Is making Equity Crowdfunding available to all a good thing?
Posted by David S. Rose on October 9th, 2014
Part of the challenge is the enormous amount of ignorance surrounding this suddenly hot topic. There are thousands of companies that “the crowd” can fund without restriction, including Apple, Google and Facebook. These are “publicly tradable companies”, and what makes them so are the extensive rules surrounding disclosure, transparency, trading and other aspects of their corporate existence.
But since there are millions of other companies that do not fall into this category, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission provides certain limited exceptions to allow individuals to invest in non-public companies.
Chief among the [highly imperfect] criteria used to determine whether companies can solicit and accept investments from specific individuals without providing those investors the protections required of public companies are income and/or asset tests. While by no means ideal, these rules are there for very good reason.
Perhaps the single biggest challenge faced by equity crowdfunding is the fundamental difference betwee “investing” and “supporting”. A quick, impassioned discussion of this can be heard in my recent keynote at CROWDFUNDx:
http://socialmediaweek.org/blog/…
*original post can be found on Quora @ http://www.quora.com/David-S-Rose/answers *
(No tags for this post.)Written by David S. Rose
David S. Rose
Founder and CEO,Gust
David has been described as "the Father of Angel Investing in New York" by Crain's New York Business, & a "world conquering entrepreneur" by BusinessWeek. He is a serial entrepreneur & Inc 500 CEO who chairs New York Angels, one of the most active angel investment groups. David is also CEO of Gust.
Gust is the world’s largest platform and community
for entrepreneurs and early stage investors.
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