The $36,000 Glass Ceiling: How Dawn Dickson Weaponized Crowdfunding Against VC Bias
When venture capital failed her, Dawn Dickson raised funding from 10,000 everyday investors — and rewrote the rules of startup funding
Written by: Brianne Garrett Original photography by: Logra Studio
Summary
- The "million-dollar milestone" was a mirage: Despite being celebrated as one of fewer than 25 Black women to raise $1M in VC, Dickson found herself with an empty bank account, stolen prototype, and unable to make payroll while gracing the cover of Black Enterprise magazine
- She discovered VCs would rather lose $500,000 than risk another $50,000 on her: When her manufacturer held her prototype hostage, investors who had already put in half a million refused to provide $50K more to rebuild, revealing she was just a "diversity checkbox" investment
- Crowdfunding became her weapon against a broken system: After the SEC shut down her ICO attempt, Dickson pivoted to equity crowdfunding, raising $4M from 10,000 everyday investors who could invest as little as $100, becoming the first woman founder to raise $1M through this method.
- She built "Team PopCom": a community movement that replaced traditional VC backing – Her 10,000 investors became evangelists and the company's best marketing, providing not just capital but the support and belief that traditional VCs never offered
- PopCom achieved 130% year-over-year revenue growth for three consecutive years: After pausing operations to restructure, the company emerged stronger, targeting regulated markets like alcohol and cannabis where their AI-powered compliance and data tracking capabilities deliver maximum value
Introduction
They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover. But when Dawn Dickson appeared on the March 2018 cover of Black Enterprise magazine, the world couldn’t help but assume she had made it big with her vending machine startup, PopCom — smart dispensers selling anything from food to jewelry to t-shirts to alcohol.
Dickson, beaming with pride, represented one of fewer than 25 Black women in America to raise over a million dollars in venture capital. Yet by the time the magazine hit newsstands, the tech founder was privately undergoing a crisis: Her startup had just lost its one and only prototype, payroll was due, and her bank account was empty.
In retrospect, this one-million milestone placed Dickson far from her finish line. It also unearthed hidden truths all too familiar for founders who look like her: The average Black woman founder struggles to secure capital, raising only $36,000 over the life of her business. And Dickson, even after raising her first million, was still struggling herself.
She was intent on finding another way.
The Million-Dollar Mirage
The Celebration That Wasn't
When Dickson closed her first $1 million round in 2017, she felt on top of the world. Press coverage and accolades, from outlets including Forbes, Inc., and Fast Company, poured in. The story was both intriguing and inspiring: a self-made Black woman with two decades of entrepreneurial experience pivoting to lead a hardware-meets-software startup taking vending machines to the next level. Hers were designed to recognize faces and track data the way e-commerce platforms like Shopify did, but also give small and medium-sized businesses a fighting chance against the retail giants.
“I thought this was going to be the turning point,” says Dickson. “Like, ‘wow, I made it.’ I've raised a million. They should see my track record; believe in me.”
Turns out, the period directly after raising her first million was the worst time in PopCom’s history.
The Token Investment Reality
“I realized I was the diversity checkbox,” says Dickson. “I was just a token investment.” They were like, ‘take the money.’ Here, we invested in a Black person. But that's not enough for an early stage company — I needed help. And they weren't giving me the resources and support that they were given to other portfolio companies.”
Meanwhile, PopCom’s reality was capital-intensive. The company was building a product that was expensive just to prototype. “I was running a hardware company on a million dollars,” she adds. “The quotes I got just to build one prototype were a million dollars.”
For three years, Dickson stretched every cent. The same VCs who poured five, ten, fifty, even a hundred million into first-time white-male founders weren’t writing checks to a Black woman with proven traction. The “million-dollar milestone” had been a mirage.
The Breaking Point
The $50,000 Betrayal
In 2018, disaster hit. PopCom’s manufacturer was demanding more money and refusing to hand over the product. “We're a startup,” emphasizes Dickson. “We raised exactly the right amount of money to build this product and paid everything required in our contract.” She couldn’t afford, nor did she see it fair to pay anything more, and she also couldn’t afford to sue the manufacturer.
Dickson turned to the prototype’s investors — it was funded by a Procter & Gamble innovation grant — hoping they might step in. “I said, ‘if you just give me $50,000, I can rebuild it.’” Her request was rejected, and the reality set in: They would rather lose half a million dollars than risk another $50,000 on her.
