About 562 articles by Matthew Milner

Own Hearst's Mansion… For Less

A few years back, I sold a start-up I’d founded to Hearst, the media company that owns everything from Cosmopolitan Magazine to ESPN.

To pay my respects, I decided to visit the legendary Hearst Castle.

The Hearst Castle is a 90,000 square foot mansion on California’s coast, about halfway between…

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Tags: Real estate-crowdfunding Realty mogul

Your British Fortune-Teller Says...

Yesterday morning, as I strolled through midtown Manhattan on my way to work, I passed a stream of mysterious-looking women.

They were dressed in turbans and flowing robes, and I soon realized what I was looking at:

Fortune-Tellers.

They’d been hiding in their air-conditioned…

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Tags: Food beverage-start-ups Seedrs

One "Commodity" You Must Own Today

Back in 2001, oil was trading at about $30 per barrel.

At the time, just a single oil company (Exxon) was on the list of the world’s Top 5 Most Valuable Companies.

Within a decade, however, oil shot up to $100 per barrel. All of a sudden, the Top 5…

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Tags: Mega trend Tech sector

Three Paths to 30-Day Profits

Once upon a time, start-up investors had to be extremely patient:

After getting in on a “ground floor” investment, they’d need to wait for years and years as the start-up morphed into a real business—the kind of business that could get acquired or go public.

But recently, we’ve become aware…

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Tags: Instagram Mini ipo

"Boring" Investment Delivers Big Gains

Corporate America is in the midst of a feeding frenzy:

In the last few weeks, big corporations have doled out $4.3 billion to acquire early-stage start-ups.

But in a strange twist, all these start-ups are in the same sector—and it’s not even an exciting sector like medical devices or cyber…

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Tags: Circleup Consumer products

Yahoo’s Loss – Your Gain!

Back in 2008, Microsoft offered to buy Yahoo for about $50 billion.

Yahoo rejected the offer as being “too low.”

Last week, a new deal for Yahoo came in—this time from Verizon.

The deal was worth just $4.6 billion, a fraction of what Microsoft had offered.

When Yahoo accepted it,…

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Tags: Early stage-investing Uber

Did You Just Make 166x Your Money?

Last week, Unilever acquired a start-up for $1 billion.

The start-up’s early investors made an estimated 166 times their money.

Some of these investors were ordinary folks just like you.

Actually… were you one of them?

Get a Shave!

The start-up I’m talking about is Dollar Shave Club.

Dollar Shave…

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Tags: Angellist syndicates Crowdfunding ma

JP Morgan Caught Reading Crowdability

Has anyone ever “borrowed” one of your ideas and used it as their own?

If I’m not mistaken, it just happened to me—and I’m thrilled.

After all, isn’t imitation the sincerest form of flattery?

And since it was JP Morgan doing the imitating—and since the idea it borrowed was about…

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Tags: Adding alternatives Diversification