Heads up: This post is 12 years old. My thinking may have evolved since then — read it with that in mind.
A few weeks ago, a friend sent The Next Web’s The Past, Present and Future of Crowdfunding article to me. My friend knew I’m a big fan of CUUSOO’s Kohei Nishiyama and had worked with him to launch their super awesome LEGO official crowdfunding site! I was eager to read this article about crowdfunding’s history, hoping to see CUUSOO’s name in it. Unfortunately, Paul Sawers didn’t mention it. Not even LEGO CUUSOO.
In The Next Web’s article, Paul named British rock band Marillion’s fans fundraised US concert as the first online crowdfunding example in 1997. 1997! Do you remember what the internet looked like in 1997?! The web was still in its infancy, pages were static, there weren’t any dynamic, reader generated content online. The social web as we know it today did not exist back then. Yet it was in 1997, that Kohei Nishiyama saw the future of co-creation of products via the internet. He quit his job at McKinsey and founded Elephant Design, and in 1998, launched CUUSOO.com. Since then, CUUSOO has helped brought many brilliant, iconic ideas into reality. It is truly “ahead of its time” in that the web’s technology wasn’t ready for CUUSOO yet. For that, Kohei and his CUUSOO.com should be recognized as the pioneer in the world online crowdfunding.