I worked my way, literally, through elementary school and through high school. In high school, I caught a break, I was on my way to buy a Slurpee, like maybe 12 years old, and a guy dropped something on the street, and I went and picked it up for him and put it on the back of a truck. And they're like, Hey, why don't you help us load this truck. I said, sure, I got nothing going on. And I just loaded a truck with them. And then like an hour later, they said, Well, hey, kid, why don't you come deliver the truck with us. And I said sure.

Now remember, this is time where parents didn't worry about their kids. It was relatively safe. I'm a 12 year old getting into a truck. We drove to Westchester unloaded the truck. I get back four hours later. And the guy says What are you doing tomorrow? I'm like, I don't have school tomorrow. He goes, we'll be here at four o'clock in the morning and you can work.

And I worked every minute of my life through high school.

We have a lobster-catching business in north Wales, and it's a story about a guy who was a scuba diver in Thailand and came back to be with his family and wanted to start a lobster-catching business and needed some money for some nets and lobster pots.

And it's like, yeah, ‘people helping people’, it still hasn't really changed from that. I just think, you're gonna see projects funded that are really organic and natural.

So even though more small businesses are being formed, traditional banks are lending less to them in terms of loan volume.

And that started to get me thinking about how I might join a startup or another company that was trying to solve this problem. I looked around a lot, and I didn't see anyone that was solving in a way that I thought was really equitable.

It's funny, I talk to a lot of entrepreneurs, people that need to be their own boss ,that feel really compelled to go out and start a company. That was not me, I was a very happy cog in the wheel. I enjoyed working in corporate America, I enjoyed working in a midsize startup. And really, it was just kind of an alignment of my passions, and a problem in the industry that I saw that no one was solving a really satisfactory way. And some good mentors that pushed me into to take that leap and jump into the entrepreneurial world.

And then there's another model, which is lighter, I call it the wine payback. Instead of investing €5,000, you would just finance for example, €500 and you will receive for three years €200 worth of wine, so you get €600 of wine and you've only paid €500 for it. And every year you receive the new vintage you, you start to create a connection with the wine estate.

And when you share the wine with your friends, it's completely different. Because you have a story to tell, like you've seen some of the project you mentioned with the vineyard planted in its purest form. And there's always lots of fascinating story you can tell the way wine is produced the way wine is enjoyed falling in time.

Very often I've said that WineFunding is not a crowdfunding platform, WineFunding has a crowdfunding platform. And it's very different.