Hi, well, this course covers crowdfunding, which is a very new arrival to America's capital markets. Crowdfunding started in earnest in spring of 2016, which is just three years ago, from where I'm speaking. And three years would be a short track record for anything, any sort of financial market or security, but for start-ups it's a very short track record. I mean, think of anybody you know, someone you knew in school, someone in your neighborhood who quit the day job, started a new company, and started working towards success. How long did it take for that person to achieve, for their project to achieve some level of promise that would show the value of what they were investing in, then probably not three years, right? Four, five, it could be ten years, right? So, for crowdfunding, crowdfunding, as I say, we've just started crowdfunding. Three years ago is when the first companies got their money this way. And so, this is a market that's so new that this course isn't going to be thinking so much about, well, what has crowdfunding done for us, right? It's too early to say what crowdfunding has done for us, but we can do is look at what crowdfunding is and see how it might fit in to the whole sort of ecosystem of financing innovation. Okay, so the focus of this module is not so much on the realized experience of crowdfunding, it's about the promises and also we'll think a lot about the conceptual challenges of crowdfunding, all right? So it's not only very possible if you're an investor in crowdfunding to lose everything you invested and to just generally have a negative experience, right,? That's certainly possible. It's also possible, as far as we know, that looking back on these early years, the general experience of investors might be negative, right? We just don't know yet. And over time, given sort of the feedback loop of companies going to this market, investors trying it out, having an experience and so on, over the years, which could be a lot of years given the life cycle of a company, crowdfunding is going to find its place in the economy. Okay, so, coming out of this course you will have a framework for thinking of the challenges that crowdfunding faces and how you can potentially overcome them either as an entrepreneur or an investor, okay? So we're going to have five sections of this module after this introduction. First, I'm going to briefly review how companies have traditionally connected with retail investors, okay? The whole process of tapping the retail markets has evolved over the years to a very kind of set procedure at this point, and I want to think about what that is and maybe we can think about why it has evolved to what it is, okay? So that will be the first module. The second one will look at the act of congress signed into law by President Obama in 2012, the JOBS Act, that gave us crowdfunding and also gave us similar related vehicles also for companies to tap the markets in some new ways. So we'll talk about that, that'll be the second module focused on the JOBS Act of 2012, okay? And then the third module will be thinking about the costs of funding in this market, right? Thinking specifically about the cost to you as an investor of going to crowdfunding, picking companies to invest in thinking through, just given the limits on how much you can invest and other things, how realistic is it that you could hope for a positive expected return and kind of what are the issues involved there. Okay, and then we'll think about, the next module is going to really focus on the crowd piece of this by which I mean, what can you gain from the sort of wisdom of crowds? How much should you expect that to work for you? If I'm investing in crowdfunding, well, there's other people investing too. We generally think of markets as sort of aggregating the wisdom of crowds. Well, is that something that's going to be there for us as an investor in this market, I mean, what are the issues there, okay? And then finally, once we've gone through those, all those modules, I think you'll see the importance of non-financial motives for crowdfunding. The probably large role in the typical investors' mind of motives other than just the expected return of the investment when we are investing in a crowdfunding startup that we see on the web page. So those are going to be the modules that we go through. And so we'll start by just thinking about how have we been going to the capital markets over the years.
