The Statue of Liberty Was a Moonshot. Fundraising Lessons for Startup Founders.
Updated: 18 hours ago
What Auguste Bartholdi’s campaign on both sides of the Atlantic can teach founders raising money today.
In September I spent an afternoon at the Musée d’Orsay with my husband. I came out having watched a fascinating 21-year fundraising campaign, complete with a pivot, a demo day, a merchandise line, a patent, a lottery, a government that said no, and a crowdfunding round that closed with more than 120,000 backers. It's quite a story. Pull up a chair.
The exhibition is Auguste Bartholdi: La Liberté éclairant le monde (on until 31 January 2027), and it is, frankly, the best case study in fundraising I’ve seen this year.
Most of us know the Statue of Liberty. Fewer know her official name, Liberty Enlightening the World, and fewer still could pick her creator out of a lineup. The opening panel puts it nicely: Auguste Bartholdi is “an artist who created a work so famous that his name has been overshadowed by it.” In startup terms, the product became bigger than the founder.
A founder, a dinner party and a rejected pitch
Bartholdi was born in Colmar, Alsace, in 1834, into a comfortable bourgeois family. After his father died, his mother moved the family to Paris, where the young Auguste fell in with the an artistic crowd, who steered him toward sculpture.
By Bartholdi’s own account, the idea for Liberty was born in 1865 at a dinner, where his friend, the jurist Édouard Laboulaye, proposed that France mark the centenary of American independence in 1876 with a gesture of friendship. Which makes it the most relatable startup origin story I know. Every company started on a napkin at a dinner party.
What the dinner-party version leaves out is the pivot. In 1869, Bartholdi went to Cairo and pitched Viceroy Ismail Pasha on a colossal lighthouse statue of a robed woman holding a light aloft, to stand at the entrance to the new Suez Canal. The Viceroy passed. Bartholdi, in the exhibition’s lovely phrase, “kept and reworked his sketches.” When the Liberty idea resurfaced in 1870, he took the Suez design and developed it into “a more classical figure with a universal scope.”
Anyone who has quietly re-worked a rejected deck with a new angle is in distinguished company.
He brought receipts
Then came war. When France and Prussia went to war in 1870, Bartholdi joined the Colmar National Guard.
He turned that period into a portfolio and a track record. He designed the Lion of Belfort, a 22-metre lion carved into the cliff below the citadel, honouring the town’s defenders in 1870–71. He made a statue of Lafayette arriving in America, which France presented to New York in 1876 as thanks for American sympathy during the war.
The Lion of Belfort, “Aux défenseurs de Belfort 1870–71.” Bartholdi’s track record, carved into a cliff. Photo: Landon Steele, Musée d’Orsay.
In June 1871, Auguste Bartholdi crossed the Atlantic carrying letters of introduction signed by Laboulaye. Warm intros, 1871 edition. He toured the country, met President Ulysses S. Grant, and scouted the site he wanted in New York Harbor. By the time he asked for serious money, he had a co-founder, a network, a track record and a location.
The ambition was the pitch
“Bartholdi was not one to shy away from a challenge,” the exhibit says, with admirable understatement. Liberty was to be the largest statue ever made: 46 metres (151 feet) from base to torch, on a pedestal that would roughly double her height.
In 1875, Laboulaye and Bartholdi founded the Franco-American Union to raise the money, and they structured the deal like a well-organised syndicate. France would pay for the statue. America would pay for the pedestal. Each side owned a clearly defined piece of the project and could tell its backers exactly what their money built. By the way, this was now 10 years after the dinner-party napkin, and only one year before the American Centennial.
The technical team was strong too. The architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc designed the original internal structure. When he died in 1879, the engineer Gustave Eiffel stepped in to design the iron skeleton. As replacement hires go, not bad. I hear he went on to do quite well for himself.
How they actually raised the money
The French campaign was, in the exhibition’s words, “a full-scale media and marketing strategy,” built on the hot new channels of the 1870s: the illustrated press, photography, the fashion for collectible scale models, and World’s Fairs. Here is what they did, and it holds up remarkably well.
They threw events. There were banquets, and Laboulaye staged a performance at the Paris Opera featuring a new cantata by Charles Gounod. Opera as a donor event is a little grander than a pitch night with warm wine, but the principle is the same.
