How early American inventors funded their ventures

Skip to the summary at the end for the juicy bits (although the rest was interesting reading too).<p>In the summary is this:<p>&quot;What there doesn’t seem to have been, at least in what I’ve seen so far, is any kind of structure around early-stage financing. I haven’t seen any formal networks of angel investors, and nothing comparable to venture capital. Funding seems very ad hoc, dependent on the circumstance and connections. If so, then the rise of institutional early-stage funding in the mid-20th century was a real revolution.&quot;<p>And I think that is the crux of it. Most people back in the day had to find wealthy people they knew, but there was no &quot;industry&quot; around early stage financing.<p>Now there is, which has probably been great for funding ideas that would not have otherwise been funded, but is also a double edged sword for entrepreneurs, as the institutions get better and better at extracting as much value as possible.

Researched in a book by L Sprague de Camp! That explains some things in his fiction.<p>Though strangely the origin of modern project finance seems to have evaded the author: seems to have evolved in New England where groups would band together to fund whaling and slaving missions (yes, abolitionist Massachusetts made a huge part of its wealth on slave missions and slave mortgages).<p>These bands were themselves evolved from a European model, in particular England (later Great Britain), Portugal, and Spain.

I read the article, which is kind of clueless. Nice pics, though.<p>Any history book of Silicon Valley details the origin of organized VC. After reading that, you can understand the overall context of informality before that.<p>Also, saying Tesla was funded by Westinghouse is a strange way to look at it - his patents were used to create the company in the first place.<p>If you&#x27;re interested in seeing those &quot;heavy metal&quot; early inventions in person, I highly recommend the Henry Ford and Greenfield Village in Michigan:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Henry_Ford" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;The_Henry_Ford</a><p>For a more modern example, Frank Robinson founded Robinson Helicopter in SoCal, which is the world&#x27;s largest producer of helicopters by shipments. I think he self-funded his first R22 prototype, then a local businessman who was intrigued invested after that:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Robinson_Helicopter_Company" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Robinson_Helicopter_Company</a><p>Similar to SpaceX, Robinson had to in-source a lot of components to get the repeatable, aerospace-level reliability needed.<p>The R22 and R44 are the dominant helicopters used in flight training, LEO and newsgathering in the USA and are about 25% of the cost of a Bell helicopter, so a real game-changer.

I wish the article noted that $30k was in which year roughly, and value in today&#x27;s currency. Interesting research!