Here we are six years in, virtual, having raised over 200 million, over 260 successful offers.

Like all capital raising, momentum and scarcity are critical and like getting off to a good start is really important. And how you do that is by engaging your audience and building a community.

In terms of deciding if we're going to work with someone, there's eligibility, but then suitability is probably

the most important thing that we work on because there are many companies.

The CrowdSelf's funding process is not appropriate for or they might not find success with.

Five to six years for this industry, 150 million of the 200 million that virtual has raised raised has happened over the last three calendar years.

It's still pretty early in the journey of a lot of the businesses.

Matt, so good to have you on. I've really been looking forward to this since we caught up in Southstart, which feels like somewhere between one week and 10 years ago, it's hard to work out.

It was an amazing time at South Star. And likewise, yeah, I've been looking forward to this

call too. How have you been?

Really good. We just got off the back of a three-day off-site, so feeling energized.

Awesome. Yeah, really good.

So this episode, we're going to put a whole lot of links in the show notes to a range of

things.

And you have a virtual podcast, and I'd definitely push people to that.

But maybe, in the short view, how did you get into this sort of game?

What was that sort of origin story and how did it come

about? I'm a lawyer and I worked in private practice at Ashurst, before that, Colin Wilcox,

mainly in financial services in corporate law. I'd seen what was happening in the UK with

crowdsource funding and they introduced legislation around 2011, 2012 and the

government started thinking about whether Australia should have something similar. And as a young

lawyer, I was doing some postgraduate study. I got involved in a government consultation,

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