Posts by Ali Moiz

At Stonks, we’re focused on building the absolute best demo day experience in the world. We host nearly 200 demo days a year with partners like 500 Global, Techstars, Tachyon & others. Over 100 Unicorns have come from these partners’ demo days in the past — startups like Uber, Dropbox, Canva, Sendgrid, Carta, and Paypal.

**Spoiler Alert: This is the largest change to the Stonks platform since we started.**

At Stonks, we believe everyone should be able to invest in startups.

YCombinator started in 2005, and has been used to launch over 3000 startups, which were collectively valued at over $300 billion as of Jan’21. Some well-known ones include Stripe, Airbnb, Coinbase, Instacart, Doordash, Dropbox and Reddit.

Startup investing is limited to those who are accredited investors, per SEC rules. Deals cannot be discussed or shared publicly, unless the startup or a qualifying platform is verifying accreditation. This has historically been a significant burden for both startups and platforms.

We’re a small team of 16 at Stonks.

We watched our investor base spike with 279 new investors all while handling our own accreditation, signing and wiring. We were stunned by the quality of investors that came inbound through our event without a single meeting — founders of unicorn companies, media moguls, GPs at top funds and many, many more.

Index investing in the public markets has yielded superior returns for most investors than active stock-picking. The data shows that fewer than 20% of active money managers outperform an index (such as SPY) over 10 years. Stretch it out to 15 years, and fewer than 5% of active money managers will outperform a broad index.