They ran a lottery. The French government authorised a public lottery, with prizes including silver plate and a terracotta models of the statue. Note what they asked the government for: permission, not money. The statue was paid for by the public, including schoolchildren and 181 French towns and cities.
They shipped the torch first. There wasn’t time to build the whole statue for the 1876 centennial, so the first funds paid for the most iconic piece: the hand holding the torch. It went on display at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, where visitors could climb up to the torch’s balcony, and then stood in Madison Square Park in New York until 1882. The head followed at the 1878 Paris World’s Fair. It was a demo day, an MVP, and a very large billboard, all at once.
They built a merchandise line, and protected it. Bartholdi filed a patent in Washington in 1876 to secure the Avoiron firm’s monopoly on reductions of the statue. Statuettes in a bronze-like alloy came in four sizes; the largest had an electric torch. At the 1878 Paris fair, the firm added small souvenir busts. The exhibition calls these the statue’s first “produits dérivés,” or spin-off products. They funded the campaign and, just as importantly, made the image famous years before the statue existed.
One of the patented Avoiron reductions, tablet dated 1776. Revenue stream and marketing campaign in one. Photo: Landon Steele, Musée d’Orsay.
They built in public. The statue was assembled in the Gaget, Gauthier & Cie workshops on the rue de Chazelles in Paris, and for years it rose above the rooftops of the Plaine Monceau. Parisians came to gawk. Victor Dargaud’s 1884 painting shows them doing exactly that, with the scaffolded statue rising in the neighborhood.
Victor Dargaud, “Liberty Enlightening the World, View of Boulevard de Courcelles,” 1884. Photo: Landon Steele, Musée d'Orsay.
On 4 July 1884, the finished statue was formally handed to the American ambassador in Paris. Then it was taken apart, packed into crates, sent by train to Rouen and shipped to New York. The French side had delivered.
Bartholdi at the foot of the statue on the day of the donation, 4 July 1884. Attributed to Pierre Petit. Musée des Arts et Métiers. Photo of the photo: Landon Steele.
Meanwhile, the American side
The American Committee had been raising money for the pedestal since 1877 (that's 7 years, if you're paying attention). By March 1885, it had raised $182,000 and spent nearly all of it, and still needed about $100,000 more. This is so relatable. The crates were on their way across the Atlantic. The pedestal was not finished.
The large institutional cheques did not come. In 1884, the Governor of New York, Grover Cleveland, vetoed a bill to give the project $50,000. In 1885, Congress declined to provide $100,000. Meanwhile, groups in Boston and Philadelphia offered to pay the full cost if the statue moved to their city. Competing term sheets with a relocation clause. Some things never change.
Then the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer did something very modern. In March 1885, he launched an appeal in his paper, The World, aimed not at the wealthy but at working people, and promised to print the name of every donor, however small the gift. Five months later, on 11 August 1885, The World announced it had raised $102,000 from more than 120,000 donors, most of whom gave less than a dollar. One young girl sent 60 cents, “the result of self-denial.” It was crowdfunding from angels with a public leaderboard, 120 years before Kickstarter.
On 28 October 1886, the statue was inaugurated with a Broadway parade, a naval parade and fireworks. We are coming up on the 140th year anniversary. and The President of the United States presided. His name was Grover Cleveland, who had vetoed funding two years earlier as Governor of New York. Every founder has had an investor who passed on the round and then turned up at the launch party, but few of them got to make the speech.
From that 1865 dinner to the unveiling took 21 years. From the founding of the Franco-American Union, 11 years. The inauguration happened 10 years AFTER the centennial it was supposed to honour. But that's just how long things took. It didn't prevent Lady Liberty from becoming the most famous statue in the world. If your raise is taking longer than planned, you are in excellent company.
Would a regular statue have been easier to fund?
That is what I've been mulling over since the exhibition.
A modest bronze statue in a public square is a perfectly nice, if unremarkable gift. Nobody stages an opera for it. Nobody runs a national lottery, buys a souvenir, climbs its torch, paints it rising over the rooftops, or donates 60 cents of self-denial to it. The scale of the ambition created the story, the story got the press, and the press brought in the donors. A normal statue would have been funded by a handful of wealthy patrons, if at all, and forgotten soon after.
Today’s venture investors depend on bold vision. Venture returns follow a power law: a small number of companies return the whole fund. So, an investor reading your deck is not really asking “will this work?” They are asking: “if this works, could it be enormous?” A perfectly good statue doesn’t answer that question. A torch you can see from the harbour does.
