We think its about time Richard Branson had a real look at the sort of tripe Virgin Start Up are promoting.
Under the heading
Virgin Startup Masterclass - How to Mastermind an Equity Crowdfunding Campaign
Virgin are selling tickets to an event purporting to have a level knowledge about this topic - https://www.virginstartup.org/content/virgin-startup-masterclass-how-mastermind-equity-funding-campaign
The expert guy giving this expert advice is one the typical modern crop of self promoting geezers who has no real experience in business whatsoever; despite his claims. No wonder people have had enough of 'experts'. A brief search through records shows no evidence of any hard yards or even real experience in this specialist field. As if that wasn't bad enough, he is backed financially by Virgin, so we are now in the realms of Agent Orange.
The tickets cost £35..............each. I know. Better to put that on the dogs.
Just to convince you, here is an eample of a Virgin backed enterprise where if Branson knew what was going on, he would surely put a stop to it.
Branson's gleaming smile can still be seen on the Home Page of Bank to the Future with a quote from 2011. Bank to the Future was involved in some highly irregular equity crowdfunding dealing in the early days. It is now operated off shore from Hong Kong as the FCA licence in the UK 'expired'.
Also Fourex, winner of last year's Pitch To Rich competition, doesn't really look promising, still stuck at 5 locations. I think their pitch forecasted something with hundreds of machines in supermarkets, airports, expansion abroad etc... can't really see ANY progress over the last 1.5 years
ReplyDeleteYup they havent moved on much since we wrote about them http://fantasyequitycrowdfunding.blogspot.co.uk/2016/06/coino-ta-fourex-off-target-despite.html#comment-form - one more unit opened. They have just raised another £1m so maybe now things will start to progress??
DeleteThis is also worth a look - http://www.crowdfundinsider.com/2016/04/84979-one-year-later-fourex-offers-up-a-progress-update-for-crowdcube-backers/ they say here that they will be opening another 70 kiosks in London in 2016 - they have to date opened just 1. mnd you this month they did win the Duke of York (!!) Business Awards. Not sure if that's good or bad news!
DeleteCan't see how this could be bad news, but one major criteria for this category was 'how it has been executed within the first 18 months of trading'. Quite ironical if you compare those 5 kiosks vs the 70 planned. Makes it very predictable that also their financial performance will be lightyears away from the Crowdcube forecast, so they might be in dire need of that extra million.
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