 Oh, I did change my slide before, so it did say how crowdfunding has changed in the world. Apparently I've only got two minutes left, but I'll just crack into it. It's going to be really fast, guys. So that's me, tweet me, follow me, follow, pleach me, we're pretty social. So how many of you out there know what crowdfunding actually is? Yay, I love it when people put their hands up when I ask that question. For those of you who don't know, put simply, crowdfunding is a crowd of people giving someone funds to do something that they care about. Simple, right? And crowdfunding is not really even a new thing. It's happened ever since people have wanted to get money from other people and do something that they care about. But what we've done, it pledged me, is we've built a platform so that it makes that super easy. And one of the good examples of crowdfunding is we might recognise that the first real modern example happened in New York in the early 1900s where they crowdfunded a business. So it's not a new thing, but the technology that we're using behind it is a new thing. And then next question, people go, well, crowdfunding, what's a crowd? Well, a crowd is anyone. You guys are a crowd. A lot of you have networks and a lot of you here are librarians. There's a whole bunch of librarians out there who might be interested in funding something. There's a whole bunch of other crowds out there that you can tap in. Pretty much if they're a network, if they're a group of people, they're a crowd. Ask them for money. And that's the important thing, because crowdfunding without the crowd, you don't get any funding. And this really harks back to, I think, what the first speaker this morning was talking about around building community as well. A crowd is a community. And there's someone where you can go and get feedback and support from. So it's not just about the money. And that's kind of where we also step in. So what does Pledge Me? We're New Zealand's first crowdfunding platform. We started almost four years ago now. We offer two different types of crowdfunding, which I'll talk a little bit more in a couple of seconds. We have 50% success rate. But if you took away all the people who thought that just putting a campaign up on the page, and someone somewhere in the middle of the internet was just going to rain money down on them, if you took away all those people, then our success rate would probably be near 100%. Because you've got to work for that money. You've got to actually tap into a crowd. So we've almost had 900 successful campaigns. And we think that's pretty awesome. We'll get onto some of those campaigns in a second. Run 12 successful equity campaigns. That's companies going out to their crowd and asking them to become shareholders. Just over 8 million raised through Pledge Me in the last four years. And we've had 58,000 pledges and 30,000 registered users. And now we've gone to a point where we've got a whole bunch of staff. So we're growing our own crowd internally, which is pretty cool. So what have we enabled people to do? Oh, that's right, people before platform. So going back to that idea of community, we think that the digital thing's cool and everything. The internet's great. But sometimes you've got to bring that out into the real world. We're a platform, but the real key here is people. Pledge Me projects. So a project is a discrete chunk of work. So and how that goes is any one of those 890 campaigns. So we've had everything from people building bionic hands and raising $20,000 to do that. The dudes who wanted to make a loaf of bread and they raised $5. And they actually ended up raising $20 because I gave them 10 by accident. I've crowdfunded myself. I'm going on a trip to Washington later in the year. So there's me and my homeboy, Obama. We had the dude who is a jazz musician in Christchurch and had taught years and years and years of jazz musicians and in Christchurch and never put out his own album. And he was pushing his sixth, sixties and seventies and all students thought, hey, why don't we get him some recording time in a studio? And so they crowdfunded and got him some studio time and he put out his own CD and didn't even know how to use Facebook. So it's both old people and young people were doing it, not just digital natives. Creative Commons are doing it. Everyone's doing it. We've funded a whole bunch of things. So that you set a deadline. So the campaign closes at this date. You set a money amount. You've got to get X amount of dollars that you need to raise to be able to do your thing. You check up a campaign. You go out to your crowd and ask people to fund you. And some great examples recently. Eat My Lunch. So Eat My Lunch is a social enterprise based out of Auckland. Really simple model. You buy a lunch. And they give a lunch to a school student in a low-decile school in South Auckland. It's really cheap. It's really effective. And they needed $120,000 to scale their business. So they keep on rolling out and keep on doing that social good. They came to us. They raised that money and a little bit extra. It's the most pledged-on campaign we've ever had with over 2,500 people doing it. They got massive news coverage for what it is that they're doing. And they grew awareness about a whole bunch of issues other than that child poverty, nutrition, and a whole bunch of other things. And yeah, they got their money. And they're out there changing the world a little bit now. Next one was Back the Bull. And this is the biggest campaign that we've ever had in terms of cash money. So the Christchurch Art Gallery Trust, they wanted to get Michael Papakofa's Bull in Christchurch. And the lovely people at Westpac and the arts, the foundation said, well, if you go out and do a crowdfunding campaign and you raise $200,000, we'll match it. Each of those groups will match it. So they raised $206,000. And then that was matched two other ways. So they ended up getting $600,000. So it's the biggest project ever. And once again, they got news coverage and they built a community around that. How many people hear from Christchurch? How many people know the Bull? Yeah, it's become an icon down there. And there was such a huge massive community-driven campaign to back the Bull. And it was really beautiful to watch that