which came out to a total of $364,600. they call it crowd funding. and for anyone who has had trouble finding the money to seed a new business, or find a new product idea, it s at the leading edge of a new world of nontraditional funding options for entrepreneurs. basically, these people are, you know, giving us maybe like 100 bucks apiece. and it really is more like a donation. there are tons of crowd funding websites out there. and they all work a little differently. but the basic premise of all crowd funding is to get financial support for a project or business by pooling money from a community of people who want to support it. what s great about kick-starter is, first of all, you get all the cash up front. so it s basically a preorder. so, customers are like, yes, i want this. here s the cash. crowd funding sites like kick starter that cater to creative projects work on a model of donations in exchange
you re saying there s a natural accountability in this structure. oh, yes. the group vetting that will take place on the internet through crowd funding sites. if i wanted to raise money for a business right now, i would have to go through a series of securities loops. would i have to basically document my prior earnings in a way that was standardized and then publish that in a proprospectus and go through a whole string of things to then list my stock at the nasdaq or list it at new york stock exchange, whatever it might be, to raise that money. how would this work and how is it different? so what you would do in this situation is you d go to platforms very similar to the various crowd funding platforms called crowd funding platforms. instead of taking large groups and small donations and funding non-profits, the same dollars would go into buying equity into these companies. but i m saying what s the regulatory mechanism that
change some of that and allow small startups to raise money online in a serious way. let s bring in an entrepreneur and advocate sherwood niece. i want to clarify something that the president say. with all due respect and humility he s incorrect. he says everybody knows that small businesses create jobs. i believe that that is factually incorrect. if you look at the research it is new businesses that create jobs, frequently new businesses are small, and you can mistake for the fact that the smallness in some way has to do something with job creation, but it in fact does not. it s just that new businesses tend to be little. give us a sense of how many new businesses could be created if we were to adopt the internet as a capital market where we can form capital and invest in businesses. how big are the possibilities? well, if you look at the success of crowd funding sites over the past five years, i think you d see if we extrapolate out, we can probably create 500,000 new businesses