 Hey guys! It says Jens Strikler. I am not Jens Strikler. Although he's a huge idol of mine, I'm really impressed by what Kickstarter has done on every other one at Kickstarter. Jensi got sick, or I think his dad got sick, so I was called in just a couple of days ago, and Jensi is the co-founder of Kickstarter, which is a huge crowdfunding platform, and I am the co-founder of Funded By Me, which is not as huge, but probably as important crowdfunding platform for Scandinavia. I'm going to start my presentation with just saying how honored I am to be here, and just meeting Simon and Rita. It's huge for me, because I'm going to tell you a bit later about how this works, but what happens is when you crowdfund is that you actually get not just money, you get a lot of people talking about your project, and I've been talking about both of these guys for like over a year. They didn't know that because I met them the first day today, so I'm happy that I'm here. Let's start with the first light. So crowdfunding is a new phenomenon. It started a couple of years ago, like the word in itself. It's not even 10 years old, but the act of crowdfunding is nothing new, and this is something that we've done for generations for like, I think, thousands of years, because we always work together. We all did stuff together. We always pitched in. As you know, we build churches, bridges, cities, companies based on the fact that you have a goal, you have something to do, and then you cut it up and try to engage people, which either invest in you with time or money. So crowdfunding per se is nothing new. What changes is that we actually have new tools. So in the early days, when we were crowdfunding like in the 70s or even for 5,000 years ago, everything was local. You could only work on a local market because you couldn't reach other continents or other cities. It was really hard to crowdfund. Like if you wanted to build a church, for instance, or any project, it took years, if you were lucky. But the thing is, and what's really, really amazing is that we are living in these days. This is today. And I tell a lot of people all the time the fact that we actually are living in the future. We are, you know, using the devices we dreamt of. I'm 34 years old, and I couldn't imagine that I could live this kind of connected life, that I could meet people throughout the world. And I couldn't even imagine that I could do the stuff that I'm doing today. So you know what? Welcome to the future. Let's do something about it. As you know, ideas spread quite easy. And what we can do today, and what we are doing with crowdfunding is that you basically have an idea. You try to boil it down to something really interesting or really well told, and you put it to the internet and ask people to be part of it. And being part of an idea is not just collecting money for rewards. It's basically asking people to do something for you. And as you know, ideas travel really fast throughout the globe. In a couple of seconds, we can reach people in India, America. We have friends everywhere. We have thousands of people online that know us or trust us at this point. But during the last years, we have started to think a lot, what is Facebook? Like for instance, what is Twitter? What are all these people we are friends with? What can we do with them? And what can they do with me? How can we connect? Because at a certain point, you get really, really bored of just telling the internet that what you ate today, for instance, or that you changed socks or didn't change socks or whatever, or that your boss sucks. You come to a point where you want to see how can I use my 700 friends or how can they use me because I have knowledge to give to them or interest. So the crowdfunding tools out there were built just for this course that we wanted to connect people who have an idea and connect them to people who want to be part of that idea. Because I'm so convinced that today we are living in a world where we are not happy that when we get a pre-packaged product. Like for instance, it's really fun to buy a CD, but it's really much more fun to be part of that making of that CD. Since I've been funded by me and we've been running that for a couple of months now, I've been backing up a lot of projects that's on our side because I really love what they're doing. And I'm starting to get rewards now and it's really amazing. Like Simon for instance here, he just crowdfunding a book and I'm really looking forward to get the book. I've been to theatre plays where I go into the audience and I know that this play is done because I once contributed with like 200 crowns. I had some guys sing a song to my wife in the city at Walborsprasofton because I gave them 100 crowns three months earlier. So you start feeling the sensation of being part of something. So let's just briefly go through the three words which everybody at this point talks about. The three crowd words is crowdfunding, crowdsourcing and also equity crowdfunding, which is becoming much more interesting now. So crowdfunding is basically an idea that you present and you decide a goal for it and then a monetary amount that you need. For instance you need 50,000 to produce a record or you need 100,000 to travel or whatever. So that's basically you collect money to be able to start doing your idea. So you pre-sell your idea. The