How much can you make on a $130 investment?
I've only ever made two investments.
In 2013, I invested in Tesla at $39/share. It's now at $854/share. Unfortunately, I listened to "experts" who made me worry that Tesla was in a bubble and sold it just a few months later for $89/share. If I had held onto it, my $1,000 investment would now be worth almost $22,000 for a 22x return on investment. I also had at the time about a $25,000 nest egg in mutual funds I was using to live on while figuring out the future of car ownership. I told my advisor who managed my account to sell it all and put it on Tesla. She told me she "advised against it" because it was too risky. Generally, she's right. It's better to diversify and just put a small amount (only what you are prepared to lose) on high risk, high return investments. But had I ignored her and done it anyway, that $25,000 would have turned into $550,000. Oops! Lesson learned- when investing, always trust your gut, not what the "experts" tell you.
In 2014, I was working TaskRabbit doing odd jobs to cover my rent while trying to figure out what a fractional car lease should look like. I got a gig assembling some furniture for someone. After an afternoon's work, he offered to pay me the $130 in Bitcoin. I had heard about it and thought sure, why not? Even though I was scraping rent together every month, I worked hard to just leave that money there because hey, maybe someday it would be worth something. As of this writing, that $130 investment is now worth $5,542. That's a 43x return on investment with some experts saying Bitcoin could someday be worth $1M. If it does, my $130 would be worth $147,500. That's enough to buy a house (or at least a down payment in San Francisco!) - just for putting together some furniture one afternoon! Fun fact, it turned out that the guy whose furniture I put together was the cofounder & CEO of Coinbase!
When it comes to building equity instead of buying it, here’s what I have worked on in the past and when:
1999 dockless bikeshare (cofounder)
2006 escootershare (designed custom eScooter at MIT Media Lab with Piaggio)
2008 rideshare (built business plan)
2008 p2p carshare (built team and business plan)
2011 robotaxi (pitched Google)
2012 p2p rideshare (pitched potential users)
2012 fractional car leasing (incorporated)
2013 on demand rental car (launched in 2016)
2017 fractional car subscriptions (pivoted)
Upshift is the only one of these businesses that I have thought was worth pursuing, both in terms of the positive social and environmental impact, and in terms of the business viability. I remain bullish on that decision and do not regret not pursuing any of these other pathways. Upshift is a "buy" and at a great price with an $8M cap. And there's just 9 days left in our Republic campaign.
If you have already invested (thank you!), you can always increase your investment at www.republic.co/portfolio/upshift This link will also work if you need to recommit your investment (eg, if your investment was cancelled earlier for any reason). If you haven't invested yet, you can invest as little as $100 in Upshift until January 22nd at www.republic.co/upshift