Investment Adventures

For the fourth time now, a yoga studio that I frequent has closed its doors.  Eka yoga (six months in business), Buddha Body Yoga (three years in business), Rainbow Body yoga (one year), and before these Jivamukti Yoga Toronto (four years), have all been shuttered.

I refuse to see a pattern here.

It's not like there's no successful yoga studios in Toronto.  In fact, on Yonge Street there are three very successful establishments within five blocks of each other, four if you extend your search by another three blocks.  I'm just having a bit of trouble finding one that both works for me and works in this economy.

There actually is a connection between this week's post's title and my unending struggle to find a financially vibrant and close-to-home yoga studio.  It's money.  And expectations.  As in, if you put money into something (a yoga studio, say), you may not always get what you expected.

About a year ago, a friend of mine directed me to the cloud-start up-funding site called Kickstarter.  If you've never heard of it, you should check it out.  Anyway, my friend wanted to me to take a look at a project called Somewhere Between, a documentary by a Los Angeles filmmaker about Chinese girls who have been adopted by people who don't live in China and are not Chinese.  The filmmaker was trying to raise $80,000 to cover the cost of distributing her movie.  People who wanted to help her raise this money had a range of options, including the one I picked, which was to send her about $45 US, in return for which I would receive a DVD copy of the film and have my name appear somewhere on their Facebook page - by July 2012.

While I was on the Kickstarter site thinking about supporting the movie, another project looking for funding caught my eye. A group of MIT engineers were promoting a project called Air Quality Egg, which they described as "a community-led air quality sensing network that gives people a way to participate in the conversation about air quality." For reasons I hope I don't need to go into, I found this notion hugely appealing. So I sent these guys $120 on their promise that they would send me my very own fully operational air egg by March 2012.  

In case you're wondering how effective cloud funding is, Somewhere Between was hoping to raise $80K; they raised more than $100K. The Air Egg folks put out their plea for $40K and raised $100K more than that.

In case you're also wondering if I ever saw anything for my money, yes, about a year later, I did. First of all, my Air Egg showed up at work (which was the address I'd given because I can't receive parcels at my home address) and a few days later, I received my DVD.

Some months before these happy returns on my investments, I had wondered aloud to Bruce how much longer Kickstarter can expect to do well if investors have experiences such as mine seemed at the time, where two out of two volleys of cash into the void appeared to be coming up empty.

When both of the promised articles showed up within one week of each other, it was Bruce's turn to wonder aloud if Kickstarter might not have its own enforcers to make sure people who promise to deliver to investors on their site actually do.

Whatever the case, my happiest moment as the proud new owner of my very own Air Egg was reading the letter that shipped with the equipment. It said, in part, that there was absolutely no warranty on the stuff that had been shipped and, by the way, the Egg contains substances found to be carcinogenic by the US Environmental Protection Agency.


Anybody wanna buy an Egg?

Toronto's Air quality looks pretty good after all.

Have a great week!

Karen