Key Takeaways:

Stonks raised $3m in a 60-minute pitch at our historic “Stonks Raises on Stonks” event

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.

The mission of Stonks has always been to democratize investing for all. It was always obvious to us that we should raise on our own platform, but what would that look like?

A few weeks ago, we secured our lead investor Andreessen Horowitz. That’s when the big question bubbled to the surface.

“What if Stonks raised on Stonks?”

Traditionally, raising $3m would’ve required dozens of meetings, more follow up meetings on top of those meetings and then a slew of back & forth emails and calls. It’s a process known for halting the founder’s productivity and taking up valuable time. Could a direct raise on our platform make things easier?

The Problem: It would’ve been difficult to pitch and collect checks from hundreds of investors

In testing our own product, we wanted to see what would happen if we held a demo day where all the stars aligned. It was our assumption that the community needed these three things to jump aboard:

1. A company that our accredited user-base was familiar with and understood
2. Strong lead investors anchoring the round and price of valuation
3. The entire Stonks marketing machine behind an event

These same variables in a traditional raise lead to months of running around collecting checks from a fragmented community of investors. Time is a founder’s scarcest resource. We couldn’t sit around waiting for these investments to happen, so we decided to take the road untraveled.

The Solution: Stonks pitches on Stonks

Over the course of an hour, we had our lead investor, Andrew Chen, partners, and users drop into the livestream to chat with our founders Ali Moiz and John Hancock.

We’ve always held the strong conviction that live video would build trust faster than deal memos, but we never realized the potential scale would be proven so quickly and by our own raise. By the end of 60 minutes, we had received millions in live commitments and 150 investors had signed their final commitment documents LIVE.

Yep, this video is probably your reference point for the event, we hear that a lot.

The Surprise: The Quality and Quantity of Investors

We were blown away by the 279 individual investors that joined the round, but that wasn’t something we deemed impossible. Frankly we were more shocked by the quality of those investors. A whole new cohort of users on Stonks was solidified in under an hour.

Out of the 279 individuals:

• 40 were GPs at well-known funds
• Over a dozen were founders of 150+ employee companies
• Media moguls with 1m+ Subscribers on Youtube and hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers
• 100’s of operators with backgrounds spanning from FAANG to pre-seed startups

Today, this event looks like one of the biggest meetings of Silicon Valley on the internet. Tomorrow, startup investing will be a core portfolio allocation for every household in America.

The Result: Immeasurable

With a great number of investors comes great responsibility, and we’re ready for that. The benefits of raising a community round have already paid off tenfold.

Overnight we saw our discord community server jump 400%. We now have a direct community of stakeholders to amplify content, ask for hiring intros or customer intros and easily tap into their feedback.

Our registered user base increased by 4,000 investors the week of the event.

The content produced from the event reached over 2 million impressions across all our social media platforms.

We aim to bring this experience to more startups. We felt magic on January 26th, not only because we were able to raise millions in 60 minutes, but also because we could give any accredited investor access to a company funded by a16z on the same terms.

If you know a startup founder who:

• Is raising a hot round
• Has a community that would love to invest, and
• Is able to pull off an amazing event

We’d love to hear about it—shoot us a note on Twitter!