around the United States to see which are the, you know, which are the best ecosystems, Las Vegas, Phoenix, Scottsdale, you know, Denver, they're all hotbeds for this. Why, well, VC is not really popular in those areas, okay, but there's a lot of people moving into those cities, and that means a lot of ideas and a lot of innovations moving in there too. So that is one of the major things that we've seen. 

Woodie Neiss  

The other thing is, and I did not know that this was going to happen when we were walking the halls of Congress, but it makes sense now that I can look back and see why. When we look at the data set, we tag, one of the things that we tag are women and minority founders. And so we look to see, you know, who is running the business? Are they a woman or minority founder? And what's been fascinating is the amount of women and minority founders that are raising capital through investment crowdfunding, and a percent basing is increasing and increasing month over month. Last month, 50% of the offerings, 50% of them, had at least one woman or minority founder in that pool. I mean, you go to venture capital, it's less than 2% of the people that go there are women of minority that get funded. And so why is that, like why are women and minorities both drawn to this, and why are they excelling at it? Well, you know what crowdfunding is really about, at least at this stage, it's community finance, and you're raising money from people that are closest to you. And you know what those people look like you and so women are raising money from women. Minorities are raising money from minorities. Their communities are women and minorities too, and they're believing in them, and they're investing in them. And that has been just such an amazing thing, because it's opened up the door to people that did not have the ability to not only start these businesses, but grow them and scale them because they didn't have access to capital. And I'll tell you one thing, when you look at the data to women, and you know, I know there's been empirical studies on this, but our data shows that they run smarter companies in terms of their financials. They spend less money, they have tend to have higher revenues. They tend to have, you know, greater year over year growth in their revenues. They're less risky in terms of, I got the money, how am I going to be strategic about scaling it? And I love to draw those, you know, parallels and analysis to the data. You know, we have this annual report that when the industry launched, was only 8 pages long. This past year we finished it, it was just 210 pages long, but we had a whole section on women and minorities, because there's so much to talk about there. And you know, that's just a byproduct of what's happening. But I think you're gonna see great things come out of it, from these amazing entrepreneurs.

Ryan Miller    

That's brilliant, you know. and I'm sure you and anyone else listening would agree, when you see a 50% change in anything in either direction, you see a 5% change in anything, in any other direction, you pay attention, 50% that's a seismic shift. 

Woodie Neiss  

Yeah. 

Ryan Miller   

And so when we see 50% adoption rate from a particular group, that tells us that we really hit something that probably, I don't know, but probably most people had no idea that there was a need for this REG CF, in that particular use case scenario. And so, so generating that, that warms my heart is, you know, we've, we've known each other for a bit now. And you know, my, my life's mission, I call the rise of the rest is, is really, you know, using whatever platforms, whatever voices, whatever air I have in my lungs, to really help people who are smart and just need someone to light the path, that's what I call the rise of the rest. And so thankful, I'm very thankful for your work that you've been able to do and and to really help add a little log to that bonfire and really help people help the rest to really rise up and and see like, hey, this isn't just ivory tower type of stuff you can do this, you deserve this as well. Everybody has the ability to generate and raise capital, and there's many mechanisms, and this is one of the best ones. So 50% adoption rate is a wild success, so thank you for that. Now, that being said, I'm getting excited and all sentimental. But that being said, we're talking about economics. We said you can't have a heart in economics too, right, we could do both. So that being said, where do you see the market going? In your opinion, where's the smart money going?

Woodie Neiss   

You know, like I said, all future unicorns will be born through investment, crowdfunding, you know, Google, meta, Apple, they started in the proverbial garage. That's gone. You know, this is now the new proverbial garage. It's online, it's, it's, you know, community driven, and the crowd is now the first filter, okay? And what you're going to see is VCs that are in funding. So our goal with D3VC and this industry just as a whole, is you want to bring the concepts that are worthy to. Too light. Okay, so you need to fund them. And the what I love about what's happening in the space is, do you remember back in the early 2000s there was that whole lean startup methodology, as I have the book behind me, okay, but you only raised as much as you need, and that's what you spent. Okay, it was very lean. Okay, then VCs came and they started throwing all this cash and said, spend, spend, spend. 