She vividly remembers walking out of the meeting with a white male colleague who acknowledged what he agreed was disdain. “He was like, ‘I can't believe what I just saw.’
They walked out together intent on finding another plan.
Rock Bottom Masquerading as Success
By the time the Black Enterprise issue was released, “I was out of money, my product was stolen, and I couldn't make payroll for months,” she says. And all whilst simultaneously gracing the cover of one of the largest Black financial publications in the U.S.
She maxed out credit cards, she took out personal loans, she drained her savings — including the money she had set aside for her 40th birthday — to pay her team and get by.
When she was named to the inaugural Forbes Next 1000, Dickson remembered thinking: “This is not right. How am I not rich?” She adds, “There’s a vision that you have for what these people represent in these magazines and these books. And then when you become one of them, you realize you don't really know what's going on behind any of these headlines.”
The pressure was crushing, but not enough to throw in the towel. “I never thought about quitting because I feel very indebted to people,” says Dickson. “There are people attached to these paychecks. There are families; there are mortgages. I could not not give them their money. Business is people, and I care about the people. I couldn't quit because of them.”
Business is people, and I care about the people. I couldn't quit because of them.”
— Dawn Dickson, founder and CEO at PopCom
The Crowdfunding Revolution
Finding the Weapon
With support from her colleague — the white male teammate who had seen firsthand how investors dismissed her — Dickson began researching initial coin offerings (ICOs), the crypto-funding craze that surged in 2017. For the first time, she felt confident she could raise capital on her own terms.
But just as their ICO plans gained momentum, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) intervened and shut it down. Still, that research led to a breakthrough: Dickson discovered the value of equity crowdfunding, a model created by the 2012 Jumpstart Our Business Startups (JOBS) Act. It introduced secure token offerings (STOs), a compliant way for people of all financial situations to invest directly in startups for as little as $100.
Dickson realized everyday people were locked out of wealth creation the same way she was locked out of venture capital. “We wanted so badly to be part of a system that wasn’t built for us,” she says. Crowdfunding was a way to control and reclaim.
Building the Army
In December 2018, just days after Christmas, Dickson launched PopCom’s first equity-crowdfunding round. By spring, she had raised over $1 million, becoming the first woman founder to do so through crowdfunding.
What worked in her favor was accessibility. “The minimum investment was only a hundred dollars,” says Dickson. “That’s a very low barrier to entry when you consider that most private equity deals start at ten, twenty, even a hundred thousand. It’s a really big change.”
Over the next three years, Dickson ran multiple rounds, raising more than $4 million from 10,000 investors across 50 states and 14 countries.
She felt complete ownership of PopCom’s destiny. “That was the first time I really felt like my company’s future was in our hands,” she says.
The Power Reversal
When it comes to Dickson’s path, “I'm definitely the outlier,” she says. “I'm definitely the stepchild. But I feel good about it.”
The upsides have been palpable: She no longer had to contort her business model to fit VC expectations or chase moving goalposts. It also re-established what a founder-to-funder relationship could look like. “I didn't realize that I wanted or needed the support from crowdfunding investors until they started pouring into me the way that they do,” says Dickson.
More than shareholders, Dickson says they’ve become evangelists. “They’re the best marketing I could ever pay for,” she adds. They’ve propelled PopCom’s rapid transformation into a community movement — “Team PopCom” — built on shared ownership.
The Mental Cost and Recovery
The Toll of Being "The One"
Carrying 10,000 first-time investors' dreams comes with pride, but also immense pressure.
“I'm very aware my success is success for us all,” says Dickson. “They need to see a win. They need to see that they can invest and put their money behind someone that looks like them and they can get it back.”
There are industry peers that didn’t get it — and still don’t. “They would say things like, ‘She's putting people's money at risk.’” But Dickson’s well aware of the scrutiny that comes with pioneering.
The "Me First" Revolution
She’s also well aware of the mental and physical strain that comes with sustaining a company. Eventually, she realized she couldn’t save PopCom if she didn’t take care of herself.
“‘Me first’ isn’t selfish,” says Dickson. “It's self-preservation.” She started a daily gratitude practice, even on the days when things felt bleak. “I gave up the idea that anything would ever be easy,” she says. “Nothing is easy. But I can still be grateful.”
