I would be willing to buy into a crowdsourced VC fund- I give money to the fund for a slice of it, which in turn vets and invests in early stage startups. They hit a big payout, my slice becomes more valuable.
The thing is, I don't want to do any work. I want someone else to do the vetting and the paperwork to invest. Obviously, they get a bigger piece of pie.
Basically, I want an index fund for early stage startups. It would be high-risk, but it's the same risk (in principle) as VC firms have.
This is what AngelList essentially does with their newly launched AngelFunds platform. You back an operator (typically other entrepreneurs) as basically an LP and they invest your money for you: https://angel.co/angel-funds
With syndicates, you get access to the deal flow of the person's syndicate you support, but you still have to decide to back each individual deal and for how much yourself. It still takes some work on your end.
In case anyone's wondering... the benefit of a syndicate as a startup is that it allows you combine smaller investors into one combined entity on your cap table. If you were to just take a lot of smaller checks, you might end up with dozens, if not hundreds of individuals you now have to do paperwork for, collect money from and thereafter manage on your cap table indefinitely. Syndicates make the process much faster and easier to manage.
Using a syndicate we were able to add ~10 smaller angels to our round that we probably wouldn't have otherwise brought in. The interesting thing now too is that probably about half of those people are some of our most helpful investors.
This was legal even before the JOBS act. A registered investment company is an accredited investor, and is allowed to sell shares to individual investors. Several companies have tried the business model, none (to my knowledge) with great success. See https://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/08/29/gsv-capital-placing-...
Iirc VC as an industry loses money (or has poor returns), with the top 10 firms dominating the returns and some small number of startup firms posting great returns (iirc this is from a Jason lwmkin's post)
I suspect that what you're seeing is basically than the large firms are successful enough and funded enough so they don't need more money that they "negotiate" themselves 100% of the value. What can you bring one of the top-10 investors that they don't already have, such that they'd be willing to share the benefits with you?
The thing is, I don't want to do any work. I want someone else to do the vetting and the paperwork to invest. Obviously, they get a bigger piece of pie.
Basically, I want an index fund for early stage startups. It would be high-risk, but it's the same risk (in principle) as VC firms have.