Ryan Miller   

Money cannons, yeah. 

Woodie Neiss    

People work. The VCs are gone. We have now gone back to a new version of lean startup methodology within investment crowdfunding, and what we're seeing is people are raising smaller rounds of financing. They're telling you the milestones that they want to hit. The ones that are successful are hitting these milestones, being communicative with their crowd and telling them, you know, this is what we did, and we want to raise another round. Now they're doing it at a higher valuation. So what we want to do is show the VCs, because, you know, investment crowdfunding only works up to a certain point, like you and I were talking about, it's a $5 million cap. If you are really going to be a unicorn and scale and grow, you're going to have to go to the people with the deep pockets, and so our job is to introduce you to the VCs that have those deeper pockets and can help you get to that exit that everybody wants. And so the VCs aren't going to ignore investment crowdfunding anymore. It is a signal that they will follow, and it's a powerful one, and it's an inversion, because the public isn't watching from the sidelines, they are the proving ground. They are literally saying, we saw it, we believe in it. We're investing in it. We're actually going out and telling people about this. And now VCs are looking at that signal, going, hmm, what is the what did, what did they see that we didn't see? Like we need to follow that signal. And that is the new, the new signal that will be driving what's happening in venture capital.

Ryan Miller   

Mmm, what you said, it's almost the play on Field of Dreams, if you build it and they love it, the investors will come. I absolutely love that. So you mentioned, there's a cap, I think we were talking before. And you said, when it first came out, was like a million bucks, and now it's 5 million. Do you see that going anywhere is it going to go up or down or stay the same? Where are you seeing that ceiling? Because 5 million today, it's great, just like when my parents started work and they made $700 a month. And maybe that was a decent amount, I don't know what they made, but they if that was a decent amount back in the day, eventually that's not enough. Do you see that happening with the ceiling?

Woodie Neiss  

Yes. So we started with 1 million cap, it was moved up to 5 million, and we now have legislation in front of Congress to push it up to 20 million. And the reason that we have it at 20 million is, if you know about these exemptions, you've got investment crowdfunding, which is REG CF, that's Title Three. You've got 506 C, which is a parallel, it's not necessarily parallel, but it's a credit investor type of crowdfunding that you can do. Then there's this other part of the Jobs Act that was called reg a plus, and it allows people to raise up to $75 million in a tier two, up to $20 million in a tier one. The tier one that's a qualified offering with the SEC takes a lot more time, energy, money, lawyers and accountants, so it's for much bigger companies, but that tier one has hardly been used because you need state approval. So you have to go to each state and essentially have them approve the offering before you can go out and raise money from people in those states. And nobody wants to spend the time or money going around state to state saying, I've got one investor here in Colorado, let me get approval from the Colorado commission. That's a waste of time and money, so people really aren't using it. So what, what I've been saying to our friends in Washington DC is Tier one's not working, REG CF is there's been one instance of fraud in all 8300, you know, if there's failure that does happen, but there's no fraud. So as long as your job is to enable capital markets and protect investors, and we've proven that we've been able to systematically grow without fraud. Why don't we just replace tier one of REG A with a $20 million cap for investment crowdfunding, and now people will be able to leverage crowdfunding up to $20 million. Do I think it will end up there? I don't think so, because I know how sausage is made in Washington, DC, but we will try.

Ryan Miller   

That's right, there's always compromise and, but still raising that cap, if you can get it to even half that $10 million cap, that's 100% increase a $10 million seed round just to build an MVP. There's a lot of entrepreneurs that can do a lot of things and, and I think about people who've got, like, the most delicious barbecue sauce, or, you know what I mean, like, it's not this high tech stuff. Sometimes it's just really cool things that people enjoy around the dinner table, whatever that is, getting a good seed round, and then working with manufacturers, and you're all about that game. It's like, that's the spirit of entrepreneurship, that's the spirit of alternative assets, and that's the spirit that REG CF has been able to accomplish, man. So I absolutely love that. So before we wrap things up. Let's round third base and talk about maybe one or two competitive advantages that you found from your experience. I mean, you've been in Washington, you've had your own pharmaceutical company or biotech company. You're now doing venture capital, I mean, you've got a breadth of experience, man. So from all of that, maybe just one or two competitive advantages that you can leave with us today.