other one is crowdsourcing where actually the money is not the important one but you ask for help. Like for instance let's build something together or let's collaborate on a book release or let's clean a park or let's create a company from scratch or like Foursquare, let's create a story about our lives which everybody can take part of. So that's crowdfunding. And then the third one which is equity crowdfunding is a bit more intricate because equity crowdfunding is basically when you give away stocks. Basically I have an idea and it's worth 100,000 and I can split it up and I can give you shares of it. And that's something that a lot of people want to do but it's a bit hard to do because both the American and the European laws are a bit hard. They don't allow you to present a stock option to more than 200 people publicly. So you have to find other ways to if you want to do that. But these three tools are out there. We're here to talk about crowdfunding and this is our platform, like that I'm running at this point. It's called Funny by Me. It's growing all the time. Of course during July it was almost dead because a lot of people tend to not use computers during the summer but now it's exploding in again so I'm really happy. But I'm not here to talk about that. I'm really here to talk about this and this is actually a list of all the crowdfunding platforms at this point. So it's not about which platform you use. It's basically how you use it and how do you interact with your audiences. And that's really interesting because all the audiences we are having are different. Some are global, some are local. I think Simon's audience is fully global but if you do something in Justice City it's not interesting to connect to the rest of the world or if you for instance work with film then you should use a crowdfunding platform maybe focusing on film in your locality. So you have a long list. And just to finalize a bit this era that we are in. A lot of really smart people have been talking about the rise of the social and creative class which is basically a scientific approach to the fact that we are not being able to compete with India and China and other countries on how to produce stuff. We can't, you know, every company is putting their force in different countries which are a lot cheaper but what do we have instead? And what we have is a lot of creative power, a lot of social power and basically we know how to use a lot of new media. So this is something that we can do. And also involved all those people that are following us because people want to be part of what you're doing. People want to tell your story. People want to be part of what you're doing. I'm fully convinced that we're coming to a point where you can't let longer stand and wait and finalize your product and then put it to the market. You should do it way, way ahead. And as I was telling Simon just before I came up on stage and I think Brita too earlier is that even without me knowing them for a year I've been working for them. I love their projects online. I watch them. I'm not sure if I back you or if I had time to back you but I know that I told a lot of people. I told hundreds of people about the project. I went to the city council and I gave Simon's project as an example. So basically I've been working for free for him because I love his idea. And we were discussing that earlier. That's really valuable. He raised a lot of money with his project which is with his crowdfunding campaign but getting me and all the other thousands of people working for him is amazing. And I have thousands of stories to tell you about people that are crowdfunding and are raising good money. But every one of those are telling about what happened on the site. Everybody has like a story of how they got contacted, how the R&D got public, etc. So that's why I just want to say crowdfunding is basically this. The money you raise is basically, it's just a positive side effect. What happens during the period you crowdfund and afterwards is actually the value that you get. And this is just a bit interesting because I should put this as a last slide but this is my Facebook friends. It's not so much but it's quite all right. Not so many Twitter friends but it's also all right. And then I have friends and family, then I have some email list and suddenly when you start boiling it down you realize, oh shit, this is real people, more than 1500 potential investors. So if I just have a good story to tell, if I package it good enough and I'm convinced enough to tell the world, I will probably make it. And just to prove it, I can tell you the story of how funded by me was built. We got to a point where we said, you know what, we have to know how it is to crowdfund if we want to work with crowdfunding. So we decided to crowdfund our own crowdfunding platform. So we begged, we borrowed, no we didn't borrow. We begged, we begged some more, we made phone calls, we talked, we gave lectures, we thought about what can we give in return. And we came to a point where we actually got a lot more money than we wanted or needed and also a lot more attention. So I know what I'm talking about. So thank you for listening. Let's invite Simon on stage. He's going to tell about an amazing film that he's producing and also one of the more successful campaigns on Kickstarter, I think. Welcome.