[jseliger]

Crowdfunded equity investments should be treated as gambling, don't do it unless you're willing to lose money.

Definitely.

With crowd-funding from the start you face an adverse selection problem, a lot of the "best" looking startups are going to take money from well respected angels and are going to fill up their seed rounds long before they need to turn to crowd-funding

I wonder about the extent to which crowdfunding is optimal for situations like startups versus the extent to which it is optimal in other fields, like real estate development (http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/06/fund...).

Still, based on my reading of A Random Walk Down Wallstreet and The Millionaire Next Door, most people doing retail investing do not beat the market.

The good news in the case of crowdfunded equity investments, however, is that even if 90% fail, that last 10% may pay for some really cool stuff that wouldn't exist without the crowdfunding, in much the way that Amazon is enabling lots of people to publish shitty ebooks but it also enabling a small number of important books that wouldn't have gotten traction in the conventional system to get traction.