Great questions from @jstar88.
Also, how does CrowdCube calculate the “failure rate”?
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Are there any plans to make a crowdcube api to allow other finance apps to read what people own there?
I’m working on holfolio.com for people to keep track of all their investments in one place - currently everything is user inputted but I’d love to automate it more!
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This will be super duper!
Hello! I would like to know if you’re planning to expand Freetrade to Poland anytime soon. Have a good day 
Hi, is their a way to get the crowd to vote on what companies or what areas of interest they would like to invest in?
Also with the high number of failures from companies funded on Crowdcube what are the steps taken to produce better selection, deeper and more insightful information to help investors make better choices?
What’s your thoughts on including more VC funded companies on the platform?Is that something you wish to implement in the future?
Kind Regards.
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Thanks a lot for your questions, everyone! We have to postpone this highly anticipated AMA today, but we are in touch with Luke to reschedule it as soon as possible.
Keep the questions coming!
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Becca from Crowdcube here.
Thanks, @Viktor, and thank you all for your questions; Luke was looking forward to today’s discussion.
He’s currently awaiting the arrival of the latest edition to the Lang family, who is arriving a little earlier than expected.
We’ll be rescheduling as soon as Luke is back from his paternity leave in a couple of weeks.
Thanks again!
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Congrats to Luke and his family, and we’ll patiently wait until he’s available. 
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Congratulations to Luke and his family! 
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Luke will be online on the forum and do his AMA at 10 AM on Friday (20th March)!
There’s still time to get a few questions in. 
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One thing I do not like at all about that 7.5% is that its on a individual investment basis.
We all know that ECF should be a large portfolio to spread risk so that to me seems that the “carry” should be on each investors whole portfolio gain or loss at the time of a profitable exit, not pay on wins with no offset on losses. The risk i think there for any ECF promoter is that carry is zero …
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Luke has informed us he would need to delay his highly-anticipated AMA. Apologies, everyone. 
We’ll delist the topic until he can confirm the new date!
Hi Viktor,
Hope all is well.
Any info on the new date? Maybe you send the questions to him and he replies in an email which you share with us.
Thanks!
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Hi Jstar88,
There’s a few questions here so let me take them one by one.
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It’s a fair comment. We have been working hard to improve the experience for claiming EIS/SEIS tax relief. Last year we introduced a digital version of the HMRC EIS form needed to make a claim. This was a massive step forward in terms of improving the experience but also it reduced our environmental impact as we no longer needed to send hard copies. The next step is to give our members a summary of the EIS tax relief relating to a given tax year. This should further help when people are claiming tax relief.
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We do have Company Profile pages where you can search our Funded Club and can see a consolidated view of all their raises, as well as, further information about the company; Companies House updates, latest news etc. Here’s the search page: Crowdcube Funded Companies And this is Freetrade’s company profile page as an example: https://www.crowdcube.com/companies/freetrade. There is plenty more we can do on this front, particularly as we are seeing a growing trend towards businesses returning for second, third, forth or even fifth rounds in the case of Freetrade.
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We do regular usability studies to improve user experience. It’s fair to say that until recently we’ve focused our efforts on improving the experience for making an investment. That has changed last year with improvements to the Portfolio section of the site, where we’re eager to make lots of improvements. It’s just a balance of resource and priority. We resurrected our customer advisory panel recently. You can find out more about taking part and helping improve our products here.
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If we include the 2019 cohort of businesses our failure rate stays at 15%, just under to be precise. We have around 850 funded businesses and 126 which unfortunately are no longer trading. The reason we excluded 2019 from the success/failure rate data is because we didn’t want to skew the statistics with lots of freshly funded businesses, with very low failure rates. The failure rate may feel like it’s accelerating but I believe that’s more a product of sheer volume of businesses we now fund. Looking at our portfolio on a annual cohort basis the percentage of failed businesses has reduced year on year since 2013. Hopefully, that makes sense.
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We’re constantly frustrated by the level of (or lack of) post funding communication by some of our Funded Club. Although some are great, many do not cut the mustard. We do periodically nudge, poke and prod every business to do updates and extol the virtues of doing this for the company. However, it is difficult for us to contractually enforce businesses to do updates. Offering benefits to good actors is a good idea so I’ll take that away and see whether there is anything we can do on that front to help shape better behaviour.
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We took the difficult decision to prioritise improving our systems, processes and technology to enable us to scale and grow our core business above building a secondary market. This has proven to be the correct decision, which has helped us to materially improve our revenue and develop a firm foundation for future growth without substantially increasing our costs. We continue to believe in the need for secondary liquidity for investors, and are delighted to have given thousands of our investors the opportunity to realise financial returns on their investments by facilitating multiple secondary transactions in 2017, 2018 and 2019. We also beta tested a secondary market in 2017 and gained some valuable feedback.
We remain steadfast in prioritising how we scale our core business so we can offer an unparalleled choice of businesses for people to invest in. Once this changes we will, of course, ensure our investor community is the first to know.
- Plenty. My personal favourite is Freetrade, we actually considered offering stocks and shares on Crowdcube many years ago so the vision behind Freetrade really appealed to me. Other investments which I’m really excited about include Monzo, Revolut, gohenry, Pod Point (just exited), MUSH, Le Col, Chip and Bluebella.
I hope that answers your questions.
Cheers,
Luke.
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Hey jakub,
Easy one. Crowdcube was inspired by an unshakable belief in entrepreneurs challenging the status quo with big ideas and new thinking, the ones with a vision and who dream big, push at the edges and want to make a difference, big and small.
Daz and I started working on Crowdcube in 2009 in the aftermath of the financial crisis. A time when entrepreneurship, somewhat counter-intuitively, blossomed with new ideas to solve age-old problems. But that ambition was constrained by the chances of getting funding, which was bleaker than ever. Enabling these ambitious businesses, who were on a mission and harnessing the belief they were getting from their friends, family, fans and followers, was a no-brainer. We knew people would jump at the chance to back businesses they believe in.
Many people said we were nuts and there were plenty of naysayers and cynics in the early years. That was frustrating but only made us more determined to prove people wrong.
That same passion for entrepreneurship is still very much alive today but instead of just Daz and I there are now 85 Cubers passionate about fuelling the next generation of businesses.
Luke.
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Ha! No contest. Crowdcube, every time 
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