But ambition cuts both ways. The size that made Liberty fundable in France made her pedestal expensive in America, and that side nearly failed. And Bartholdi never asked anyone to fund a dream alone. He showed up with proof at every step. Bold vision gets you the meeting. Evidence that you can execute gets you the cheque.
The Statue of Liberty was a Moonshot. Fundraising Lessons for Startup Founders
1. Make the vision inspirational enough to be a story. “The largest statue ever made” is a sentence people repeat at dinner. Investors, sponsors and journalists all need a story they can retell without you in the room.
2. Ship the torch first. He couldn’t build the whole thing by 1876, so he built the most compelling piece and let people climb it. Your torch is the pilot, the paying customer, the signed letter of intent. Momentum raises money; plans mostly raise questions.
3. Bring receipts. The Lion of Belfort, the Lafayette statue, Eiffel on the team. A credible track record and team are what make a big vision feel safe enough to back. The smaller projects showed an ability to execute that built trust.
4. Re-work your rejected pitches. The Suez “no” became the foundation of the most famous statue in the world. A pass is information about the audience, not always about the idea.
5. Structure the raise so every backer owns a clear piece. France paid for the statue, America for the pedestal. Clear use of funds lets each investor see exactly what their money builds and what the next milestone is.
6. Give people something to hold, and something to be seen holding. Statuettes, lottery tickets, your name printed in The World. In my corporate sponsorship work I see this constantly: people give to missions, but they give more generously when they can see themselves in them.
7. When the big cheque says no, widen the base. The governor and Congress said no; 120,000 people said yes. Angels, syndicates, crowdfunding and non-dilutive grants are all modern versions of Pulitzer’s appeal. Canadian founders know this rhythm well, raising on two sides of a border with two investor cultures, two timelines and one company to build regardless.
8. Budget for time and survive during the ups and downs. Twenty-one years, a war, a dead architect and a governor’s veto. It still got built. It was a tremendous success. It took much longer than anyone expected, and there were huge obstacles along the way. "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." (The more things change, the more they stay the same).
What she stands for
The statue was conceived to celebrate the friendship between France and the United States and the ideals of American independence. As the exhibition notes, she “quickly became a purely American symbol,” and her meaning kept evolving.
Much of that came from another fundraising contribution. In 1883, the poet Emma Lazarus was asked to donate a piece to the Art Loan Fund Exhibition, an auction raising money for the pedestal. She wrote a sonnet called The New Colossus. It made little impression at the time, and alas, this female poet whose words are known by millions is not a household name either. In 1903, it was engraved on a bronze plaque and placed inside the pedestal, and it has defined the statue ever since:
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore,
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
The New Colossus, by Emma Lazarus. Photo: Landon Steele, Musée d’Orsay.
For millions of people arriving in New York Harbor, Lady Liberty was the first thing they saw. Many of them, and their children, went on to build companies. A 2022 study by the National Foundation for American Policy found that 55% of America’s billion-dollar startups had at least one immigrant founder, and anyone who has spent time in the Canadian startup ecosystem knows how much of our own energy comes from people who arrived with little more than an idea and a lot of grit.
It is worth remembering what kept 120,000 people sending in their dimes. It wasn’t the engineering, impressive as it was. It was what the statue meant. Bold vision gets people’s attention, but a mission they believe in keeps them giving.
The torch went up first and the pedestal last. And the poem, donated to a fundraiser and largely ignored at the time, turned out to be the part that mattered most. An important and timely reminder of what America stands for, and an important reminder that great vision can come from anywhere.
Sources
Exhibition wall panels and labels, Auguste Bartholdi: La Liberté éclairant le monde, Musée d’Orsay, Paris (visited September 2026)
National Park Service: Statue of Liberty history handbook, “Plan Approved”
NFAP: Immigrant Entrepreneurs and U.S. Billion-Dollar Companies (2022) _________________ What are your thoughts? Share them in the comments. If you liked this post, please send it to a friend. Want some help with your own startup and fundraising process? Please reach out.
Landon Steele is a startup consultant, angel investor, and advisor to early-stage founders. She is based in Vancouver, BC. She works with founders and the ecosystems that fund them across Canada and the US. Learn more at steeleconsultinggroup.com
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