One of the most telling passages about the world of business in general and Wall Street in particular is in the first act of "Liar's Poker." Written by Michael Lewis, describing his personal experiences in working on Wall Street, "Liar's Poker" makes it clear that getting a job on Wall Street is as much about who you know as it is about what you know. An Art History major, Lewis ultimately lands the job of his dreams by having his cousin arrange for him to sit next to the spouse of a director at Salomon Brothers at an exclusive banquet. Ultimately it is this brief dinner introduction that guarantees him a coveted position at the firm.In the three decades since Lewis left Wall Street, much has changed. He has continued to chronicle these changes in his acclaimed books including "The Big Short" and "Flash Boys," both of which touch on the democratization of financial markets. Practically anyone anywhere can gain access to financial markets now and may even move those markets should they have "better" or "faster" information as detailed in both books respectively. The next big thing to hit Wall Street is already here. While access to financial markets has become cheaper and easier, access to private equity and venture capital is hardly "democratic." Crowd funding has begun to change that.In the past, coming up with a great new business idea or product was not sufficient to getting it off the ground. Proof of concept and prototypes were followed by months and years of pounding pavement to get in the "right room" and making the "right pitch" to secure seed funding necessary to move any business product from the planning phase into the execution phase. By the time the "idea" became a reality, the entrepreneur or inventor who came up with the concept was nearly diluted out of existence and reaped few if any of the rewards that came with being a commercial success. Crowd funding allows these same entrepreneurs and inventors to pitch their ideas to the retail customer directly. The end-user pays for the product being pitched up-front, waits for a few weeks or months until the product is finished and takes delivery.So who benefits? The entrepreneur benefits by not having to front the expense of making these products. He or she further benefits by not taking the risk of producing enough inventory for customers only to see the product fail commercially. The crowd-funding intermediary, websites such as Kickstarter.com and Indiegogo.com, take a small percentage of the total amount raised (usually between 3 and 10 percent) and transfer the remainder of funds raised to the entrepreneur. This method of seed funding allows the entrepreneur to get the product off the ground. They can use the funds received to officially incorporate the business, make molds, pay for required tooling, and save on shipping costs that may normally be cost prohibitive. Essentially, crowd funding allows all parties to benefit from economies of scale.I have backed 10 different projects so far and have had a 7/8 success rate with two other campaigns still in-process. Yes, failure is an option in the world of crowd funding. The product that failed, "Stone Tether," was supposed to wirelessly tether devices and other objects together by notifying the user when the two "tethered" objects moved away from each other, like a wallet and set of keys. Stone Tether was never delivered because the inventors appear to have misjudged the investment necessary to complete the project. The funds I paid the entrepreneurs behind Stone Tether is gone for good, but that is a risk I knew going into the project. Generally, funds collected are not large enough to do any financial damage to the "backers" as they are known in the crowd-funding world.My latest investment/purchase/backing is for a product called "The Universe in a Sphere." The inventor Clemens Steffin produced a glass-like sphere which has been etched with 380,000 lasered dots, each of which represents an entire galaxy. Our own Milky Way Galaxy is so large that it would take 120,000 light years to travel through says the inventor. The "Sphere" really puts in to perspective how minuscule our earth and even our galaxy are relative to the universe. Without crowd-funding this desk ornament would be far more difficult to produce and market. I am looking forward to receiving it any day now.