Woodie Neiss  

I mean, listen, you can build an entire career, like we did around this. Okay, you can learn about it and if you want, we actually wrote this manifesto, that's a 400 page book called, Investomers, about it, so you can learn everything that was in my brain over 14 years, we've worked globally on this. So it's takes the entire global learning experience and distills it down into that 400 pages. But you can be like, I just, you know what Woodie I'll follow you. And that's what we're trying to do with D3VC is, we've take we built this industry, we built the database, we built this algorithm. We've tested, you know, the algorithm itself that we built with the data science PhDs took us 16 months to build. Okay, because we had to look, what are the signals? How do we test those signals? How do we take ingest the new data? How do we wean off the old data? How does it how do we build this machine learning model that's constantly updating? Okay, thanks to large language models and AI, you can do this now. You need a team to do it and then we tested the signals. So we didn't go live with the venture fund until for a year, we sat down, got the signals from the report, and looked at it and said, Let's start doing our own diligence and our own investing. We have an investment committee that requires unanimous consent to invest in a deal. And so there will be deals that we look at where the algorithm says it's something we should look at, and we diligence it, and we pass on it. I think, you know, actually, there's been over 230 companies that we've looked at. We've made 20 investments so far, we're just getting started. We've got a lot of work ahead of us. But, you know, this is, this is, I think, a great way for people that see the future can take advantage of this and follow, really, not really, really follow, but be partners alongside us.

Ryan Miller    

Brilliant. So you talk about data, this is kind of the underlying theme a lot. I mean, there's so much more that doesn't do this conversation justice, but data was is an important theme here. You mentioned that you had a book that kind of talks about that. Maybe Can you unpack that a little bit? What is what is that? Why and why should investors who are interested in crowdfunding way of raising capital and doing deals, why does that book matter to that type of crowd?

Woodie Neiss  

Well, first and foremost, the, this book is like Freakonomics for investment crowdfunding. It distills the economic rationale for why this is important. It talks not only about the structure of the law and the benefits and why there's been so little fraud in it, because there's easier ways to commit fraud, but it talks about the economic stimulus and economic impact that this can have in communities all across, really, around the world, and so that's what we're trying to do with the book. We have chapters in there that focus on investors and how investors should think about exploring or diversifying into the space. Remember, this is still high risk, high return. So you don't want to be putting all your eggs in this basket. You want to be looking at what you know, what do I allocate in terms of alternative assets. What am I allocating in terms of high risk in those alternative assets? We fall in that category. So the book really helps you hone in or, I mean, I think a lot of people that read the book will probably know this type of stuff, but it repeats things that bear repeating, so it helps them understand that. And then we've got a section, you know, that I think is super cool. I did this one thing in the book, where I created a formula for successful crowdfunding offerings, and I came up with the symbols, and I threw them all together in this really cool looking formula. And then I went to my finance professor where I got my MBA, and I said, what do you think? And he goes, you can't do that. And I went, great, I gotta do it. But we look at all the variables that go into putting one of these offerings together and then I came up with a scale for each variable. And so the book breaks down each of those variables and the scale under which those variables operate, so that you could see, if you pull your levers in certain ways and you excel, your chances of success in these offerings is going to be greater. So that's a big part of it. 

