SEC OK’s Start-Ups’ Use of Social Media

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Trying to figure out how many investors might want to fund your small business? Go ahead and tweet about it.

The US Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) has given a social media greenlight to startups seeking to raise money and this week updated rules allowing for use of Twitter and other social media tools to solicit investors.

The Division of Corporate Finance announced that tweets of 140 characters or less are a proper way for a startup to gauge potential investor interest in a stock or debt offering. The posting must include a link to a disclaimer that says the firm isn’t yet selling securities.

If you are interesting in equity opportunities with start-ups, click here. Brokerdealer.com is the leading database for broker-dealers that want to help you.

Bloomberg noted that the SEC has been warming up to social media since April 2013, when it approved the use of posts on Facebook and Twitter to communicate corporate announcements such as earnings. Its latest endorsement of social media applies only to companies looking to raise up to $50 million a year.

Firms that use Twitter to solicit investor interest must include a link to a required disclaimer that says the firm isn’t yet selling securities, the SEC said in this week’s announcement.

It’s not clear how many companies will take advantage of the higher fundraising cap. Fewer than 30 offerings were made from 2012 to 2014, when the limit was $5 million, according to the SEC.

This post is from raisemoney.com.

FOMO Is Leading To Cramming Of Startups According To One Capitalist

FOMOBrokerdealer.com blog update courtesy of the Wall Street Journal.

Venture capitalist and Benchmark partner, Bill Gurley, advised people against “cramming” too much money into startups, such as Uber, Snapchat, and WeWork, at last week’s Goldman Sachs technology conference. Following his speech, Gurley gave even further insight to investing in startups and how the slang word, FOMO, plays into investing.

After speaking about the risks of “cramming” too much money in startups at the Goldman Sachs technology conference last week, venture capitalist Bill Gurley exited the stage.

More than a dozen investors swarmed the lanky partner of Benchmark, eager to speak with him— but few were planning to heed the venture capitalist’s advice. According to Gurley, one man, who represented a large mutual fund, asked, “You don’t want us to invest in this but the big tech stocks are not delivering enough growth and my competitors are getting into these startups, so what are we supposed to do?”

Gurley says he didn’t have a good answer but he wasn’t surprised by the sentiment, which he describes as FOMO, a slang popular among millennials that stands for “fear of missing out.”

It is this infectious FOMO, according to Gurley and other venture capitalists, that has created a flotilla of billion-dollar startups with ever-soaring valuations and mixed financials.

According to The Wall Street Journal’s Billion Dollar Startup Club, there are now at least 73 private technology companies worth more than $1 billion dollars, versus 41 a year ago. Some, such as Uber, the $41.2 billion car hailing app backed by Gurley’s Benchmark, are worth enormous sums. At least 48 companies were valued at $1 billion or more for the first time, and another 23 members moved up the ranking after raising more money.

Many investors are treating these 73 companies as if they were publicly traded, says Gurley. They are investing sums of money usually reserved for IPO offerings and, sometimes, giving away those dollars with the kind of confidence usually associated with investors who’ve perused regulatory filings for detailed financial information. The investors themselves are a blend of traditional venture-capital players and typically public-market investors: hedge funds, mutual funds and banks. They are sort of meeting in the middle, with the venture capitalists investing in later-stage companies than they have historically done, through new growth funds, and the institutional investors getting in before the IPO.

“We’ve been calling this the private-IPO slice,” said David York, managing director of Top Tier Capital Partners, a fund of funds. “The valuation of risk is a public-market thought process versus a private-market thought process.”

Gurley, who has become a vocal critic of irrational behavior in the industry, says he’s also very worried about the pile-up in the “private IPO” market.

He’s worried that venture capitalists’ new bedfellows, such as mutual funds, are too new to venture capital to properly weigh the risks and realize that these billion-dollar companies are not guaranteed home runs.

“This replaces the IPO — but not all these companies are IPO level candidates,” he said. “Would you hand a teenager $200,000?”

According to data collected by The Journal, of the 29 firms that have invested in five or more current billion-dollar startups, only about half are traditional venture-capital firms. The rest are a mix of institutional investors, such as the Dragoneer Investment Group and Tiger Global Management, and strategic investors, such as Intel and Google. Near the top of the list is Tiger with 12 investments in private billion-dollar companies, and T. Rowe Price Group with 11. In this group, Tiger also raised the most money last year, keying up $4 billion, or 12% of all venture capital raised in 2014.

