Buffalo startup to close as founders team up with Pittsburgh business

Scaling a business is no small feat.

For Buffalo-based startup Common Owner’s founding team, it made sense to join forces with a company with a similar mission.

Common Owner’s founders Julian Anjorin, Derek King, Richard Rogers, Mitchell Skomra and Jacob Walsh are joining Pittsburgh-based business, Small Change, as partners and plan to wind down Common Owner's operations by the end of the year.

Common Owner, founded in 2020, created a crowdsourcing platform that combines the user experience of donation portals like Kickstarter with being an actual owner in the project to which you’re contributing.

Small Change, which uses an index to measure a project’s social impact, helps developers raise funding for projects.

“(We have) a lot of the same goals and priorities,” Rogers said. “It just seemed to make a lot of sense.”

How the team came together

Rogers attended a small-scale developer conference in Savannah, Georgia, in late October 2023.

It was there that he started chatting with Eve Picker, founder and CEO of Small Change. They bonded over their startup goals and the challenges of operating similar funding platforms.

“We kind of talked hypothetically, would it make sense to join forces, share fixed overhead costs and try to grow and to scale in this real estate space?” Rogers said. “Broadly, it’s been a tough time to be in real estate, given the interest rate increases. We’ve seen a lot of similar challenges.”

On the Small Change side, Rogers said that Picker wanted a bigger team to scale and delegate tasks.

By early December, they knew they wanted to work together.

The founding team decided to close Common Owner, as Small Change had been in business longer, was more established and had more volume of deals and funding raised.

Common Owner, whose employees are just its founding team of five, has raised about $1.33 million on its platform; Small Change, founded in 2016, has raised more than $13 million.

All of the Common Owner’s founding team, except Anjorin, are based in Buffalo, and the team expects to open a Small Change Buffalo office sometime this year.

“(Small Change) was always a platform that we kind of admired as we were getting started and going through everything,” said Rogers, who will handle many compliance functions and will help issuers with structuring their offerings and review and negotiate contracts. “I’m just really excited to see what comes next and see how far we can scale this and really change the way that these types of deals get funded.”