• Home
  • About
  • Recommended Reading
  • Disclaimer
  • Privacy Policy
  • Advertise / Contact

Invest It Wisely

Maximizing your EV in life

  • Home
  • Growing Your Wealth
  • Small Business Solutions
  • Healthy Living
  • Miscellaneous

Interview: CapLinked Co-Founder and PayPal Mafia Member Eric M. Jackson

By Mich

The following is a guest post by Alex Levin, who writes for JW Surety Bonds.

The early founders and employees of PayPal are famous for dreaming big. Known informally as the “PayPal Mafia,” these entrepreneurs have gone on to fund or help create numerous game-changing startups, including YouTube, Yelp, Flickr, LinkedIn and Facebook. And now Eric M. Jackson, the former VP of marketing for PayPal, has added his own contribution to the long list of PayPal Mafia internet startups – a private investment networking site called CapLinked.

According to Jackson, while the internet was busy revolutionizing all sorts of industries, the world of private investment went largely neglected. Facebook had made connecting with friends easier than ever, and YouTube put video entertainment at the fingertips of anyone with a computer, but professionals with a very real need for engaging in investment opportunities were stuck with old technology that was difficult to use. In order to remedy this, Jackson and co-founder Chris Gray created CapLinked as a way for investors and private companies to connect, manage deals and stay in touch even after a deal has been completed. And the results have been astounding – since its founding in 2009, over $27 billion dollars in deals have been made through CapLinked involving nearly 80,000 companies, making CapLinked an undeniable success.

And as Jackson puts it, the success indicates to him that CapLinked finally provides the service that the private investment community has needed for over a decade.

What was the inspiration for creating CapLinked?

I think the simplest way to answer is that in 2009, I was having coffee with [co-founder] Chris Gray and we were talking about business lessons we learnt in our careers – I had been at PayPal before and had a media company, so I had raised some capital before, and I was talking about how challenging it is to get a business up and running.

When it came to raising capital, there weren’t a lot of tools but then the other problem was to keep updated with investors. And Chris, who had been in investing for 15 years as well as private equity, he said from his side of the table there weren’t a lot of tools to help him invest and find opportunities either, and we realized that there should be a way to make this a lot easier than sharing information on LinkedIn or Facebook. So that realization was difficult for all parties involved and led us to create a new platform that’s social and easy to use and makes it a much simpler process.

How does CapLinked work?

At a very basic level, CapLinked gives companies, investors and their advisors tools for networking, managing and raising capital as well as exchanging updates. So think of it as a centralized platform for all the parties involved in private investing to come to and share info.

You can set up a profile and network on the site and be introduced to advisors and lawyers, and you can set up a deal room. And unlike other online deal rooms that can be very expensive and require longterm commitments, the site is free. So you set up a free deal room and populate it with info from your transaction, you can share it and it feels very social – so the software is not clunky and user unfriendly.

It’s meant to be much more enjoyable and really intuitive while also giving you the tools to go through due diligence. Then, after the deal is done the investor can continue receiving updates from this guy through a full suite of investor relation tools.

Generally speaking, it is a social network and you might say it’s a professional network where people that are looking for private investing come and find good prospects to work with and then are given the tools to be able to deal with them.

How does CapLinked differ from past private investment tools?

It really brings it out of 1995 and by that I mean that private investment has been stuck with old 1995-era technology for a long time – this includes spreadsheets, faxes, emails loaded with attachments, etc and it was a really old school process that desperately needed an update. When you look what’s going on with public markets, those investment tools are far more sophisticated and it’s time for private investment to catch up. It’s moving the entire industry away from email clients and lengthy cumbersome spreadsheets and moving it to a much more centralized and online environment – and even an environment that’s more secure than just emails flying around the internet. So it also protects privacy.

What has the success of CapLinked taught you?

The success of CapLinked has proven that it’s a product that people want. It’s really taken off and grown quickly and in the 13 months we’ve been available to the public, we have worked with technologies and industries that you wouldn’t expect to see – not just high tech but commercial, real estate, food and beverage and it just shows that a good set of tools is important for any business and that there is a real need for it in the business world.


Alex Levin is a writer for JW Surety Bonds, a surety bond agency licensed nationwide.

 

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...

Filed Under: Investing, Opinion Tagged With: caplinked, chirs gray, eric m jackson, investment tools, PayPal, private investment

About Mich

Mich is your typical middle class guy with a house and 2 kids minus the dog. He works in the IT industry and likes to muse about how to achieve more for less when it comes to money.

Comments

  1. Shilpan says

    April 20, 2012 at 6:39 pm

    I have launched an iPhone and Android app with the aim to connect consumer directly with hoteliers. It’s taking OTA’s(Online Travel Agencies like Travelocity, Priceline etc.) out so that hoteliers can offer best room deals. You can download the app from this site –

    http://www.mistay.net/

    I wonder if this network can help me get connected with investors as I want to grow it.

  2. 101 Centavos says

    April 21, 2012 at 8:50 am

    Intersting… sort of like a Kickstarter for established companies?

    • Alex says

      April 23, 2012 at 11:51 am

      yup! something like that — with an simple UI. I haven’t tried it out yet, but if I ever start my own business it’s the first place i’ll go.

Trackbacks

  1. Weekend Reading: What Lies Ahead Edition | Invest It Wisely says:
    April 22, 2012 at 2:34 pm

    […] « Interview: CapLinked Co-Founder and PayPal Mafia Member Eric M. Jackson […]

About Invest It Wisely

Invest It Wisely is about evaluating the choices that each of us face everyday. It’s about investing your time, your money, and your energy wisely, in order to achieve your goals. The end goal is maximizing your life expectation, and exploring the ways to get there.

Subscribe!

Subscribe via RSSSubscribe via EmailSubscribe via TwitterSubscribe via Facebook

Most Popular Posts

  • How to Get Fit, Feel Better, and Get Rid of Your Foggy Head: A Few Simple Steps
  • 3 Frugal Ideas for a Romantic Valentine’s Day
  • What Would You Do with a Million Dollars?
  • The Importance of Opportunity Costs, and Why They Should Not Be Ignored
  • What Do You Need to Get out of the Rat Race and Achieve Financial Freedom?

Categories

  • Avoiding Scams
  • Book Reviews
  • Crypto Trading
  • Currency Trading
  • Economics
  • Financial Freedom
  • General Reviews
  • Growing Your Wealth
  • Healthy Living
  • Insurance
  • Interviews
  • Investing
  • Market Analysis
  • Miscellaneous
  • Motivation
  • Opinion
  • Paying Down Debt
  • Philosophy
  • Precious Metals
  • Reader Questions
  • Real Estate
  • Relationships
  • Saving Your Money
  • Small Business Solutions
  • Stories
  • Uncategorized
  • Weekend Reading

Archives

Invest It Wisely Copyright © 2016
Creative Commons License
This work by Invest It Wisely is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.investitwisely.com/contact