That mindset became company culture. She encouraged her team to take breaks, to set boundaries, to believe that resilience mattered as much as revenue. “Attitude of gratitude,” says Dickson. “I integrated that when things got really bad. When we didn't have a runway. I said, ‘you guys, this is tough, but there's always something to be grateful for. Always.’”
The New Playbook
The Model That Works
PopCom’s recent numbers paint a resilient success story: The company has brought in 130% year-over-year revenue growth for three consecutive years. It’s got more than a dozen vending machines active across the U.S., plus imminent celebrity and corporate partnerships.
As PopCom scales, Dickson isn’t chasing unicorn valuations. She’s focused on strategic exits that maximize the return for herself and her investors.
With her case study as a model, the power reversal of crowdfunding is something she projects will only surge. “People are taking businesses that crowdfund more seriously,” says Dickson. “I think in the next three to five years, we're going to see some really big things coming out of companies that were counted out.”
The Legacy Being Written
It’s a hopeful prediction as venture capital shows no signs of improving (other than a few firms actually focused on progress, Dickson emphasizes).
“What I don’t understand,” she says, “is if it's really about just business — if venture capital is truly about investing in companies that are scalable and can go the distance — why is the due diligence process so skewed?”
She’s seen the pattern up close: investors aren’t truly betting on winners, they’re betting on familiarity. “It’s not always about the best business,” she adds. “It’s pattern matching — putting bets on who you like and who you're friends with and who your friends are friends with.”
For years, the industry hid behind claims of a “pipeline problem,” insisting there just weren’t enough Black founders to fund. Dickson declares that’s far from the truth.
Rather than suffer, she made pioneering decisions that led to historic fundraising, on her terms.
In many ways, she’s part of a much longer lineage of Black entrepreneurship that predates Silicon Valley itself. Her great-great-great-great grandmother, Amanda America Dickson, was once the wealthiest woman in America, a formerly enslaved woman who inherited land from her white father and skillfully parlayed it. And her great-great-great grandfather helped establish one of the first universities for Black students in Ohio.
Ultimately, success for us isn’t just about building a company. It's about building technology that transforms automated retail in regulated industries and lives on at a global scale.”
— Dawn Dickson, founder and CEO at PopCom
The Revolution in Progress
In 2025, walking through Ohio’s Columbus Airport, Concourse B to be exact, feels like a full-circle moment for Dickson. She always takes a second to visit the airport’s stationed PopShop adorned with her photo front and center before leaving her hometown to jet set, as she does 75% of the year.
After pausing operations in early 2023, PopCom has emerged sharper two years later. The company maintained its IP, hardware, and proprietary software while redesigning its go-to-market strategy around scalability and data-driven retail. It reopened its community round on PicMii, giving backers another chance to invest, with the goal of raising a minimum of $100,000 to scale the company to an acquisition within the next two years.
Before the pause, PopCom had 15 machines generating $35,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Now, the relaunch targets even stronger growth, doubling down on AI, collaborating with celebrity talent, and expanding into global hubs. PopCom is also setting its sights on regulated markets like alcohol, pharma, and cannabis where compliance, data tracking, and customer verification are especially vital — areas where PopCom’s machines deliver best.
“I’m the Chief Everything Officer,” says Dickson, which means nothing’s off the table and everyone’s invited.
“Ultimately, success for us isn’t just about building a company,” she says. “It's about building technology that transforms automated retail in regulated industries and lives on at a global scale.”
"Spiraling Up: The Journey to Become a Unicorn"
LinkedIn and HubSpot for Startups collaborated to create an inspiring documentary film series showcasing the stories of startup founders at various stages of funding and development. If you've ever dreamed of starting and growing a business, overcoming adversity, and impacting the lives of millions, this is for you.
Season 2 featured the stories of Goldcast, G2, and Dawn's PopCom journey.
Author: Brianne Garrett
Brianne Garrett is a journalist, editor, and producer focused on entrepreneurship, lifestyle, and food. Before pivoting to freelancing, she held editorial roles at brands including Sweet July, Forbes, and Wine Spectator. She’s also the founder of Stella, a newsletter, podcast, and community platform that champions and connects Black women in media. A dual citizen of the United States and the United Kingdom, she splits her time between London and New York. She’s both a tiramisu lover and a Chardonnay hater.
