Dawn Dickson; The First Black Woman Worldwide To Raise More Than $1 Million in STO
"The process is not simple nor has it been easy to understand. There are no handouts or shortcuts, but there’s hard work and a willingness to learn,” says PopCom founder Dawn Dickson while explaining how Secure Token Offering, funded her business.
Dickson is the first Black woman in the world to successfully use Secure Token Offering to fund her business. She is a well known serial entrepreneur with a background in Information Technology (IT) and has also worked in the tech business for nearly two decades. She created Flat Out Heels in 2011, a vision she pursued to “sell shoes in vending machines.” When running into difficulties with finding a company that built the hardware to support selling the shoes , she built it herself and named the hardware PopCom.
Now that Dickson had impressively created and perfected two businesses on her own, she needed some help with funding. "With the historical wealth of Black families being nominally low compared to their more majority counterparts and pattern matching often leaving Black founders out, the venture funding landscape has traditionally been a major obstacle," writes Brittany Chambers in Forbes. Not being able to raise the number she had in mind after her "friends and family" funding round, she decided to turn to crowdfunding through a Secure Token Offering (STO).
As defined on Google, STO is a cryptotoken required to pass the Howey Test and it's a token not limited to one particular role; it can fulfill a lot of roles in its native ecosystem. This token, represent an asset or utility that a company has and they usually give it away to their investors during a public sale called ICO (Initial CoinOffering). Dickson's method options are also aimed to bring some of the funding back to the community and the conversations of her brave move to success are inspiring us all. She was recently on the popular radio show The Breakfast Club talking about her winning venture; a show that reaches millions of young minority communities.
"I used my own company as a guinea pig and it worked. It could have gone either way, it could have possibly not gone well. But it worked because I knew it would work, and I know that we're better than they want to play us. I know we're smart enough to invest in something," stated Dickson.
Congratulations to the FIRST BLACK WOMAN WORLDWIDE to raise a successful STO over $1 Million in history. Ladies, let's get inspired and continue to innovate and make our communities and those who fought for our rights to succeed proud!