happen. So something new that we've started doing is Pledge Me Equity. So as I said before, that allows companies to go out to their crowd and ask them to become, not just customers or champions, but become shareholders, put their money where their mouth is and become part of a more formal crowd. And that works in a really similar way to the project crowdfunding. You set a goal for your money, so you need $200,000. You set a deadline, you need it by the 1st of March. And you provide a business plan and you go out and you ask people, hey, come invest in me. The government changed the law last year to allow this to happen, so we're not doing anything dodgy, promise. And it's taken off. So as of this week, we've had 12 equity crowdfunding campaigns and we've raised $3.2 million just through equity. And we've got one current campaign up on there. If you like Kumara and you like chocolate, go check that out. The biggest was CellShed, which is a new tech product that makes selling things geographically easy. And they raised over $700,000. And the smallest was Parent Interviews, which is a small startup based down in Dunedin, run by a 19-year-old, put Indy Griffiths, who's the world's youngest equity crowdfunder at 19. So it's super cool that we're seeing like a huge range of companies come through here. So we've had the second fastest equity campaign in the world, where the Eastie Boys are racing half a million dollars and half an hour. They got BSLs, right? 211 investors into their company. And yeah, it was crowd-driven. They had people chomping at the bit before they before they actually pushed go on the campaign. And it was really interesting to see the work that they did in the real world, as well as fitting alongside their work online to really push out their campaign. And then another great example of how we're diversifying who gets funding is Sorbet. So that's Brian West. She's a chemist and she owns a cosmetics company. She raised just over $200,000 in a week for her solid shampoo company, Sorbet. And 68% of the investors were customers. So it goes back to building that community around what you do and really owning it. Now, the other cool thing about equity crowdfunding is that we've seen that it has diversified and democratised who gets funding. So out of those 12 successful campaigns, four of them have been female founders. And one of them has been the youngest. And we've had other people in there that wouldn't traditionally get funding from VCs or they might find it hard to get it from banks. Cool. So that's really what we do. We help fund things that Kiwis care about and that could be baking a loaf of bread or it could be beer, which really do the same thing, right? So we help people turn ideas in reality by giving people a platform to exchange money and exchange value with the rewards and we're democratising who gets funding. So what's next for us? Because we like to keep on pushing what we're doing and give people other options to do cool stuff. So the next jump is across the ditch to Australia. We are looking at expanding equity crowdfunding over there. Lots of New Zealand companies operate here and in Australia, so it makes sense that we start offering that service both here and over there. And more excitingly, crowd lending. Might have seen Harmony, which is a peer-to-peer crowd lending platform. We're going to be doing a similar thing, but it's a person-to-business crowdfunding. And it's been proven internationally as a really effective way of getting your crowd if you're an existing business or a startup or an NGO, a not-for-profit or a community organisation, which you can't do an equity campaign because you need to be a company for that, to get funds so that you can build and carry on doing all the awesome work that you're doing. And internationally, it's taken off over in the UK. We've seen a company who offered a crowdfunding round where they paid the interest back in burritos. So it opens up the ways that you can use your money. And as I said, almost any organisation can do a crowd lending round, not-for-profits, social enterprises, community groups. And by doing this, we allow more choice. Sometimes equity doesn't fit, sometimes a project doesn't fit, sometimes you just don't want to go out and get a little bit of debt, but the bank is a little bit mean sometimes. And as an example, they charge quite high interest rates on things. So we're kind of democratising that because hopefully all of you have some form of savings account. And that's just sitting there earning a few percent interest. With something like crowd lending, you could be earning a little bit more and supporting, something that's going to give you warm fuzzies and maybe burritos. And it's also a preferred option. Small and medium enterprises in New Zealand borrow 33 billion over the last 10 years. And that's compared to 630 million that was given by angels in the last 10 years. So there is a desire for this. So just quickly, what makes a good campaign? Got to have a crowd, got to have a clear idea, got to have a plan, you got to have a pitch. And I was talking to Mark before, somewhere in the audience, about like a really discreet areas. A really discreet bit of work that someone in Cromwell could do. You could digitise the archives of the local paper and that would you get it costed out. So you've got a crowd, people in Cromwell, people who like archives, people who just like want to know what happened down the deep south. You've got a clear idea, you're digitising it, got a plan, well we need X amount of dollars to go out there. Then all you need is a pitch, chuck it up on Pledge Me, go out and tell people about it because that's kind of what you want to do if you want the money. And maybe do some IRL events because I can go around with a bucket right now and probably collect a few dollars out of the people here who wants to see the local Cromwell paper digitised. Have we got a crowdfunding campaign boiling here, Mark? So yeah, that's the end. If you want to know more about Pledge Me, obviously PledgeMe.co.nz. If you're thinking about running a campaign, guide.pledgeme.co.nz or education.pledgeme.co.nz for equity. And that's got a step-by-step guide of how to do it. Really simple. And if you've got questions, give me a bell. Thanks.