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VENTURE CAPITALISM - HOW & WHY TO GET IN EARLY! By Maxwell Ampong, CEO, Maxwell Investments Group, Ghana
Venture Capitalism is a wonderful thing, if you know how it works and how to get in safely. By the time you finish reading this article , you will have just enough information to be a pocket venture capitalist right here in Accra, Ghana. This is the same information that has made a fortune for Mark Cuban, Goldman Sachs, other Wall Street billionaires, and, soon, you! The reality is that, in the good old days, the rest of us could wait for a tech company to go public before we bought and owned a piece of it. Microsoft went public when it was valued at a billion dollars. Oracle went public when it was worth a billion dollars, as did Apple and Amazon.
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If you had bought those stocks back then and held them until now, you’d be a multi-millionaire, if not a billionaire. The problem is that these days, there are many valuable companies that have great prospects and easily demonstrate that they are the next trillion dollar businesses in the near future. But you and I are not invited to invest when it really counts. It’s not open to the public until the big guys get the most out of it, then they say “oh hey come buy shares in this company and hope things go well”. Venture capital is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that
have been deemed to have high growth potential or which have demonstrated high growth. Private equity financing means you’re giving the startup money in exchange for ownership shares. Everybody knew very early on that Uber was a game-changer. I wish I had bought an Uber when it was only a few years old. Uber waited from 2009, when it was worth about $5M, until it was worth over $76 billion in 2019 before going public. Since then, its stock has risen from slightly more than $40 per share to slightly less than $60 per share.That’s not exciting at all. THE REAL MONEY WAS MADE BY THOSE WHO BOUGHT INTO UBER
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