With such financial heavyweights jumping in, many of their peers are wondering: Can I afford to sit out?

It’s difficult to quantify exactly how much money is sloshing around at this level. Several top venture capital firms have raised large growth funds in the past few years, but total contributions from hedge funds, mutual funds and banks is practically immeasurable without knowing how much each invested in particular funding rounds. Whatever the amount, this layer of growth capital could warp prices, venture capitalists say.

“It’s like traffic on the highway, you add just 5% more cars and it slows down traffic considerably,” said Glenn Solomon, a managing partner at GGV Capital. His firm is an investor in four companies in The Billion Dollar Startup Club.

In some ways, Gurley’s firm has benefited from this influx of pre-IPO capital. His firm is an early investor in four companies in the Billion Dollar Startup Club: Uber, Snapchat, WeWork and Jasper Technologies. All four have since raised money from a big public-market investor.

For the entire article from the Wall Street Journal, click here

BrokerDealers Help Mint Billionaires in 2014; Greed Is Good, Funding is Fun

startup valuationsBrokerdealer.com blog update courtesy of extracts from 29 Dec edition of the Wall Street Journal, with reporting by Evelyn M. Rusli

As brokerdealers, investment bankers, institutional investors and entrepreneurs “close the books” on 2014, all will agree this has been a remarkable year in which “billion dollar valuations” have seemingly been the norm. Most notably, technological start-ups have enjoyed increasing valuations with each subsequent round of financing from private equity and venture capital firms, albeit many financial industry professionals are wondering whether those valuations can carry over when these private companies embark on initial public offerings (IPOs).

While “Wall Street” protagonist Gordon Gekko coined the phrase “Greed is Good!,” the Broker-Dealers mantra for 2014 was “Funding is Fun!”

Below please find highlights of the WSJ article.

Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi Corp. is now officially the world’s most valuable tech startup, worth $46 billion—the exclamation point on a year of extraordinary valuations. Continue reading

Next Generation BrokerDealers Dare to Displace Old Guard Banks and Brokerages

Start-up broker-dealer “Aspiration” aspires to succeed via “pay us what you think we deserve” model; Palo Alto’s “Robinhood” offers “commission-free trading” and wants to make money the old-fashioned way: interest on deposits and margin loans (in a near-zero interest rate environment).  For those inspired by this new trend, BrokerDealer.com provides a forum by which start-ups in the finance industry can network with prospective investors.

BrokerDealer.com blog update is courtesy of below extracts from 23 Dec NYT DealBook story by William Alden.

Editors note: For those not aware, the notion of “commission-free trading” is often a fallacy and a term that financial industry regulators somehow allow service providers to use, despite Finra’s self-acclaiming focus for cracking down on deceptive advertising. Few brokerdealers offer anything for ‘free’. Those who offer ‘commission-free’ trading for customers typically receive rebate payments aka payment for order flow checks in consideration for routing customer orders to the various electronic exchanges who dangle kickbacks in consideration for brokers delivering orders to their venue.

Andrei Cherny, Aspiration CEO

Andrei Cherny, Aspiration CEO

From Dealbook: “..A number of new financial start-ups are trying to reach younger and middle-class Americans by upending the customary fee structure of traditional brokerage firms and money managers. They are backed by deep-pocketed venture capital investors — and even celebrities like the rapper Snoop Dogg — who are wagering that these upstarts can challenge the Wall Street establishment…

Aspiration, a start-up wealth manager on Sunset Boulevard here, which had its official debut last month, is asking customers to pay whatever they think is “fair.” That can be as much as 2 percent of their assets, or as low as zero. Reflecting its high-minded goals, the company has also pledged to donate 10 percent of its revenue to charity.

Robinhood, a new brokerage firm based in Palo Alto, Calif., whose founders were inspired by the Occupy Wall Street movement, introduced an app this month that lets customers trade stocks without paying commissions. (The firm plans to make money by offering margin loans and by collecting a portion of the interest earned on customer money invested in money market funds.)

Big banks and brokerage firms haven’t been sitting still. Charles Schwab, for example, recently said it would introduce an automated investment service that doesn’t charge advisory fees. But many are constrained by new regulations or their own inertia. The public’s persistent skepticism of these institutions in the wake of the financial crisis hasn’t helped, either.

Some industry experts have voiced skepticism about the viability of the new business models, including those of Aspiration and Robinhood. But venture capitalists have been happy to bet that technology-focused start-ups can offer more appealing products for buying stocks or managing savings. Continue reading