Woodie Neiss  

The other thing is, is, you know, and we touched on this a little, but where is this going in terms of what is happening with the evolution of the markets, okay? And so you have to look, you know, I'm, I'm heavily involved, you know, I think we were joking about this earlier. When I go to work in the morning, I listen to CNBC. When I'm coming home, I listen to Politico, okay, because I need to know both things that are happening. I need to know what need to know what's happening in the business world and the political world. I am highly in touch and in tune with what's going on in the regulatory space when it comes to the private capital markets. Okay, yes, we've got this bill to push the $20 million cap. But you know what security tokens are going to be the next big thing too. So I need to understand, and I need to know how the security tokens are going to play into this world of investment crowdfunding, because it is very likely that the SEC is going to say, you know, this whole framework for investment crowdfunding has worked incredibly well. There's a one year holding period on these securities, and investment crowdfunding is after which they can become freely transferable. Maybe we use that framework for the security token framework, and force people that want to issue security tokens for companies that want to raise capital to do it under Regulation crowdfunding. And so what's great about that is we're going to bring blockchain into the world of investment crowdfunding. What's great about that is that blockchain has an immutable ledger for which we'll be able to follow who owns what shares or the tokens in the company after a one year period. What's amazing about this is you don't have to wait for that IPO anymore. If you invest in a company and it is hitting those milestones, if it does get that venture capital financing, if it is growing into something really phenomenal. Hey, guess what? These tokens can be listed on an alternative trading system, and they can be bought and sold. And I think that is the next evolution of where the market goes, which is how you integrate security tokens into this regulatory framework. I cover all that in the book, and so I think it's an amazing read, but a lot of people to sleep too.

Ryan Miller  

Yeah, all right, so some of those late, if you've been to university, you know darn well, there's some useful information that's out there, and consuming it is one, but possessing the knowledge is another. And that's really what we're after. And then I think you said you had the second one, which is kind of the manual, the second edition, that's free on Kindle?

Woodie Neiss  

Yeah, so we've got this, this 150 page one day read. It's the crowd, it's the playbook for entrepreneurial success. So if you're an issuer and you want to use investment crowdfunding, and you want to think, Where do I even get started? This is that one day read, you can go through it. It covers the law, best practices, platforms that you should look at, keys to success that we saw in the data. I don't know up there. You can probably see, if you're listening, you can't see this, but I wrote the crowdfund investing for dummies book. The playbook is very actionable. It is actually, if you got Kindle, it's free, so you can just go onto Amazon and Google Investomers and look for the playbook one and get it for free. 

Ryan Miller  

Awesome, man. And so final thoughts, we talked a lot about getting an edge and an edge with data. Any, any final thoughts about that? And before we wrap things up.

Woodie Neiss 

I mean, listen, if you're intrigued by the space, you want to get into it. You want to see what's coming before anyone else. I would just tell you to go to d3vc.ai/express-interest. And that's a direct link that can get you connected to us and so I'll actually, if you do that, I'm more than happy to send you, you know, the manifesto, if you complete that, you know, because I think if you're interested in this, you're going to want to read it. So you are sold on what we're selling you as well. But you know again, you can go to d3vc.ai/express-interest, and people can always just reach out to me at investor and investor inquiries@d3vc.ai.

Ryan Miller  

Brilliant. So just to wrap everything up that we spoke about, in order to win, just make sure you don't waste time you find actual insights, right? Get that data, because this is an inefficient market that we're operating in, but it doesn't mean there's not data there. So if you want to get an edge, either you get your edge or you invest with someone who does and if you're the guy or person who wants to do that, find actual insights. We give a lot of information on that. Make sure you read between the lines by reading the comment section. This is such a cool part of REG CF is you have access to what the crowd is saying most entrepreneurs and investors alike, we just want to know what is the sentiment. This is a an investment thesis that really helps you to zero in on that. And then just make sure, like REG CF is is a phenomenal thing and if you build it and they and they love it, investors will come. And then finally, just really understand if this space is intriguing, or if anything is intriguing. Make sure you understand what it is, how it works, and if it's right for you, you do these things, and you too will be well on your way in your pursuit of Making Billions.

Ryan Miller  

Wow, what a show. I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did. Now, if you haven't done so already, be sure to leave a comment and review on new ideas and guests you want me to bring on for future episodes. Plus, why don't you head over to YouTube and see extra takes while you get to know our guests even better. And make sure to come back for our next episode, where we dive even deeper into the people, the process and the perspectives of both investors and founders. Until then, my friends, stay hungry, focus on your goals and keep grinding towards your dream of Making Billions.