Crowd Street Offers a New Type of Investing
If you’ve been honing your “self-directed” stock-trading skills online to the point where you feel pretty confident in your financial acumen, your world just got bigger. Crowd Street is a new trading platform promising access to investment in companies that are not publicly traded.
Crowd Street is a private market investment platform that has a new website and a new brand video that promise to democratize a world previously open only to institutional investors and the ultra wealthy.
The company moved its headquarters in March from Austin, TX, to New York City, to be closer to Wall Street. John Imbriglia, CEO of Crowd Street, sat down with StreetFight to discuss the company, its promise, and its recent physical move.
Why is physical proximity important in this digital age?
Crowd Street represents a physical destination and puts us in the same league as Wall Street. We are conveying that there are one of the two major ways to invest: In public markets, which is done on Wall Street, and in private markets done on Crowd Street.
By moving our headquarters to NYC, we’re strategically positioning ourselves to strengthen relationships with investors and expand our network. Relocating our HQ to New York City will empower our leadership team to collaborate more closely with our strategic partners and enable us to better collaborate with our member community based in one of the world’s leading financial centers.
Can you define the “new frontier” of self-directed private market investing?
Private-market investing has traditionally been reserved for institutions and elite wealth managers that primarily serve extremely high net-worth individuals. Crowd Street is changing that dynamic by providing private-market opportunities directly to the millions of accredited investors who prefer to use a self-directed platform to manage their investments rather than relying on financial advisors. We believe there are millions of Americans who want to control their own investing strategies and participate in the possible outcomes that private-market investment opportunities can provide.
It’s also an untapped and growing market. Only about three percent of individual investors’ portfolios are allocated to the private markets today, but industry research projects this total allocation will rapidly expand and become a market opportunity in the trillions of dollars by 2028.
Crowd Street has more than $4.4B invested through its platform solely focused on investment opportunities in commercial real estate. We are poised to scale the business by introducing new investment funds across new categories – also known as asset classes – including private equity and private credit, later this year.
How is what Crowd Street does different from the offering at a company like eTrade?
Platforms like eTrade are for individuals that want to invest in the public markets, which involves buying and selling securities, like stocks and bonds, on established exchanges, including The New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq, that are open to the public.
Crowd Street’s platform is for accredited investors interested in private market investing, which involves putting money into assets, including commercial real estate, that aren’t traded on stock markets. Private-market investing is typically not available to the public or everyday retail investors.
Why is this a new paradigm?
A new investor class has emerged that wants the same access to private-market investments as the institutions, but without the need to work with a wealth manager to access these opportunities. As we continue to build out our platform, we’ll work with top asset managers to offer new private market funds for accredited investors on Crowd Street through a direct and seamless experience. Our manifesto film shares our story and our vision in a powerful way.
Moreover, our vision aligns with some of the top asset-management firms. BlackRock CEO Larry Fink recently wrote in a letter to investors that the traditional 60/40 investment portfolio consisting of 60 percent stocks and 40 percent bonds may no longer fully represent true diversification. Fink believes that future portfolios may look more like “50/30/20 — stocks, bonds and private assets like real estate, infrastructure and private credit.”
We believe that Crowd Street can be the home for that 20 percent of private-markets investment allocation for individual investors.
Who are some of your strategic partners?
This summer, we will be announcing a strategic partnership with one of the world’s leading investment consultants. Together, we’ll curate additional private market funds for our members, provide essential due diligence, and create customized educational materials to help members evaluate which opportunities best fit their portfolios.
Later this fall, when we are ready to offer additional private market funds beyond commercial real estate, we will be announcing strategic relationships with top asset management firms in order to offer new third-party funds to our members.
Why did you change the name from Crowdstreet to Crowd Street? What impact will that have on your messaging and marketing?
The company is making a strategic transition from a single-word brand to a two-word naming convention – Crowd Street. The new two-word brand conveys a physical destination or a place, evolving from its previous name, which emerged during an era of heightened interest in crowdfunding. Crowd Street is both literal and figurative, part location, part navigation, virtual and actual, where investors are free to explore the possibilities and pursue their financial ambitions.
Your ad campaign talks a lot about access for individual investors. What does that mean?
Private-market investing has traditionally been restricted to institutions and extremely high net-worth individuals. Crowd Street is changing that by unlocking access to private-market opportunities for the millions of accredited investors that prefer to use a self-directed platform to manage their investments. We are not just building a marketplace – we are creating an ecosystem where accredited investors can independently explore, evaluate, and invest in private market opportunities with confidence.
